* To advertise your unit or department’s event in the “Of Interest” section of this weekly bulletin, please e-mail complete event information in text format (no PDFs) to cult@ucsc.edu no later than noon on Friday of the prior week.
* Additional information and regular updates on many “Of Interest” events can be found on the IHR website.
OF-INTEREST EVENT DESCRIPTIONS:
Wednesday, April 15 / ANTHROPOLOGY COLOQUIA / Juned Shaikh / “Revolutionary Desires, Spatial Entanglements: Dalit Literature and Bombay City, 1950-1982” / 3:15-5:00pm / Social Sciences 1, Room 261
Marathi Dalit literature produced a Dalit public and articulated a Dalit identity in the 1960s and 70s. By the end of the 1970s, Dalit literature was recognized as a distinctive category of Marathi literature; newspapers and magazines devoted special supplements to discuss it and the Marathi literature Department of Bombay University hired faculty teaching Dalit literature. Three recurring themes of Marathi Dalit literature suggest the spatial entanglements that produced it: a) the revolutionary transformation of the self and society, a theme that borrowed from and resonated with the desire for revolutionary change across the world in the 1960s and 70s b) the depiction of housing as a symbol of Dalit marginality which this paper puts in the context of the urban transformation of Bombay city in which slums were an eyesore, but a political-economic necessity c) the representation of villages and Dalits in villages as the subject of backwardness that needed to be transformed with the raising of political consciousness. The themes of revolution, urban built environment, and rural/agrarian transformation also reflect the entanglements of spatial scales – global, regional/national, and urban/rural that shaped Dalit lives in Bombay city. In other words, the paper argues that the social space of Dalit literature in this period was shaped by events and processes that had different temporalities that were articulated in the city at the time of significant projects of urban transformation and regional and global political-economic change. I elucidate this point through the study of literature, housing reports, newspapers, and pamphlets.
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Wednesday, April 15 / VISUAL AND MEDIA CULTURES COLLOQUIA / Thomas Poell / “Social Media Mechanisms” / 4:00-6:00pm / Porter College, Room D245
Thomas Poell is Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. His research is focused on social media and public communication around the globe. Together with professor José van Dijck, he leads the KNAW-‘Over Grenzen’ research program on ‘Social Media and the Transformation of Public Space’ (June 2013 until August 2015). The program investigates how public space is reconfigured in the new emerging ecosystem of social media and conventional mass media. http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/t.poell/
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Thursday, April 16 / LIVING WRITER SERIES / Janice Lee / 6:00-7:45pm / Humanities Lecture Hall, Room 206
Janice Lee is a writer, artist, editor, designer, curator, instructor, and scholar. She is the author of KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), Daughter (Jaded Ibis, 2011), and Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013). She also has several chapbooks, most recently a poetic collaboration with Will Alexander, The Transparent As Witness (Solar Luxuriance, 2013). She is currently working on several collaborations: a critical book on Bela Tarr’s Satantango with Jared Woodland and an ekphrastic project about decapitations in films with Michael du Plessis. The Sky Isn’t Blue: The Poetics of Spaces, a book of essays, is forthcoming from Civil Coping Mechanisms in 2016. She is Co-Editor of [out of nothing], Editor of the new #RECURRENT Novel Series for Jaded Ibis Press, Assistant Editor at Fanzine, Executive Editor at Entropy, and Founder/CEO of POTG Design. She currently lives in Los Angeles where she is a Co-Founder of Code Talk, a new initiative to teach web development to low-income women, and where she teaches Graphic Texts & Interface Culture at CalArts. She can be found online at http://janicel.com
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Thursday, April 16 / FILM + DIGITAL MEDIA / Screening: “The Overnighters” / 7:00pm / Communications 150 (Studio C)
Screening and Q&A with Director Jesse Moss. Short-listed for the 2015 Documentary Feature Oscar, THE OVERNIGHTERS (2014, 100 minutes) is a modern-day “Grapes of Wrath” in the form of a beautifully shot and paced verite film.
Filmed over a year by director and cinematographer Jesse Moss, the film is a deep exploration of what happens when a small, conservative community is confronted by a mighty river of desperate, job-seeking strangers.
Sponsored by the Arts Dean’s Fund of Excellence and the Department of Film and Digital Media. Co-Sponsored by the Department of Sociology.
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Thursday, April 16 / CENTER FOR EMERGING WORLDS / Dr. Amina Wadud” / “Muslim Women: Equality and Justice Movements Globally / 7:00-9:00pm / Kresge Town Hall
Muslim women are actively engaged–at every level and in every kind of community–to address the problems of obvious inequalities on the basis of gender. Still, while it is a cliche to say that Muslim women are not a monolith, there is a tendency for many outside of Muslim contexts to seek a single solution to address this inequality.
This presentation will give a critical reading of Muslim women’s reform movements with emphasis on the historical evolution and epistemological distinctions of three major perspectives: secular Muslim women, Islamist women and the rise of Islamic feminists. While this could be seen as a dynamic history it is relatively short history and still unfolding. Islamic feminism is a pro-faith/pro-feminist movement to construct knowledge about Islamic thought and to use that construction to challenge patriarchal authority. This knowledge construction challenges policies that oppress women in the name of Islam and hopes to transform Muslim cultures from inequality to justice and reciprocity. In particular, this presentation will discuss Dr. Wadud’s experiences as a resource scholar with Musawah, a global movement for reform in Muslim family law.
Dr. Amina Wadud is an African American scholar of gender and Islam with a focus on Qur’an exegesis. She has taught at the Islamic University of Malaysia, the Virginia Commonwealth University, and the Gadjah Mada University of Indonesia. Her first book, Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective (1999), contributes a gender-inclusive reading to one of the most fundamental disciplines in Islamic thought, Qu’ranic exegesis. Her latest book, Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam (2006) continues her Qur’anic analysis but also provides extensive details about her experiences as a Muslim, wife, mother, sister, scholar, and activist.
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Friday, April 17 / FRIDAY FORUM FOR GRADUATE RESEARCH / Evan Grupsmith / “Revolutionary Movement: Class Based Inclusion and Exclusion in the Cultural Revolution Chuanlian Movement” / 12:00-1:30pm / Humanities 1, Room 202
In late 1966, young people started to traverse the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to exchange revolutionary experiences. To encourage and direct Red Guard travel, the Cultural Revolution Small Group (the highest governmental authority during this time period) decreed that all “revolutionary students and teachers and Red Guards” would be able to travel for free in the PRC. Millions of people jumped at this opportunity and traveled all over the country. This movement was dubbed chuanlian (串连). Chuanlian was one of the dominant political activities for urban youth in the PRC. Grupsmith’s research shows, through looking at both state and first-person accounts, that the chuanlian movement was driven by interactions of autonomous Red Guards and the state (exemplified by state media and the Cultural Revolution Small Group). Chuanlian activities were initiated by autonomously acting Red Guards. The state reacted by encouraging the movement and channeling it through propaganda and provision of free travel and lodging, while simultaneously attempting to exclude those that had “bad” class backgrounds. State encouragement caused a drastic increase in Red Guard chuanlian activity. Red Guards largely rejected these class based exclusionary policies, and the movement was characterized by widespread cross-class participation.
The Friday Forum is a graduate-run colloquium dedicated to the presentation and discussion of graduate student research. The series will be held weekly from 12:00 to 1:30PM and will serve as a venue for graduate students in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts divisions to share and develop their research. Light refreshments will be available.
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