Saturday, May 12, 8:30 am-5:00 pm & Sunday, May 13, 8:30 am-12:00 pm
Stevenson Fireside Lounge

Participants include: Daniel Brower (History, UCD), David Chrisitan (History, SDSU), James Gelvin (History, UCLA) and Jose Moya (History, UCLA)

This event is one of two yearly research conferences sponsored by the World History Workshop, a UC Multicampus Research Group. The Workshop seeks to uncover modernity’s roots both as outcomes of long-term world historical processes and as the cumulative interaction of European and non-European elites and peoples. In doing so it also hopes to further the development of world history as an emerging research area both within the field of history as well as an arena of interdisciplinary inquiry at the intersection of the humanities and social sciences. It draws together faculty and resources from all eight UC campuses (Irvine, Berkeley, Davis, Los Angeles, Riverside, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara and San Diego). The MRG is based at UC Irvine, and is headed by Kenneth Pomeranz. The steering committee consists of Edmund Burke, III (UCSC), Rebecca Emigh (UCLA), John Hall (UCD), Randy Head (UCR) and John Marino (UCSD).

Friday & Saturday, May 11-12 | Kresge Town Hall

The festival provides an on-going venue for women of color to show their work, discuss current issues facing communities of color, and form collaborative projects. This year’s festival will honor filmmaker and director Cheryl Dunye. The festival will additionally feature works that document the international struggle against the violence of incarceration through political and cultural resistance in a postcolonial present.

For more information, please contact Katy Elliott, cult@hum.ucsc.edu; 459-4899

Michael Shanks
(Classics and Cultural Anthropology, Stanford)

35 Moments in The Construction of an Archaeological Site. Or, the Impossibility of Archaeology

Tuesday, May 1 | Oakes Mural Room | 4:00 PM

Professor Shanks is an archaelogist who, in his own words, “taking the broadest view of the subject, works on what is left of the past.” From 1993-98 he was Head of Archaeology at the University of Wales, Lampeter and helped build there a department with a new interdisciplinary agenda. In seven books and other publications, the latest of which is Theater/Archaeology, forthcoming from Routledge-“the (re)articulation of ruin/trace as real-time event”-he has tried to contribute to a critique of anthropological archaeology which would radically revise it as a disciplinary and cultural field.

Stephen Caton
(Anthropology, Harvard University)

America–the Land Without History

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

Professor Caton is a Middle East specialist and anthropological linguist by training, but of late has become interested in writing a biography of one of his ancestors, a prominent lawyer and judge who lived in the midwest in the nineteenth-century United States. This paper examines his amateur scientific writings, along with a number of other, more professional pieces written about the same time by the noted anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan and the celebrated historian Frederick Jackson Turner, and examines the way in which the categories of “science,” and particularly of “natural history,” were constructed at the time. It will be argued that the production of what was then called scientific knowledge is complexly related to issues of regionalism and civilization as discussed in this seminar.

The Civilizational Thinking project is supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation.

Tuesday, April 24 | Oakes Mural Room | 4:00 PM

Istvan Rev is Professor of History and Political Science at Central European University, Budapest, where he is also the Academic Director of the Open Society Archive. He has been a visiting faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley on several occasions. Since the early 1980s Rev has published widely on the political cultural, and architectural history of Hungary and other Eastern bloc countries. Since the political transformations of 1989, he has emerged as one of the most highly regarded writers on issues of post-socialism, publishing on various dimensions of the transition-such as official and popular memory, state discourse and popular resistance, andthe status of socialist-era monuments-in journals such as Daedalus, Dissent, and Representations. His articles include . “The Advantages of being Atomized” (1987), “In Mendacio Veritas” (1991), and The Archeology of Resurrection (1991) . He is currently completing a book for Stanford University Press on retroactive justice.

John Lechte (Senior Lecturer, Sociology, Macquarie University) 
The Time-Image and Seduction
Thursday, April 19 | Social Sciences II, Room 265 | 4:00PM

Professor Lechte has published numerous articles and books on Julia Kristeva, psychoanalysis and culture, and Australian history. His books include:  Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Semiotics to Postmodernism (1994); After the Revolution: On Kristeva (1998). Presently, he completing a book called On the Imaginary: Its Life and Death. His paper will examine the time image in light of Deleuze’s work.

Peggy Phelan (Performance Studies, Tisch School, New York University) 
The Photography of Francesca Woodman: Death and the Image One More Time
Friday, May 4 | Kresge 159 | 4:00PM

Professor Phelan works at the intersection of performance, visuality and gender. Her books include Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993) and Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (1996). She has co-edited two collections: Acting Out: Feminist Performances and The Ends of Performance(1998). Phelan is writing a book entitled:  Death in America: Ronald Reagan and Andy Warhol. She is currently a Visiting Professor at Stanford University.

Thursday, April 12 | Oakes Mural Room | 12:00 PM

This talk moves forward from the arguments of “discrepant dislocations”, first explored in John’s (1996) and draws on her current participation in feminist debates in India. The nature/culture problematic has been paradigmatic for western feminism. It has enabled major advances in feminist theory, of which the sex/gender distinction would be just one. This problematic constitutes the staple of feminist theory in much of the world, including India. Theorizing the subject of “women,” the women’s movement and feminism over the last two centuries in India, however, brings a somewhat different problematic to the fore, best captured by the tensions and conflicts between culture and politics. Taking its cue from problems and impasses besetting the women’s movement in India today (such as the question of a uniform civil code and political representation for women) this paper argues for the urgency of comparative and transnational feminisms to tackle the problems of the present.

Mary E. John completed her Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness Program in 1991. She is currently Senior Fellow at the Centre for Women’s Development Studies, New Delhi, India. Her publications include A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of Modern India (co-edited with Janaki Nair, Kali for Women. New Delhi, 1998 and Zed Press, 2000). She is currently completing a project on the history of women’s studies in India.

Wednesday, April 11 | Kresge 159 | 7:00 PM

Sheila Rowbotham is one of the leading British socialist feminists of the past 30 years. She is the author of numerous books, including Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World (1973),  Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight Against It (1973),  The Past is Before Us: Feminism in Action Since the 1960s (1989), and more recently, Women Encounter Technology: Changing Patterns of Employment in the Third World (1995), and Threads Through Time: Writings on History and Autobiography (1999).

She is also the author of a memoir, “Promise of a Dream,” recently published by University of Manchester Press. During her visit to UCSC, she will read from the memoir and hold a booksigning.

Co-sponsored by the Women’s Studies Department, the Institute for Humanities Research, the Center for Cultural Studies, and the Women’s Center.

Thursday, March 8 | Oakes Mural Room | 4:00PM

This talk with slides draws on Rebecca Solnit’s current book in progress, which traces the genesis of the Hollywood film industry and of Silicon Valley through an examination of transformations in the technologies of everyday life dating from the 1870s. The talk also draws on her two most recently published books, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Viking, 2000), and Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism (Verso, 2000). At the center of all three books is a concern with pace in contemporary life: the acceleration of everyday life through technology, the rhetoric celebrating efficiency and convenience as ultimate ideals, and with the pace at which place is experienced or obliterated. Solnit’s current project examines phenomena ranging from the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 to Richard Misrach’s photographs of race cars in the Bonneville Salt Flats– where the world’s speed records were set– to the spread of Starbucks and pedestrian fatalities in contemporary San Francisco.

Rebecca Solnit is a writer, art critic, museum exhibition curator, and political activist. She won wide acclaim and recognition for her 1994 book, Savage Dreams : A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West (Vintage). Centering on counter-histories of Yosemite National Park and the landscape of Nevada’s nuclear test sites, Savage Dreams is a destabilizing and demystifying intervention into the tragic and romantic mythopoetics of place in the American West. Her 1997 A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland (Verso) is a travel narrative which navigates through ideas about remembering and forgetting, identity and landscape, and patterns of movement, from colonialism to tourism and nomadism. Her recently published Wanderlust, Solnit writes, is a history of “walking as a cultural activity, from the peripatetic philosophers of ancient Greece to the contemporary paleontological arguments about bipedal evolution, from an aesthetic pleasure in eighteenth-century England to the growth of politically active walking clubs at the turn of the century and the birth of the outdoor industry and climbing gyms, as well as histories of the rise and fall of urban walking as a pleasure, pedestrian uprisings, and the gender politics of public space.” Hollow City combines text by Solnit with photo essays by photographer Susan Schwartzenberg, and traces the devastation that has come in the wake of San Francisco’s dot-com fueled gentrification: skyrocketing residential and commercial rents that are driving out artists, activists, and the poor, the homogenization of the city’s appearance, industries and population, the decay of public life and the erasure of the sites of civic memory.

Thursday, February 8| Oakes Mural Room | 4:00 PM

Reading:“Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History,” from Public Culture 12.3 (2000)

Sheldon Pollock is George V. Bobrinskoy Professor of Sanskrit and Indic Studies at the University of Chicago. His work over the past ten years has sought to illuminate the relationship between culture and polity in precapitalist South Asia. His nearly complete book on this subject–The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit and Power in India to 1500— is forthcoming from UC Press. These same concerns motivated a seven-year collaborative research project Professor Pollock just concluded with seventeen scholars from India, Europe, and the US on Literary Cultures in History (in press). His next project addresses the state of Indian learning on the threshold of western modernity; the first component is a small cooperative initiative among eight scholars from Europe and the US called Sanskrit Knowledge Systems on the Eve of Colonialism(1550-1750), and is expected to run from 2001-2004. Professor Pollock’s work on Indian literary and vernacular cultures s is central to an understanding of global literacy and vernacularization, and has been of great importance to scholars both within and without South Asian Studies.

Lecture:
Club 51: On the Question of the Culture of U.S. Imperialism
Thursday, February 1/ 4:00PM/ Oakes Mural Room

Seminar:
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Politics and Prospects
Friday, February 2/ 10:00AM-12:00PM/ Oakes Mural Room

Seminar Reading: Editorial Statement from the inaugural issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Movements.
Copies of the readings 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.

Kuan-hsing Chen is Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Coordinator of the Center for Asia-Pacific/Cultural Studies at National Tsing-Hua University in Taiwan. He held previous appointments at City University of New York and UC Berkeley, and is founding editor of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Movements, a Routledge journal that began publication in 1999. His publications, in English and Chinese, consist of work in cultural studies, including a volume on Stuart Hall, and on imperialism and postcolonial criticism. His recent edited volume, Trajectories: Cultural Studies Inter-Asia(Routledge, 2000, in English and Chinese), has contributed to the reshaping of cultural study in East Asia, and has created important common ground for scholars from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, China, Australia, the US, and elsewhere in the Asia Pacific region. Kuan-hsing Chen’s work has treated subjects as diverse as karaoke, Taiwanese new cinema, Samuel Huntington’s civilizationalist work, and new Taiwanese subjectivity. Forthcoming books include Intellectual Moods and Geo-Colonial Sites: Cultural Studies from the Postmodern to Decolonization(in press in Chinese), and The Imperialist Eye: The Decolonization Question.

Kuan-hsing Chen’s talk stems from his work on Taiwanese nation formation and US imperialism. “Club 51” refers to a bizarre Taiwanese political organization advocating US statehood for Taiwan. Chen’s analysis suggests that the Club 51 phenomenon represents what is in fact a new politics of place in the global era, whose significance goes beyond issues of PRC-Taiwanese relations. For his seminar, Chen will discuss the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies project. This will be of particular interest to local scholars who may want to participate in the journal’s activities, which include conferences, special issues, and colloquia. Chen and his colleagues founded the journal at what they considered a crucial moment in Asian cultural politics.

Since the 1980’s, a pervasive rhetoric of the ‘rise of Asia’ has come to mean more than the concentrated flow of capital into and out of the region. It has come to constitute a structure of feeling that is ubiquitous yet ambiguously felt throughout Asia. Historically, this feeling of the ‘rise of Asia’ is complicated by the region’s colonial past. While Asia’s political, cultural and economic position in the global system will continue to fluctuate, there is a need to question and critique the rhetorical unities of both the ‘rise’ and of ‘Asia’…On the other hand, no matter whether there are common experiences shared by sub-regional histories, there is an urgent need for forging political links across these sub-regions. Hence, ‘Inter-Asia’ cultural studies.