Friday January 31 / 12 PM / Oakes Mural Room

Carlos Monsiváis is one of Latin America’s foremost cultural critics, and has been for many North Americans the source of some of the most acute and trenchant commentary on Mexican politics, U.S.-Mexico relations, and contemporary Mexican cultural practices. He is the author of Amor Perdido (Lost Love), Escenas de Pudor y Liviandad (Scenes of Frivolity and Shame), Entrada Libre (Free Entry), and Rituales del Caos (The Rituals of Chaos). Mexican Postcards, an English translation of essays on topics such as Latino hip hop, Dolores del Rio, boleros, and melodrama, was published by Verso in 1997. Sr. Monsiváis’s paper discusses post-NAFTA Mexico and questions of cultural nationalism.

“It’s not a bad joke to declare that in the era of postnationalism we live in Post México, a country that survived nationalism, but not the necessity of saving a common language, a common culture, an obligation of social justice. In Post México we face the same problems, but we select the traditions we need, and we decide to survive a racist and overwhelming globalization. In the time of post, Post México is a still a nation, and a cherished one for its people. Post México gringo y querido, as the ancient song declares.”
—from “Will Nacionalism Be Bilingual?”

Participants in the seminar should complete the readings in advance. Readings are available at the Center for Cultural Studies. For campus mailing of readings, please contact Stephanie Casher at scasher@cats.ucsc.edu.

Sr. Monsiváis’s visit to Santa Cruz will also feature a talk in Spanish, “El otro crimen del Padre Amaro,” sponsored by the Chicano/Latino Research Center, on Thursday, January 30, at 4 PM in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge. The Spanish-language talk is on the recent controversial Mexican film, “El crimen del Padre Amaro,” which will be screened on the evening of Tuesday, January 28. Contact the Chicano/Latino Research Center for screening details, clrc@ucsc.edu.

Thursday, November 21 | 4pm | Oakes Mural Room

Aamir Mufti has emerged in recent years as one of the most interesting voices in colonial and postcolonial literary and cultural studies. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, and taught previously at the University of Michigan. His research interests are wide-ranging— Marxism and aesthetics, minority cultures in Europe and elsewhere, exile and displacement, human rights, refugees and the right to asylum, modernism and fascism, language conflicts, and the history of anthropology. Many of these concerns are often considered under the rubric “postcolonial.” Mufti prefers the term by which Edward Said characterized his own critical practice: secular criticism, whose referent is not only the religious/secular divide, but a range of belief systems, including the national. These concerns are elaborated in Mufti’s article, “Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture” (Critical Inquiry, Autumn, 1998), and in his introductory writing and editorial work in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, co-edited with Anne McClintock and Ella Shohat (University of Minnesota, 1997). He has also written on blasphemy and literature, the post-literate public sphere, and the Urdu-language short story. His book, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and Dilemas in Postcolonial Culture, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. His talk this fall comes out of this project, and suggests that the legacy of the Jewish question in Europe informs and shapes the contemporary, crisis of secularism in postcolonial societies.

Tuesday, November 19|Oakes Mural Room|4:00 PM

Vicente Rafael, Professor of Department of Communication at UC San Diego, will give a talk titled “The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines”. This talk explores the roles of the cell phone and the crowd as two related but distinct technics in conjuring up a kind of messianic politics during “People Power II,” the recent civilian led coup that ousted Joseph “Erap” Estrada from the presidency in January of 2001. It inquires into the ways by which a middle class politics of wishfulness comes to rest on the imagined capacities of technologies to communicate at a distance and call forth, as well as defer, the arrival of justice. Finally, it asks how the promise of telecommunication holds forth the possibility of momentarily flattening social hierarchy, a possibility simultaneously longed for and dreaded by those most anxious to chart the course of this promise. Prof. Rafael holds a Ph.D in history from Cornell University and has research interests in comparative colonialism, nationalism technology and modernity, and the politics and culture of the Philippines and Filipino Americans. His recent publications include White Love and the Other Events in Filipino History (Durham: Duke UP, 2000), Figures of Criminality in Indonesia, the Philippines and Colonial Vietnam (Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 1999), and Discrepant Histories: Traslocal Essays on Filipino Cultures (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1999).

Monday, October 28
4pm, Oakes Mural Room

The Religion and Culture Cluster continues its lecture series this fall with a presentation by Professor Gauri Viswanathan, whose fields of interest are intellectual history; education, religion, and culture; 19th-century British and colonial cultural studies; and the history of disciplines. Her recent book, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton, 1998), is a major reinterpretation of conversion. Centering on colonial subjects in British India and on minority communities within Britain, she sees in religious conversion both a mode of resistance and an alternative epistemology. Outside the Fold won numerous prizes, including the 1999 Harry Levin Prize awarded by the American Comparative Literature Association for best book in comparative literature, the James Russell Lowell Prize awarded by the Modern Language Association for best work of literary criticism, and the 2000 Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Prize awarded by the Association for Asian Studies. Her first book was Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (Columbia, 1989), which demonstrated how the colonial and imperial context shaped the formation of English literary study as a field of knowledge. Professor Viswanathan recently guest-edited a special issue of Ariel: A Review of International English Literature on “Institutionalizing English Studies: the Postcolonial/Post-independence
Challenge”. She has received Guggenheim, NEH, Mellon, and American Institute of Indian Studies fellowships, and is currently research collaborator on a major international project on globalization and autonomy, based in Toronto and Hamilton, Canada.

Co-sponsored by the History of Consciousness Department

Two Lectures
Wednesday, October 16, 5-7pm
Wednesday, October 23, 5-7pm
Kresge 159

The Center for Cultural Studies is pleased to present a two-part talk by Wlad Godzich, who has over the last decade been a central figure in a number of scholarly discussions of globalization, humanism, and literature. Indeed, many of the concerns shaping Dean Godzich’s recent work on the global are present in his early work as a medievalist, where he traced the concurrent emergence of vernaculars, print technology, and political administration. With the 1988 publication of his essay “Emergent Literature and the Field of Comparative Literature” (reprinted in Godzich, The Culture of Literacy, Harvard, 1994), Professor Godzich explored an ongoing concern with the problematic of emergence, which has led not only to reconceptualizations of literary history, but to dialogues with natural and social scientists engaged in similar work on new forms of knowledge.

About his talks this quarter, Dean Godzich writes:
“The two talks bring together two lines of research I have been working on during the past decade. The first has focused on the category of the subject in the context of western modernity. It is my contention that the modern subject is characterized by a homology between discourse and action. In the first talk I will present a synoptic view of this homology and argue that it is the ground upon which the strong subject of modernity has been built. In the second talk I will turn to my other concern: globalization and its significance for scholars in the human sciences. I will use the synopsis presented in the first talk to identify areas in which the subject is affected. Some of these areas will be analyzed in some detail, others identified as research topics for the future. A surprising outcome of the juxtaposition of these two research projects has been the re-emergence of imagination as a central and dynamic category for thinking the subject in the context of globalization.”

Wlad Godzich has taught at Columbia, Yale, the University of Minnesota, the University of Toronto, and the Université de Montréal, and has held many visiting appointments in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Before coming to UC Santa Cruz he was at the Université de Genève (Switzerland) where he held the Chairs of Emergent Literature and Comparative Literature. He is the author of several books, notably The Emergence of Prose (Minnesota, 1987) and The Culture of Literacy (Harvard, 1994). He was co-editor of the acclaimed 88–volume series Theory and History of Literature, published by the University of Minnesota Press.

Thursday, October 12 | Oakes Mural Room | 4:00 PM

David Theo Goldberg comes to the University of California’s Humanities Research Institute from Arizona State University, where he was Director and Professor of the School of Justice Studies, a law and social science program that focuses on issues of social, political, and economic justice, including critical issues of crime, punishment, and imprisonment. In 1999-2000, he was a visiting professor in African American and Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Combining a philosophical approach with critically engaged analyses of race and social justice, Professor Goldberg is the author of Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning(1993); Racial Subjects: Writing on Race in America(1997); and Ethical Theory and Social Issues(1990/1995). His editorial work on race, racialization and multiculturalism includes Anatomy of Racism(1990); Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader(1995); and two forthcoming co-edited collections: Race Critical Theories and Rethinking Postcolonialism. He is the founding co-editor of Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture. His current book, The Racial State(Blackwell 2001), is a study of the centrality of racial configurations to modern state formation and administration. Professor Goldberg argues that modern states assume a racial configuration in becoming modern, and in turn become modern by various and shifting deployments of racial technologies of governance. Even while assuming specific expression in different socio-cultural conditions, any particular racial state is tied into a world order of racial states that offers the conditions of possibility for the particular racial state to exist. Racial states accordingly collapse the distinction between states as forms of governmentality and states as conditions of being. “Raceless States,” a chapter from the book, argues that self-proclaimed raceless states, in their various configurations of colorblindness in the United States, racial democracy in Brazil, nonracialism in South Africa, ethnic pluralism in Europe are in fact late modern modes of the racial state.

Friday, October 11| College Eight 240| 4:30 PM

In a language and a land hostile to its operations, Fredric Jameson has crafted a dialectical critical method of singular power and efficacy. His metacriticism, ranging in register from the inescapable, hortatory “Always Historicize” to the real work of historicizing a wide range of critical, filmic, artistic, and literary genres, has been central in the continuation of a vibrant and engaged Marxist critique. Postmodernism, history, narrative, form itself—he has not only shaped our understanding and conception of these and other fundamental elements of critical discourse, but has made the political stakes of this discourse clear. Jameson’s Marxism is a capacious one—not eclectic, but attentive to the logic of the critical situation. Few critics, for instance, would be capable of making both Adorno and Brecht central to a critical project, as Jameson did in Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic (Verso, 1990) and Brecht and Method (Verso, 1998).

Jameson is the author of seventeen books and dozens of essays. His criticism is the subject of many studies, including books by Perry Anderson, Douglas Kellner, and others. His work has been translated into all the major European and Asian languages. It has been particularly important in Japan, China, and the Chinese-speaking areas. Houxiandaizhuyi he wenhua lilun (Postmodernism and Cultural Theory), published in China in 1987 and reprinted in Hong Kong and Taiwan in 1988 and 1989, had a transformative effect on Chinese critical discourse.

Periodization, historicization, and temporality have always been central concerns in Jameson’s work. His most recent book, A Singular Modernity, is being published this fall by Verso. It examines revivals of discussions of modernity and aesthetic modernism against the perceived disappearance of alternatives to capitalism, offering a meta-critique of the concept and a diagnosis of the stage of capitalism which has given birth to it. His talk at Santa Cruz represents further thinking on these questions.

“What is…identified as the history of ideas is poorly equipped to deal with intellectual regressions of this kind, which can often more plausibly be accounted for by political conjunctures and by institutional dynamics. The defeat of Marxism (if it really was defeated) checked the flow of much contemporary theory at its source, which was the Marxist problematic as such (even if it traveled via the detour of Sartrean existentialism and phenomenology). Meanwhile the professionalization (and increasingly, the privatization) of the university can explain the systematic recontainment of theoretical energy as such, as aberrant in its effects as it is anarchist in its aims. But this is precisely why such reinstutionalizations and their regressions can scarcely be numbered among the consequences of postmodernity, with the latter’s well known rhetoric of the decentered and the aleatory, the rhizomatic, the heterogeneous and the multiple. Nor can one imagine that this was exactly what Jean-Francois Lyotard had in mind when he celebrated the displacement of the “grand narratives” of history by the multiple language games of the postmodern, which surely implied the invention of new games and not the artificial resuscitation of those of the academic yesteryear.”

—from “Regressions of the Current Age,”
Preface to A Singular Modernity.

Wednesday, October 2 | 4 PM | Oakes Mural Room

Professor Ling-chi Wang is a distinguished scholar and activist on Asian American issues. He was at the center of the struggles that shaped the creation of the Ethnic Studies Department at UC Berkeley, and has been an advocate ever since of the department’s social activist agenda, particularly in the wake of the Bakke court decision and other attacks on affirmative action. He has been centrally involved in activism, scholarship and dialogues about the rights of Chinese-speaking students in K-12 education, the housing crisis in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the 1996 campaign finance scandal, and, most recently, issues around the Japanese government’s responsibility to Chinese, Koreans, and other Asian targets of Japanese aggression during World War II. He played a key role as strategist and advisor during former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Wen Ho Lee’s battle against espionage charges. His recent publications in Asian American studies include “Being Used and Being Marginalized in the Affirmative Action Debate: Re-envisioning Multiracial America from an Asian American Perspective” in Asian American Policy Review and “Structure of Dual Domination” in Amerasia Journal.

Originally trained as a specialist in ancient Semitic languages, Professor Wang has also worked extensively on the literature and culture of the Chinese diaspora. His Chinese American Poetry: An Anthology, edited with Henry Yiheng Zhao, was published in 1991 by the University of Washington Press. The Chinese Diaspora: Selected Essays, co-edited with Wang Gungwu, appeared in 1998 (Singapore: Times Academic Press). Professor Wang is currently organizing a November conference on the literatures of the Chinese diaspora. This body of literature is written in several languages: Chinese, English, Spanish, French, Malay, and Tagalog among them. Because this literature does not fall under the rubric of Chinese national literatures, it receives little attention from scholars in Taiwan and China. Treatment of Chinese diasporic literature within the fields of European or American minority literatures rarely allows for attention to the global contexts and transnational articulations of its various national sites. Professor Wang aims at the creation of a new field of study.

Tuesday, May 21 | Oakes Mural Room | 4:00 pm

E. San Juan Jr. is a cultural critic and a renowned scholar in the fields of Filipino and Asian American studies. He has published widely on cultural politics in the Philippines, Marxist theory, Filipino and Filipino-American literature, and postcolonial theory. He has been a Fellow of the Center for the Humanities and Visiting Professor of English at Wesleyan University, and Director of the Philippines Cultural Studies Center. He was also the chair of the Department of Comparative American Cultures at Washington State University, and Professor of Ethnic Studies at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. He received the 1999 Centennial Award for Literature from the Philippines Cultural Center. He is the author of Beyond Postcolonial Theory (St. Martin’s Press, 2000), From Exile to Diaspora (Westview Press, 1998), and After Post-colonialism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). His book Racial Formations/ Critical Transformations (Humanities Press, 1992) received the Distinguished Book Awards from the Association for Asian American Studies
and the Gustavus Myers Human Rights Center, Boston University. With a focus on racism and cultural studies, he will talk about the
impact of the Septmeber 11th events on the race/class dialectic.

Sponsored by Asia-Pacific-America Research Cluster, the Ad Hoc Faculty Committee on Current Events, the Institute for Humanities Research, and the History of Consciousness Department. Asia-Pacific-America Research Cluster contact: Chih-ming Wang, wchimin@hotmail.com.

Lecture  

Melinda Micco
Edward Hohfeld Professor and Associate Professor in Ethnic Studies, Mills College

Don’t Call Us Black . . . We are Seminole Freedman: History and Identity of African and Native Americans

Poetry Reading 

Jennifer Lisa Vest
Poet & Visiting Scholar in the Center for the Study of Women at UCLA

Thursday, May 16 |Oakes College, Mural Room | 4:00 p.m.

Reception afterwards

Melinda Micco (Seminole/Creek/Choctaw) received her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on multiracial identity in American Indian and African American communities, primarily in the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma where she is enrolled. She is working with her tribe to secure a multimillion dollar claim against the United States to return assets for tribal members from mineral rights. She has served as historian and consultant for the tribe and for two documentary films about Black Seminoles. Dr. Micco’s other areas of research include: indigenous women; colonial history of American Indians; film portrayals of people of color; and comparative racial theories. She is the author of numerous articles and essays including: “Inside-Outside Stories and Seminole Racial Posture” in the forthcoming book Pretending To Be Me: Ethnic Transvestism and Cross-Writing, which she co-edits; “To Be or Not to be Indian”: Construction of Identity for Native and African Americans” in African Americans and Native Americans: Explorations in Narrative, Place and Identity (forthcoming); “Empire-Building and the Construction of Black Seminole Identity” in Crossing Waters, Crossing Paths: Black and Indian Journeys in the Americas (forthcoming). She is working on a book entitled A Nation Divided: Black Seminoles in Oklahoma which will examine Black and Indian contemporary communities.

Jennifer Lisa Vest is a Mixedblood (Black and Indian) poet born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. She received her Ph.D. in Native Studies from UC Berkeley. She has been involved in organizing a number of artists’ collectives including the Berkeley group, Women of Mixed Heritage, and the D.C. groups, Daughters of the Dream (for Black women artists) and Divination (for Black women writers). In 1993 she returned to the Bay Area to form Four Corners Collective, a collective of mixed heritage artists. She has had her poetry published in two journals, The Fire This Time, and Ache and in four anthologies including Testimonies; Fast Talk; High Volume; Out of Many, One; and Face America. She has performed in and produced poetry readings and mixed media events throughout the Bay Area, Washington DC, New York, Connecticut, Boston, and Atlanta and was a member of the 1997 San Francisco Slam Team that competed in the nationals. Names, her first collection of poetry, was published by Indigenous Speak in Berkeley, CA in 1997. She is currently working on a second collection of poetry entitled Ancestor Count.
Sponsored by Native Research Cluster