Thursday, January 13 | Kresge Town Hall | 7:00 PM

Joy Harjo’s published works include She Had Some Horses,In Mad Love and War, Secrets from the Center of the World, and The Woman Who Fell From the Sky. She is also co-editor, with Gloria Bird, of Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writings of North America. Her works have won a variety of prestigious awards, including the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, the American Book Award, and two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships. The multi-talented performer also plays tenor saxophone for her band, Poetic Justice, winner of the 1998 Outstanding Musical Achievement Award presented by The First Americans in the Arts. Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1951 and is an enrolled member of the Muskogee (Creek) Tribe. In 1968, she graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts, and from the University of New Mexico in 1976. Two years later, she received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa. She has taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Arizona State University, University of Colorado, and the University of New Mexico.

Co-sponsored by the Native American Studies Research Cluster, the EOP office, and the Women’s Center at UC Santa Cruz

Friday, October 29 | Kresge 159 | 4:00 PM

In the United States, Dante’s The Divine Comedy has been acknowledged as a formative influence on Emerson, Eliot, and Pound. In this talk, Dennis Looney considers an important but neglected facet of Dante’s U.S. reception. Looney tracks the changing reception of Dante over the last 150 years from what he calls the Colored Dante, to the Negro Dante, to the Black Dante, and finally to the African-American Dante. Moving from slavery and reconstruction in the nineteenth century to segregation in the South in the first half of the twentieth century, to the Black Revolution of the 1960s, and finally to the tensions between the urban ghetto and suburbia of today, he exposes a chronology of reception that has been largely ignored by students of Dante. Dennis Looney is Associate Professor of Italian and Chair of the department of French and Italian at the University of Pittsburgh. He has written a number of essays on the encounters between ancient and early modern Italian culture. His book, Compromising the Classics: Romance Epic Narrative in the Italian Renaissance, was published in 1996.
For more information contact Deanna Shemek. This event is sponsored by Pre- and Early Modern Studies and the Department of Literature.

Monday, October 25 | Oakes Mural Room | 4:00 PM

Giorgio Agamben’s work began to appear in English in the early 1990s, and has had enormous impact in a range of disciplines, including hermeneutics, semiotics, ethics, literary theory, and political theory. Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (translation 1991, Italian original 1982), made a remarkable linkage of Heidegger and Hegel under the rubric of negativity, which Agamben identified as central to Western metaphysics. The Coming Community (English translation 1993 of 1990 original) continued Agamben’s thinking through of the social, turning to medieval European philosophy, among other sources, to identify an ethical ground for community and sociality beyond identity, ideology, or morality. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998/1995) has probably been Agamben’s most influential work. It is foundational to all current discussions of sovereignty, as that concept has been deployed and debated in political philosophy and in ethics, and applied philosophically to issues such as refugees, citizenship, health care, abortion, and individual rights. Drawing on Foucault and Carl Schmitt, among others, Homo Sacer aims for nothing less than the foundation for a new politics, one which can supersede the “strange continuum connecting democracy to totalitarianism,” and the dead ends of Western political philosophy’s “biopolitical paradigm.” Agamben’s talk at UCSC is part of a current project considering the problem of messianic time as paradigmatic of historical time, through a comparative reading of Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History and Paul’s “Letter to the Romans.” Giorgio Agamben, in addition to his position at the University of Verona, has held distinguished professorships at several U.S. and European universities.

Monday, October 18 | Oakes Mural Room | 4:00 PM

Peter Hulme is Professor in Literature at the University of Essex, where he teaches literature and postcolonial studies. Hulme has written widely on the relations among ideologies of colonialism, European texts of colonial discourse, and literature, primarily in the Caribbean context. In Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (Methuen 1986), Hulme practices a form of radical history centering on a critique of colonial discourse, which he defines as “an ensemble of linguistically-based practices unified by their common deployment in the management of colonial relationships.” He combines rhetorical analysis with contextual historical study to tease out the dicursive fantasies of Europe’s colonization of the Caribbean across a span of four centuries. His recently co-edited collection of essays, Cannibalism and the Colonial World (Cambridge, 1998), extends these concerns world-wide and across time in analyses of cannibalism, both as heatedly debated anthropological “finding” and as discursive fantasy in popular culture. His talk is taken from his research-in-progress which looks at fictional imaginings of indigeneity in the Caribbean since the end of the eighteenth century.

Professor Hulme’s talk is sponsored by Pre- and Early Modern Studies and the Center for Cultural Studies.

Tuesday, October 12 | Kresge 159 | 4:00 PM

The past twenty-five years have wrought a revolution in U.S. penal policy that has resulted in a tripling of the incarcerated population. Bell Gale Chevigny first taught a college course in prison in the late 1960s, and was greatly impressed with the power of reading, writing, and thinking to transform prisoners’ lives. In 1993, she joined the PEN Prison Writing Committee to help judge writings by U.S. prisoners for PEN’s annual contest. Disturbed by the general public’s ignorance of prisoners’ own experiences, and impressed by the high quality of prize-winning prisoners’ work, she edited and published Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing, a PEN American Center Prize Anthology (Arcade Publishing). Chevigny has taught literature at Sarah Lawrence College and Westchester County Penitentiary, and is recently retired from SUNY Purchase. Her published works include The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller’s Life and Writings (rev. ed., Northeastern University Press, 1994), Reinventing the Americas: Comparative Studies of Literature of the U.S. and Spanish America(Cambridge University Press, 1986), and the novel Chloe and Olivia(Grove Weidenfeld, 1990). She has published on a variety of social issues for journals including The Nation,The Village Voice,and DoubleTake.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Literature and the Center for Cultural Studies.

Wednesday, October 6 | Oakes Mural Room | 4:00 PM

Cuban feminist scholar Luisa Campuzano is a founder and director of the WomenÍs Studies program at Casa de las Ame’ricas in Havana, as well as Professor of Literature at the Universidad de la Habana. Her distinguished list of publications on Latin American culture and history includes, most recently, a book on magical realist Alejo Carpentier, Carpentier entonces y ahora (1997) and the two-volume edited collection, Mujeres latinoamericanos: siglos XVI al XIX, published jointly in Havana and Mexico City. She is currently researching a book on Cuban women travelers to the U.S. The lecture will be in Spanish, with a bilingual question-and-answer session to follow; an English version of the talk will be available at the Center for Cultural Studies office a week before the event.

Sponsored by the Inter-Americas Research Cluster.

Friday, May 28 | 4:00 pm | Oakes Mural Room

Luana Ross, a member of the Salish and Kootenai tribes, will speak on Native women in the prison industrial complex. Her publications include Inventing the Savage: The Social Construction of Native Criminality (University of Texas Press, 1996), “Resistance and Survivance: Cultural Genocide and Imprisoned Native American Women,” (Race, Gender & Class 3(2) Winter, 1995), and “Personalizing Methodology: Narratives of Imprisoned Women.” in On Our Own Terms, Ines Hernandez-Avila (ed.), (forthcoming). She is Professor of Native American Studies at UC Davis.

Stormy Ogden is Kashaya Pomo and Yokuts from Tule River Indian Reservation. She is an activist and advocate for Native women in prison. Ogden is a former prisoner of California Rehabilitation Center in Norco, where she was instrumental in the approval of the first sweat lodge for Indian women in a California prison. She is co-author of the book, The American Indian in a White Man’s Prison: A Story of Genocide.

Sponsored by the Native American Studies Research Cluster.

Thursday, May 20 | 4:00 pm | Kresge 159

In 1884, Crown Prince Rudolf, the only son of the Austrian Emperor Francis Joseph II, requested and received an indulgence from his father to plan “a great ethnographic work offering a comprehensive picture of our fatherland and its peoples.” The project enlisted the foremost ethnologists, historians, geographers, and humanists of the day to represent the entire empire from the Viennese center to the outermost peripheries in Bohemia, Bukovina, and Bosnia. The question faced by the Austro-Hungarian Empire was how to deal with multinationalism, and the collective cultural representation offered in this work was in part a political justification for the shared administrative structure provided by the Crowns. Although the Crown Prince’s effort to will the Empire into the twentieth century faltered, the style of cultural representation he developed remains instructive for an understanding of the processes that continually transform cultural knowledge into market commodities.

Regina Bendix is Assistant Professor in the Department of Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania and Corresponding Editor of the Journal of Folklore Research. Her book In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies (1997) explores the ways in which “authenticity” permeated the launching of inquiry into folklore two hundred years ago, the subsequent institutionalization of the field as a “discipline,” and the traces of “authenticity” that persist even in present-day approaches.

This presentation is one of a series of events in the Civilizational Thinking project, organized by the Center for Cultural Studies and funded by the Ford Foundation.

Wednesday, May 5 | 4:00 pm | Oakes Mural Room

Dr. Gobert will present a slide-show on current genetic research projects which affect Native peoples. Gobert, a member of the Blackfeet, Nakota, and Salish tribes, is a microbiologist and a biochemist. She has participated in activism against the Human Genome Diversity Project, and serves as the science advisor to the Montana-Wyoming Area Indian Health Board.

Sponsored by the Native American Studies Research Cluster.

Monday, May 3 | 4:00 pm | Oakes Mural Room

Nancy Cott, the Stanley Woodward Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, is currently a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Her many works on American women’s history include The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835 (1977; 2nd ed. 1997); The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987); and A Woman Making History: Mary Ritter Beard Through Her Letters (1991). Her current project examines the history of marriage as a public institution in the United States, focusing on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.