Monday, April 26 | 4:00 pm | Oakes Mural Room

Professor Barlow specializes in modern Chinese gender history and international feminism. She is senior editor of positions: east asia cultures critique; editor of Positions on Colonial Modernity: A Reader; and Gender Politics in Modern China: Writing and Feminism (Duke University Press, 1993); and co-editor of Body, Subject and Power in China (University of Chicago Press, 1994). She joined the University of Washington’s Women Studies faculty in the fall of 1994. Her talk will address issues in the cultural politics of the production on discourses of Asia.

Sponsored by the Asia-Pacific America Research Cluster.

Thursday, April 22 | 4:00 pm | Oakes Mural Room

Professor Palumbo-Liu’s talk is intended to be a wide-ranging discussion of the study of Asian America in global and local frames. It will center on his forthcoming book, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier, in which he traces the formation of Asian America in conjunction with modern American national identity. Possible topics of discussion include racial hybridity and body imaging from the 1930s to the present day; links to migrancy; cyberspace, and Asia Pacific space; post-Confucianism and the new discourse of democracy; the materialism of Asian American literature; and the restructuring of Asian American urban space as Pacific Rim space.

David Palumbo-Liu is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Program in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford. He has published articles on ethnic studies, cultural studies, and Asian and Asian American studies in journals such as Poetics Today, differences, Cultural Critique, Public Culture, and diacritics. He is a member of the editorial collective of positions: east asia cultures critique, and a contributing editor of the Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies. His fourth book, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier, will appear in May from Stanford University Press.

Sponsored by the Asia-Pacific-America Research Cluster.

Tuesday, April 20 | 4:00 pm | Oakes Mural Room

This seminar will discuss selected portions of Alice Bullard’s book manuscript, Constellations of Savagery and Civilization. Portions of this book have appeared in Cultural Anthropology (May 1997) and History and Anthropology (January 1998). The book focuses on the fundamentals of the civilizing process by examining the colonizing techniques deployed against two groups of “savages”: Parisians from France and Melanesians from New Caledonia.

“Savage destroyers of civilization” was the label fixed on the Parisian Communards of 1871 by defenders of the central government. Exiled to the Melanesian islands of New Caledonia, the Communards suffered the rigors of a carceral system designed to spread civilization through penal colonization.
There they joined another group of “savages,” the indigenous Kanak clans. The book explores the means of creating “civilized” and “moralized” subjects, as well as strategies of resistance and subversion. It discusses the varieties of “selves” encountered and produced in the civilizing process and the evolving role of morality in this period.
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.

Monday, April 19 | 4:30 pm | Kresge 159

Richards is a musicologist and performer who works on 18th and early 19th- century music aesthetics and criticism. She focuses on the intersections between musical performance (music as sound and spectacle) and composition (music as text) in late 18th-century culture and is currently completing a study of notions of musical fantasy in the period, entitled Fantastical Landscapes: The Free Fantasia and Theories of the Musical Picturesque for Cambridge University Press. Working with both visual and musical source materials, this book seeks to reconfigure the fantasia’s disrupted and fragmentary nature within the contemporary aesthetic of the picturesque, considering especially issues of indeterminacy, ephemerality, and improvisation’s escape from memory. Richards is especially interested in late 18th-century listening practices, brought new urgency by the increasingly complex interplay of return, recognition and recollection in instrumental music (music divorced from verbal text) towards the end of the century. She is co-editor with Mark Franko of Acting on the Past: Historical Performance Studies across the Disciplines, forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. Annette Richards was the Geballe Dissertation Prize Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center in 1993-94, and a Fellow at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in 1994-95. This year (1998-99) she is a Fellow at the Cornell Society for the Humanities.

This talk is presented as part of the Visual and Performative Studies Speaker Series, which explores issues in performativity. The series is coordinated by Catherine Soussloff (Art History, UC Santa Cruz) and Mark Franko (Theater Arts, UC Santa Cruz), and co-sponsored by the Art Division, the departments of Art History and Theater Arts, and the Center for Cultural Studies.

Thursday, April 8 | 4:00 pm | Oakes Mural Room

A working critic since the mid-1970s, Rich has been closely identified with a number of important film movements, notably feminist film, Latin American cinema, independent film in the U.S. and Europe, and the recent phenomenon of the New Queer Cinema, a term she coined. She has published in Signs, Feminist Studies, and Iris. Her book, Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement, will be published by Duke University Press in November. Rich started her career in film exhibition, as founder of the Woods Hole Film Society in 1972 and then as Associate Director of the Film Center at the Art Institute of Chicago. After a stint as film critic for the Chicago Reader, she moved to New York City to become the director of the film program for the New York Council on the Arts for its decade-long golden age prior to disastrous budget cuts. Since 1992, she has lived in San Francisco and taught documentary film and queer studies at UC Berkeley. She curated the tribute to Argentine cinema for the Sundance Film Festival and theseries for the opening season of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 1995-96, she was a Rockefeller Scholar in the Humanities at NYU’s Center for Media, Culture and History.

Sponsored by the Revisionary Cinemas Research Cluster.

Thursday, March 4 | 4:00 pm | Oakes Mural Room

Eduardo Cadava is Associate Professor of English at Princeton University. His talk focuses on Emerson’s relation to issues of race and manifest destiny, and is part of a book in progress entitled Mourning America, on the relationship between mourning and nationalism. Professor Cadava is the author of Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (1997), a reading of Walter Benjamin’s concept of history and its relation to photography; and Emerson and the Climates of History (1997), a study of the politics of Emerson’s meteorological reflections. He co-edited Who Comes After the Subject? (Routledge, 1991), and is the translator of many essays by contemporary French philosophers, including the work of Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Blanchot. In addition to his work on Emerson, he is currently writing Music on Bones, a book length meditation on the relation between music and techniques of reproduction, memorization, and writing.

Thursday, November 19 | 4:00 pm | Kresge 159

In recent years, Teresa Ebert has emerged as as one of the most prominent Marxist critics of “post-al” theory in the academy. Arguing for a “red feminism” and a “red cultural studies” in the context of academic professionalization and the corporatization of the university, Professor Ebert has insisted on the necessity of critical thought in the university, and on the need to critique those currents of intellectual work which impede genuine critical- “critique-al” in her usage-analysis. Her talk at UCSC will center on a critique of the ways in which theories of the body-the local, the “concrete” and the “delectable”-have become the foundation for anti-foundationalist knowledges and practices. Through a brief re-reading of Marx’s Grundrisse, Professor Ebert proposes to make a historical materialist and dialectical analysis of the “concrete” as a basis for “global” revolutionary theory and praxis.

Professor Ebert’s writing and teaching focus on critical theory, Marxism, feminism, and cultural studies. Her publications include Ludic Feminism and After: Post-modernism, Desire, and Labor in Late Capitalism (1996) and Postality: Marxism and Post-modernism (in the Transformation series on “Marxist Boundary Work in Theory, Economics, Politics and Culture”; co-edited, 1995). Her extended text, “Quango-ing the University: The End(s) of Critique-al Humanities” has appeared in the electronic journal Cultural Logic. Her many essays have been published in such journals as Cultural Critique, College English, Rethinking Marxism, Genders, Against the Current, and Poetics Today.

Professor Ebert has been a faculty member in English and Women’s Studies at the State University of New York at Albany since 1991.

Thursday, November 5 | 4:00 pm | Oakes Mural Room

Ian Morris’s talk on “Civilizational Thinking and Ancient Greece” inaugurates a year-long series of lectures that accompanies the new faculty seminar on “Civilizational Thinking” funded by the Ford Foundation. Morris’s work combines meticulous attention to the demands of classical scholarship with bold scrutiny of the process by which knowledge of the classical world has been created. In a 1994 article on “Archaeologies of Greece,” Morris observes that

A spectre is haunting archaeology-the spectre of history. Archaeologists study the whole of the human past, but grow uncomfortable when considering themselves as a part of that past. …[T]he past of the archaeology of classical Greece… is at once one of the most venerated and one of the most reviled archaeological traditions. I argue that this split personality is a product of archaeologists’ lack of concern with the intellectual history of their own practices. The archaeology of Greece is intimately involved with a two-century-old project of understanding ‘Europeanness’ (Classical Greece: Ancient Histories and Modern Archaeologies, 8).

Ian Morris is Willard Professor of Ancient History and Archaeology at Stanford University. Educated at the University of Birmingham and Cambridge University, he has also taught at the University of Chicago. His books include Burial and Ancient Society (Cambridge, 1987) and Death-Ritual and Social Structure in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge, 1992). He edited Classical Greece: Ancient Histories and Modern Archaeologies (Cambridge 1994), and is co-editor of A New Companion to Homer (Leiden 1997). Morris’s Archaeology as Cultural History will be published by Blackwell in 1999.

Monday, November 2 | 4:00 pm | Oakes Mural Room

Theodore William Allen is the author of the monumental work on the origins of racism and white racialized identity in the American colonies, The Invention of the White Race, published by Verso. The first volume, published in 1994, deals historically with the specific form of social hegemony that gives rise to the concept of race, considering the instances of the English colonization of Ireland and their later relation to Native Americans. The second volume (1997) addresses the evolution of the institution of slavery in the American colonies, as the soil from which the concept of race germinated in the U.S..

An independent scholar, Mr. Allen was an activist in the anti-racist movements during the 1960s and 1970s. He is a graduate of Goddard College, where he received his M.A. in History and Political Science in 1976. Prior to that, he taught mathematics at the Grace Church School in New York City (1964-1973). Since then, he has worked as a librarian in the New York City public library system.

Monday, October 26 | 4:00 pm | Kresge 159

What are the material conditions of authors and readers today? In this exploration of cultural theory and new media, Mark Poster examines alterations in authorship and readership brought about by new material conditions of textuality. Print, broadcast electronics, and digital networks, he argues, each construct authors and readers in different ways. Drawing on Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault, Poster frames the question of the author/reader in relation to new technologies.

He writes, “I contrast the analogue and the digital, the printed book with the hypertext, the classroom lecture and distance learning of the Internet, the TV image with the multi-media hypertext of the World Wide Web. In each case I explore the changed configuration of the subject. I conclude with questions about the nature of the subject in new fields of authoring/reading and connect these with implications for political theorizing.”

Mark Poster is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. Poster’s incisive work on the history and uses of critical theory has been read widely across the disciplines. His most recent book, Cultural History and Postmodernity (Columbia, 1997), charts the move from social to cultural history, posing an important challenge to cultural historians:

…as long as historians presuppose that their task is to discover or investigate agents or victims, to resurrect for the present age fully formed agents in the past bearing and resisting burdens of oppression, there can never be a historiography that is critical of modernity simply because a world of agents and victims is its chief cultural figure, its great ideological myth. Historians may contribute to the delineation of the limits of the modern only by studying how such a cultural figure (the individual or group as agent/victim) was constituted…. The truly historical task is not to find in the past suffering workers and victimized women so that all may recognize the evils of the system. Instead the problem is to describe the mechanisms through which such people were constituted as subjects in relation to the measure of stable, centered autonomy; to show how the discursive figure of the universal, free individual was paradoxically able to designate these groups and others as outside the universal and as unfree, to show that modern freedom has always only been possible through its exclusions (Cultural History and Postmodernity, 10-11).

Poster’s current work on digital and print authors brings this concern with the constitution of the subject to bear on the study of electronically mediated communities. “These technologies,” he observes, “are drastically altering the conditions under which the subject is constituted, indeed even the subject who writes history” (12). Poster’s other books include The Second Media Age (Blackwell, 1995), The Mode of Information (Blackwell and U. of Chicago, 1990), Critical Theory and Poststructuralism (Cornell, 1989), and Foucault, Marxism and History: Mode of Production vs. Mode of Information (Blackwell, 1984). His work has been translated into Spanish, Korean, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Turkish, and Bulgarian.