Friday, February 1 | Oakes Room 105 | 7:00 PM-9:00 PM

This event will feature a screening of the documentary Long Day’s Journey into Night. Awarded the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary (2000), the film centers on the work of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), set up by the post-apartheid, democratic government to consider amnesty for perpetrators of crimes committed under apartheid’s reign. The film includes interviews with policemen, journalists, victims, rebels, and members of the commission members, as well as newsreel footage and footage of meetings between perpetrators’ and victims’ families. It provides an intimate portrayal of South Africa’ s attempt to heal the wounds of forty years of apartheid. Filmmakers Frances Reid and Deborah Hoffman will be available for a question and answer period after the film.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies and the Center for Justice, Tolerance, and Community.

Thursday, January 24 | Oakes Mural Room | 4:00 PM

Jitka Malecková is Associate Professor at the Institute of Middle Eastern and African Studies at the Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. She has published articles in Czech, English, French and Turkish on nine-teenth-century cultural and intellectual history of the Ottoman Empire and on gender and nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe. She is co-author of The Struggle for a Modern State in the Muslim World (1989) and Fertile Soil: Women Save the Nation(forthcoming), both in Czech. Her presentation, part of the Center’s ongoing project on “Civilizational Thinking,” will address the relationship between gender and nation at the margins of Europe in the 19th century.

Malecková writes:
People like to think in binary oppositions. Despite some politicians’ efforts, the current fight against terrorism, to mention just one example, is often presented as a fight between two civilizations — the Western, rational civilization versus the Eastern (Islamic), irrational civilization, “the realm of good” against “the realm of evil”, as the Czech president Havel put it. From a different standpoint, postcolonial studies focuses on two situations/models, leaving some parts of the world out from the current interest of academia. The presentation will concentrate on 19th-century societies which defined themselves in relationship to Western civilization, but were not considered a part of it. These “margins of Europe” present neither a geographical category nor a permanent one. They were rather constructed as a result of the exclusion from the post-Enlightenment (Western) Europe (which defined itself as the center and peak of civilization) and of the reaction to this perceived exclusion and lagging development. The idea of European/Western civilization played an important role in their self-perceptions, self-definitions, and concepts of modernity. The margins of Europe comprised various degrees of marginalization, as represented by: Italy and Greece, the old, displaced Southern centers of civilization; Eastern Europe, seen as both Europe and not-Europe, as the Orient of Europe and Oriental Europe (L.Wolff); and the Ottoman Empire, considered to be a barbaric opposite and the Other of Europe. Even today, this marginalization continues to have an impact on current historical writings and has political implications. The “margins of Europe” can be also used to reconsider binary approaches to history.

Thursday, January 22 | Oakes Mural Room | 12:00 PM

Hokulani Aikau is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of American Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her dissertation is titled “Arti-culations of Hawaiian Culture: Cultural Revitalization, Religion, and Migration at the Polynesian Cultural Center, 1963–1973,” centering on Polynesian ethnic and religious identity in the context of the Mormon Church’s Polynesian Culture Center in Hawai`i.

Thursday, November 29 | Oakes 109 | 4:00 PM

Allan Sekula is photographer, writer, and critic, and is on the Art Faculty at the California Institute of the Arts. His work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions all over the world, including the Folkwang Museum (Essen), the Vancouver Art Gallery (vancouver), the University Art Museum (Berkeley), the Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Munich Kunstverein (Munich), and the Palais des Beau Arts (Brussels). His many books include Geography Lesson: Canadanian Notes (MIT, 1997), Five Days that Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond (with Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Verso, 2000), and The Traffic in Photographs (MIT, forthcoming). Fish Story (Richter Verlag, 1995) is an extraordinary book that is representative of much of his work. In phtographs and texts, Sekula effects a politically engaged and conceptually original re-materialization of oceanic social space-harbors, ship interiors, port towns, factories-and its dwellers, whose existence and struggles are so often effaced by globalist boosterist abstraction. For this visit, Allan Sekula will screen and discuss his video Irrational Exuberance (Tsukiji)-one part of a projected three-part Irrational Exuberance series-which engages the Japanese fishing industry, U.S. militarism, and the history of the U.S.-Japanese encounter.

Lecture
In the Outback of Civilization: Anthropology as Popular Culture in Modern Colonial Australia
Tuesday, November 13
4:00 PM
The lecture will include film clips from the 1940s Australian film Uncivilized.

Lecture
“Two Schools”:Contact Narrative and Cultural Rivalry in Martial Arts Cinema
Thursday, November 15
4:00 PM
The lecture will include film clips from the 1970s Hong Kong film Bruce Lee in New Guinea.

Seminar
On History in Action Adventure: Cultural Studies, Critical Theory, and the Question of Genre
Friday, November 16
10:00 AM-12:00 PM

Copies of the readings for this seminar are available to the UCSC community at the Center for Cultural Studies office, or may be requested via email (cult@hum.ucsc.edu). Please make email requests at least one week in advance.

Meaghan Morris’s pathbreaking work in cultural studies ranges across many fileds, among them film and media; gender, nationality, and globalization; and Australian and Asian-Pacific popular culture. In two lectures and a seminar, Meaghan Morris presents her current work. One project centers on pioneering Australian travel writer/journalist Ernestine Hill, who used the literary action-adventure genre and “contact” stories about both Aborigines and Asian peoples in Australia to promote civilizational values and policies. The other examines the deployment of history in action cinema over the past 30 years, with attention to Hollywood, Hong Kong, and the production narratives about these “two schools” and “two styles.” The seminar will take up connections between the two projects, which form a trilogy with Morris’s 1998 book, Too Soon Too Late: History in Popular Culture, in which she writes:

Sharing neither the immobilizing conviction that practical action is pointless or doomed in the present, nor the panicky belief that immigrants, the internet, postmodern architecture, and aliens from outer space are terminating history, I think it worth remembering that cultural criticism is necessarily subject to phases of market boredom with …”critical ” historical sense…and with the slow, incremental temporality endured by any struggle with serious designs on the future. My response to such boredom is–that’s tough for cultural critics. Alternative values and their constituencies may be obliterated in an apocalyptic event, but they will not disappear by decree of some jaded culturati, nor fade to fit the needs of the conference component of the hospitality of industry. (232)

Morris is also the author of The Pirate’s Fiancee: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism (1998) and Ecstasy and Economics: American Essays for John Forbes (1992), and co-editor, among other works, of Australian Cultural Studies: A Reader (1993) and Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy (1979). Currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, she has taught at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, Duke University, the University of Illinois, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and La Trobe University.

Meaghan Morris’s visit is sponsored by the research clusters in Asia-Pacific-America and in Civilizational Thinking.

Wednesday, November 7 | Oakes Mural Room | 7:00 PM

Juliana Spahr is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. She is co-editor of the journal Chain and member of the Subpress collective. She won the National Poetry Series award for her first book., Response (Sun & Moon Press, 1997), an innovative text possessed with voices of alien otherness. Working on the edge between critical theory and poetic language experimentation, her critical study, Everybody’s Autonomy (Alabama UP, 2001), explores connections between textual invention and the plentitudes of imigrant energies in writers like Stein, Hejinian, Mullen, and Cha. She has a new book of poetry due out this fall called Fuck-You-Aloha-I Love You (Wesleyan), dole street is a work of placenames and material geopoetics set in the entangled colonial contexts of contemporary Hawai’i.

Thursday, November 1 | Oakes Mural Room | 4:00 PM

Educated in Korea, Taiwan, and the United States, Shu-mei Shih works at the forefront of a new generation of Asian and Asian American scholars who track and critique the geopolitics of Asia/Paciic transnational flows, gender dynamics, and national situations in literary, theoretical, and filimic genres. She has just published a thickly descriptive work in this mode called The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China 1917-1937 (University of California 2001). She is presently editing a collection of essays on “Hong Kong After 1997” and completing a book on “Visuality and Identity: Cultural Transactions Across the Chinese Pacific.” Her work has appeared in the journals Signs, positons, Public Culture, and New Formations. She is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies at UCLA, where she directs a research program called Comparative and Interdisciplinary Research on Asia and co-directs (with Francoise Lionnet) a multicampus research group on Transational and Transcolonial Studies. Her talk will interrogate the valuecodings of temprality (“when”), ehtnicity (“Chinese”) and gendered subjectivity (“feminist”) in transnational encounters and representations.

Sponsored by the Asia-Pacific-America Research Cluster.

Thursday, October 18 | Cowell Conference Room | 4:00 PM

Luisa Passerini’s work on cultural identity and self-representations has transformed the use of oral narratives in the writing of history. She is the author of Europe in Love, Love in Europe: Imagination and Politics Between the Wars (NYU Press, 2001), Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968 (University Press of New England, 1966), and Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class (Cambridge, 1987). Her edited and co-edited works include Gender and Memory (Oxford, 1996) and Memory and Totalitarianism (Oxford, 1992). Passerini is Director of the Gender Studies Program and Professor of Twentieth-Century History at European University in Florence (Fiesole), Italy. In Fall 2001 she holds the Chair of Italian Culture in the Department of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. This talk, drawn from her comparative research on France, Britain, and Italy in the1930s, takes a critical look at Eurocentric notions of passion and the emotions.

Sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies and the Departments of History and Literature.

Lecture

Globalization and the Question of Culture 
Thursday, October 11
Oakes Mural Room
4:00 PM

Seminar
Re-thinking Colonialism: Globalization, Postcolonialism, and the Nation
Friday, October 12
10-12:00 pm
Oakes Mural Room

The seminar reading should be completed in advance. Copies of readings can be picked up at the Center for Cultural Studies, or can be mailed to a campus address on request (cult@hum.ucsc.edu). Please make email requests at least one week prior to the seminar.

Arif Dirlik is one of the most important critics writing at the nexus of globalization, postcolonial theory, historiography, Asia-Pacific Studies, and capital critique. He has published over fifteen books and numerous articles. His 1997 book The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Westview), is a trenchant analysis and critique of postcolonial theory, and an assessment of its adequacy to the contemporary situation. After the Revolution: Waking to Global Capitalism (Wesleyan, 1994), posed a similar set of challenges to Marxist theory, calling for a new set of oppositional practices and modes of critique that respond to the situation of a newly hegemonic global capitalism and the demise of the socialist states. Other books include Places and Politics in the Age of Global Capital (ed. with Roxann Prazniak, Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), Postmodernity’s Histories: The Past as Legacy and Project (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), What is in a Rim? Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea (Westview, 1993), and Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution (University of California, 1991). His works have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, Portuguese, and Turkish. Professor Dirlik’s seminar paper, forthcoming in Engin Isik et al., ed., Handbook of Historical Sociology (Sage), is a provocative intervention into debates about the place of colonialism in contemporary historical cultural studies.

Thursday, May 17 | Oakes Mural Room | 4:00 PM

Arthur Groos is Professor of German Studies, Medieval Studies, and Music at Cornell University, where he has taught since 1973. Co-editor of Reading Opera (1988) and co-author of Giacomo Puccini: La Bohème (1986), his other books include Romancing the Grail: Genre, Science, and Quest in Wolfram’s Parzival (1995),and numerous articles on medieval literature, Goethe, Schiller, and German and Italian opera. Works in progress include a monograph on orientalism and Madama Butterfly and the Cambridge Opera Handbook on Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. He writes that his talk “is largely a decolonizing interpretation of Acts II-III of the opera, suggesting that Butterfly’s attempt to construct a western identity as Mrs. B. F. Pinkerton is doomed to failure because of western racial prejudices about the oriental other. It shows among other things that all those embarrassing moments in Act II are deliberate, and suggests through an analysis of Butterfly’s major numbers how the opera can be viewed as a tragedy of failed assimilation.”