Monday, October 18 / 1:30 PM / Merrill College, Baobab Lounge

This paper examines “la Movida,” the 1980s cultural explosion in Madrid that included filmmaker Pedro Almodovar. Focusing on new trends in urban geography, the paper treats the quintessential “Movida” magazine La Luna, an oral history of the movement, a nostalgic novel by Luis Antonio de Villena, and a little-known gay comic.

Paul Julian Smith is Professor of Spanish at the University of Cambridge. His books include Amores Perros (BFI, 2003), Contemporary Spanish Culture: TV, Fashion, Art, And Film (Blackwell, 2003), The Moderns: Time, Space, And Subjectivity in Contemporary Spanish Culture (Oxford, 2000), and Laws Of Desire: Questions Of Homosexuality In Spanish Writing And Film, 1960-1990 (Oxford, 1992).

Sponsored by the Latina/o Americans in a Global Perspective Research Cluster

Friday, October 8 / 12 PM / Oakes Mural Room

Kuan-hsing Chen is Professor of Cultural Studies and the Coordinator of the Center for Asia-Pacific/Cultural Studies at National Tsinghua University in Taiwan, and a founding editor of Trajectories: Inter Asia Cultural Studies. His articles, on topics including imperialism, decolonization, and cultures of consumption, written in English and Chinese, have appeared in journals such as Theory, Culture, and Society,Cultural Studies, positions, and the New Left Review. His talk considers “Asia not as an object of analysis, but as a medium to transform knowledge production, and the driving force of the rediscovery and transformation of the self.”

Kuan-hsing Chen is currently a visiting senior research fellow in the Asia Research Institute, National
University of Singapore.

Monday, May 24 / 4 PM / Cowell Conference Room

Joseph Dumit, a 1995 History of Consciousness Ph.D. from UC Santa Cruz, is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies in the Program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT. His books include the co-edited Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots (with Robbie Davis-Floyd, Routledge, 1998), and Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity (Princeton, 2004). About his talk he writes, “Even as biopsychiatry insists on the pharmaceutical management of emotions, the public relations industry continues to treat the mind as subject to manipulation through talk therapy. Using the case of anti-cholesterol drugs (statins), and based on fieldwork, interviews, online studies, and media analysis, this paper will investigate how facts are used to strategically manage consumer behavior. In turn it will also consider the ways in which active patients take up pharmaceutical-talk into their self-care and develop new ways of living better through chemistry.”

Sponsored by the Hybrid Media Research Cluster

Monday, May 17 / 3:30 PM / Oakes Mural Room

Matt Wray is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and works on whiteness, race, youth culture, and class issues. His publications include the forthcoming Not Quite White? Science, Medicine, and Poor Rural Whites (Duke, 2005) and the co-edited volume White Trash: Race and Class in America (with Annalee Newitz, Routledge, 1997). He writes that his talk “develops a theory of how ‘symbolic boundaries’ (i.e., concepts, prejudices, beliefs, norms, attitudes, distinctions, etc.) form the basis for cultural difference and how over time, they may result in ‘social boundaries’
(i.e., laws, morals, institutionalized identities, discrimination, etc.) that serve to divide and stratify societies. I explore these theoretical musings through the historical and contemporary case of ‘poor white trash,’ a stigmatizing term that emerged in the 1830s and that remains in wide use today.”

Spring Quarter: Friday Afternoons / 1:30PM – 4:30PM / Oakes 109

Antonio Gramsci’s work—often filtered through contemporary theorists such as Stuart Hall, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe, among others—exerts a pervasive influence among those working on the interfaces of culture, politics, and political economy. Yet few, if any, at UCSC have an adequate grasp of Gramsci’s writings or a firm sense of his historical context.

U.C. Berkeley Professor Renate Holub will lead a group through selected Gramsci texts relevant to contemporary research concerns. The aim is to gain a foundation in key concepts and then to connect them to a range of current research projects.
The first half of the quarter will feature readings from The Southern Question, The Prison Notebooks, and writings on religion. The second half of the quarter will feature reports on Gramsci and anthropology, Latin American contexts, international social movements, and U.S. Left politics and the “popular.”

Renate Holub is Director of Interdisciplinary Studies at UC Berkeley, and author of Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism (Routledge, 1992).

SEMINAR: “The Prison Notebooks: Gramsci’s Workshop”
JOSEPH BUTTIGIEG
THURSDAY, MAY 6 / 4 PM / OAKES MURAL ROOM

Joseph Buttigieg, Professor in the English Department at Notre Dame University, and editor and translator of the authoritative and complete English edition of The Prison Notebooks (Columbia, 1992), writes about his seminar:

In spite of the ubiquitous invocation and widespread circulation of such Gramscian concepts as “hegemony,” “civil society,” “subalternity,” “organic intellectual,” etc., very little attention has been devoted to the way in which Gramsci developed these concepts, or the kinds of political and cultural analyses he undertook that led him to the formulation of these categories. A close examination of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and the way in which they were composed reveals that Gramsci’s method or mode of inquiry is as important and as worthy of attention as the concepts and theories it yielded.

All events are open to the public, but those intending to participate should notify Professor Jim Clifford (jcliff@ucsc.edu) in advance.

The workshop and seminar are sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies, the IHR, the Center for Global, International, and Regional Studies, and the David Hoy Presidential Chair funds

Friday, April 16 / 2 PM / College Eight Red Room

Aihwa Ong is Professor of Anthropology and Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley, and has a distinguished record of scholarship on transnational citizenship, sovereignty, and governmentality, arguing that the current global economic and political conjuncture has produced new forms of identification and subjectification. Other areas of research include gender and Islam, Chinese transnationalism, and Malaysian labor. Her many books include Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Duke, 1999), Buddha is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America (California, 2003), and the influential co-edited volume, Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism (with Donald Nonini, Routledge, 1997).

Sponsored by the Asia Pacific America Research Cluster

Friday, April 2 / 2 PM / Oakes Mural Room

What have tribes gained and lost in the decision to open casinos on Native land? Do they risk cultural integrity by engaging in gaming? Why do some tribes choose not to game? What is a tribal-state compact, and how does the political climate affect the compact-making process? This panel will explore the effect of high-stakes gaming on Native culture, economics, enrollment, and identity.

PANELISTS :

JOELY DE LA TORRE, of Pechanga Luiseno descent, is professor and former chair of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University. She holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from Northern Arizona University. The first member of her family to complete high school, Dr. De La Torre serves as a role model for Native youth and encourages self-determination through knowledge and education. She was the first fellowship recipient of the American Political Science Association Native Fellows Program.

NICOLE MYERS LIM, a member of the Pinoleville Indian community, received her J.D. from the University of San Francisco School of Law. She has worked for the National Indian Justice Center and the California Indian Museum and Cultural Center for the past five years. She has taught undergraduate courses on U.S. law and American Indians at San Francisco State University, and teaches federal Indian law at Sacramento State University. Ms. Lim serves as a trainer for NIJC’s regional and on-site training programs on fetal alcohol syndrome, and is currently developing a fetal alcohol awareness curriculum for tribes in California and the northwest.

RAQUELLE MYERS, a member of the Pinoleville Band of Pomo Indians, received her J.D. from the University of Utah. She serves as Staff Attorney for the National Indian Justice Center and Chief Judge/Administrator for the Intertribal Court of California, a court of limited jurisdiction currently being developed in Northern California. A member of the California Judicial Council’s Committee on Racial and Ethnic Bias and the CDSS Tribal Government Advisory Committee, she was recently appointed to the National Taskforce on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and Fetal Alcohol Effect. She teaches undergraduate courses on federal Indian law, California Indian history, and tribal government at UC Berkeley and Sonoma State University.

Sponsored by the Native Research Cluster. Co-sponsored by the GSA, Cowell College, Merrill College, and the Department of Women’s Studies

Wednesday, February 25 / 4:30PM / Oakes Mural Room

Margaret Cohen is Professor of French and Italian at Stanford University, having come from New York University in 2003. She is a scholar of critical theory and of the novel, whose books include Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (California, 1993) and the prizewinning The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton, 1999), as well as several edited volumes. Her talk is from her current book project, The Romance of the Sea, which is a study of how the history and representation of open ocean travel informed the development of the modern novel. About her talk, she writes,

Across the range of diverse genres (narratives of discovery, exploration and warfare, manuals of practical seamanship, shipwreck narratives, imaginary voyage narratives, novels), writing about seamanship constitutes one of the most sustained reflections in the Western tradition on the labor process, distilling a kind of hands-on practical reason that differs markedly from the contemplative reason of philosophers or the objective knowledge of scientists, more like the metis of Odysseus, or what Conrad eloquently called “craft.”…What emerges then across writings aboutopen ocean sea-faring, is a kind of romance of the real, a romance with labor and practice. Romantic poets will devise figures of the sublime to represent the extravagant aspects of this frontier zone, though critics often fail to notice how a delineation of the sublime is inseparable from questions of labor in Romanticism, ignoring the representation of work in a move akin to the erasures of Orientalism.

Co-sponsored by the Literature Department

Friday, January 23 / 12PM – 2PM / Oakes Mural Room

Seminar Reading: The Dominion of the Dead, pp. 1-36, 142-159 (first, second, and last chapters). The seminar reading is optional but strongly encouraged. Please pick up readings at the Center for Cultural Studies, or contact Stephanie Casher (scasher@ucsc.edu) one week in advance for campus mailing of the reading. Copies of the book will also be available for purchase at the Literary Guillotine.

Robert Pogue Harrison is Professor and Chair of the Department of French and Italian at Stanford University. He has published widely on Italian literature. His previous book, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago, 1992) was a profound and stylistically rich exploration of the role of forests in the Western literary and philosophical imagination. In The Dominion of the Dead (Chicago, 2003), Harrison turns to death, the dead, burial, and the material and psychic relations that the living maintain with the dead. Drawing on the work of Vico, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and a diverse range of poets and thinkers, Harrison makes a convincing argument for the primacy of death within multiple spheres of human existence. The book touches on such topics as burial and its relation to place and possession of place, the roots of architecture in tombs, and grief and the origin of language.

The dead, who in effect set up their dominion in human guilt, do not only need our help to sustain their afterlives, they also provide us with help from beyond the grave. The contract between the living and the dead has traditionally been one of mutual indebtedness, for reasons that Vico probes and that I, in his wake, have sought to clarify. The dead depend on the living to preserve their authority, heed their concerns, and keep them going in their afterlives. In return, they help us to know ourselves, give form to our lives, organize our social relations, and restrain our destructive impulses. —from The Dominion of the Dead

Friday, January 16 / 12PM / Oakes Mural Room

Georgine Clarsen is Lecturer at the School of History and Politics, Faculty of Art, University of Wollongong, Australia, and Research Fellow at the Center for Cultural Studies during Winter 2004. Trained as a historian, she also received a Certificate in Automotive Engineering from Sydney Technical College. Her areas of interest include history of technology, tourism and travel, twentieth-century modernity, women and war, feminist historiography, history of the body, and a history of physical performance in Australia. She has published widely in the history of women and motoring in Australia and elsewhere. Her talk is from a book in progress entitled Auto-Erotic: Early Women Motorists’ Love of Cars (forthcoming from Johns Hopkins).