Wednesday, May 8 | Oakes Mural Room | 5:00 pm

Jonathan Z. Smith is Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor of the Humanities College at the University of Chicago,
where he also serves on the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World and the Committee of History of Culture, and is an associate faculty member at the Divinity School. Jonathan Z. Smith is a historian of religions whose research has focused on such wide-ranging subjects as ritual theory, Hellenistic religions, nineteenth-century Maori cults, and the notorious events of Jonestown, Guyana. Some of his works include Map is Not Territory (Brill, 1978); Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (University of Chicago, 1982); and To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (University of Chicago Press, 1987). In his book Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity(University of Chicago, 1990), he demonstrates how four centuries of scholarship on early Christianities manifest a Catholic-Protestant polemic.

Sponsored by the Religion and Culture Research Cluster.

Tuesday, May 7 | Women’s Center | 7:00 PM

Nalo Hopkinson is the author of the short story collection Skin Folk (Warner Aspect, 2001); the science fiction novel Midnight Robber (Warner Aspect, 2000), named New York Times Notable Book of the Year and short listed for the Hugo and Nebula awards; and Brown Girl in the Ring (Warner Aspect, 1998). She also edited Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction (Invisible Cities Press, 2000). Her forthcoming novel, set in Haiti, is entitled Griffonne. 

Contact Escheese@aol.com, sealion@cats.ucsc.edu or maritza@cats.ucsc.edu for more information.

The Research Cluster for the Study of Women of Color in Collaboration and Conflict continues its series,”Turning the Tide: Recent Works by Caribbean Women Writers,” this spring with readings by Nalo Hopkinson.

Monday, April 29 | College Eight, Red Room | 2:30 pm

Lewis has served as music curator for the Kitchen in New York, and has collaborated in the “Interarts Inquiry” and “Integrative Studies Roundtable” at the Center for Black Music Research (Chicago). His published articles on music and cultural studies have appeared in journals such as Black Music Research Journal and Lenox Avenue. His forthcoming book, Power Stronger Than Itself: The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2003. Lewis has served as Darius Milhaud Professor in Composition at Mills College, lecturer in computer music at Simon Fraser University’s Contemporary Arts Summer Institute, and Visiting Artist/Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has received numerous fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and is the 1999 recipient of the Cal Arts/Alpert Award in the Arts. Lewis now serves as Professor of Music in the Critical Studies/Experimental Practices program at the University of California, SanDiego.

Sponsored by the Popular Culture Research Cluster.

Thursday, April 4 | Oakes 109 | 4:00 PM

Webcam spectators cannot fully achieve the empowered looks and erotic engagement with bodies that are promised by the technology. Instead, the presence of the camera, screen-based elements, and delivery failures are common aspects of this form. Feminist media theory offers important methods for considering such viewing conditions as nearness to the screen and the controlled visibility of women webcam operators.

Michele White is an Assistant Professor of emerging media in the Department of Telecommunications at Bowling Green State University, where she teaches internet and media studies, contemporary visual culture, and gender theory. Her articles include “Cabinet of Curiosities: Finding the Viewer in a Virtual Museum,” (Convergence: The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 3,3, Autumn 1997); “Visual Pleasure in Textual Places: Gazing in Multi_User Object-Oriented Worlds,” (Information, Communication, and Society 2, 1999); and “Where is the Louvre,” (Space and Culture-The Journal, 4/5, 2000). “On the Internet, Everybody Worries that You’re a Dog: The Gender Expectations and Beauty Ideals of Online Personals and Text-Based Chat” will appear in the forthcoming anthology Readings in Gendered Context. 

Sponsored by the Popular Culture Research Cluster.

Thursday, March 7 | Oakes Mural Room | 4:00 PM

Few scholars can be said to have transformed our thinking as deeply as David Roediger, whose now-classic book, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Verso, 1991), inspired the field of “whiteness studies.” Roediger underscored the psychological as well as economic benefits of race privilege enjoyed by white workers in the nineteenth century. In so doing, he challenged scholars and activists to reframe our understanding of race as a white problem — a set of practices, ideologies, and institutions in which white people in the U.S. have been deeply invested. Roediger deepened his analysis in Toward the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics and Working Class History(Verso, 1994). Since then, he has edited a collection of African American voices on white privilege, Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (1998) and published, with James Barrett, a much-cited article, “In between Peoples: Race, Nationality and the ‘New Immigrant’ Working Class” (Journal of American Ethnic History, Spring, 1997). In his talk at UC Santa Cruz, he will offer a glimpse of his about-to-be published sequel to The Wages of Whiteness. Professor Roediger is Kendrick C. Babcock Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. Arizona State University, Tempe

Wednesday, February 27 | Oakes Mural Room | 5:00 PM

Both an Islamicist and a comparativist, Bruce B. Lawrence is the Nancy and Jeffrey Marcus Humanities Professor of Religion, and Chair of the Department of Religion at Duke University. His early books explored the intellectual and social history of Asian Muslims. Shahrastani on the Indian Religions (1976) was followed by Notes from a Distant Flute (1978), The Rose and the Rock (1979) and Ibn Khaldun and Islamic Ideology (1984). Since the mid-80s, he has been especially concerned with the interplay between religion and ideology. The test case of fundamentalism became the topic of his award-winning monograph, Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt Against the Modern Age (1989/1995). A parallel inquiry informed his latest monograph, Shattering the Myth: Islam beyond Violence (1998/2000), while his next two monographs will once again tackle broader theoretical issues. Go, God, Go: Resilient Religion in the Global Century, (forthcoming in Fall 2001 from W.W. Norton) looks at the complex interaction of ideology, theology and spiritual practices in multiple contexts throughout the 20th century. His second in-progress monograph is on Asian religions in America, tentatively titled New Faiths/Old Fears (scheduled to be published by Columbia University Press in Spring 2002). Co-sponsored by the Adhoc Faculty Committee on Current Events.

Friday, February 22 | 4-5:30pm | Oakes Mural Room 

Roberto Mendoza (Muscogee) is a former member of Students for Democratic Society (SDS) and the American Indian Movement. He was part of the Occupation of Alcatraz, and is the author of Look a Nation is Coming, and analysis of Marxism and Native American sovereignty struggles. He was also a leader of the Green Movement and the Bioregional movements of the 1980s. He’s currently producing his first film: The Eagle and the Condor.

Profile on Roberto Mendoza:

I was born in Oklahoma in 1943, in a small town where racism and poverty was a fact of life for most Muscogee (Creeks) at that time. I also was half “Mexican” or Chicano as we say now. That did not help my situation among either whites or Naitive people. I went to Haskell Indian School briefly when I was a teenager but finished high school in Kansas City, MO after I found my father there. I went to the University of Mosouri for a year and a half , got involved with SDS and with other Marxist and Socialist students just as the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam war movement were arrriving in Missouri. I went to San Francisco intent on becoming a Beat writer. I endied up broke and joined the Navy instead, a racist instution if there ever was one. Then I went to New York City, again intent on writing, but learned filmmaking instead. With my girlfrinend at the time I went to San Francisco in 1969, right into the whirlwind of the hippie, antiwar, Chicano and Native movement. I was involved in the Alcatraz and Pit River Indian struggles and was co-chair of the San Francisco AIM chapter in 1972. Then I married a woman from a small reservation in Maine and spent years raising a family and working with AIM there. I wrote Look a Nation is Coming during this period. I also was a leader in the emerging Bioregional and Green movements of the 1980’s. Presently I live in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois where I am trying to produce my first feature length film, The Eagle and the Condor.

For more information, please contact Andy Smith, 831-460-1856 <andysm@cats.ucsc.edu>.

Lecture
“Bombing the Savages in International Law and Military Practice” 
Thursday, February 14
4:00 PM
Baytree Conference Room D

Seminar
On a History of Bombing (New Press, 2000)
Friday, February 15
10:00 AM-12:00 PM
Oakes Mural Room

Seminar participants should read excerpts from the book, available on request from the Center. The Center has a few copies of the book available for graduate students who will attend the seminar. The book can also be purchased at a discount at the Bay Tree Bookstore.

The author of over a dozen books, translated from Swedish into many lan-guages, Lindqvist began his scholarly life as a China scholar, publishing several books out of his years in China in the early 1960s, and followed this with books on Latin America. Radical popular historians know him for his 1978 manual and manifesto Gräv där du står: hur man utforskar ett jobb (Dig Where You Stand: How to Research a Job), a book on the Swedish cement industry that was intended to empower workers through a demonstration of research techniques into that most occluded area of inquiry: one’s own workplace. Two linked books—Desert Divers (English translation by New Press, 2000) and “Exterminate All the Brutes”: One Man’s Odyssey Into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide (New Press, 1996)—are simultaneously accounts of Lindqvist’s travels through the Sahara into sub-Saharan Africa and histories of the repressed origins of European genocide. European racism was also Lindqvist’s focus in The Skull Measurer’s Mistake, and Other Portraits of Men and Women Who Spoke Out Against Racism (New Press, 1995). After reading Lindqvist’s account of now forgotten antiracists like Thomas Winterbottom and Friedrich Tiedemann, early nineteenth century scientists who carefully and thoroughly debunked “scientific” claims for the inferiority of nonwhites, it is difficult to claim that Euro-American racist ideology was simply the only option for nineteenth
century thinkers.

Sven Lindqvist’s visit this winter will center on the research that has produced, among other pieces, A History of Bombing, a critically acclaimed book that has particular relevance to the current situation. We learn there of the first bombs to fall in Afghanistan—over eighty years ago—and the economic and political justifications for European and American domination by air. Drawing on science-fiction narratives, historical archives, military histories, museum exhibits, and constructed as a labyrinth of a hauntingly written text through which there are a number of history-estranging paths for the reader, A History of Bombing is a chilling exposé of a hidden past and present.

Professor Lindqvist’s visit is co-sponsored by the Adhoc Faculty Committee on Current Events and by the Humanities Research Institute in Irvine, CA.

Wednesday, February 6 | Oakes Mural Room | 5:00 PM

Bruce Lincoln is the Caroline E. Haskell Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His interests center on the social and political dimensions of myth, ritual, and religion, along with the mythic and ritual dimensions of society and politics. He is particularly interested in issues of discourse, practice, power, conflict, and the construction of social borders. He works in Indo-European religions and the anthropology of religion, with occasional excurses into African, Melanesian, and native American traditions. His recent publications include; Authority: Construction and Corrosion (1994); Death, War, and Sacrifice (1991); and Discourse and the Construction in Society (1989). His most recent book, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (1999), addresses narratives that hover between myth and history in the emergence, consolidation, and contestaion of kingship and the nationstate in medieval Scandinavia.

Tuesday, February 5 | Women’s Center | 7:00 PM

This is the first event in a series of readings organized by the Research Cluster for the Study of Women of Color in Collaboration and Conflict.
Myriam J. A. Chancy is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at the Arizona State University. Her books include Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (Rutgers, 1997) and Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in
Exile (Temple, 1997). She will read from her most recent fiction manu-script, followed by discussion. The series will continue with readings in
the Winter and Spring quarters.