Tourism is a form of capital accumulation that requires the presence of the consumer at the location of production. How does a place become a destination? What transfigurations of value occur in the process?  How do various actors collaborate and clash over the management of people and resources?  The talk explores these questions in relation to the Honduran tourist industry.  Professor Anderson is the author of Black and Indigenous: Garifuna Activism and Consumer Culture in Honduras (Minnesota, 2009).

Mark Anderson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UCSC.

Mad at School (Michigan, 2010) uses a disability-studies perspective to examine how mental disabilities impact academic culture. Focusing on classroom discussions, conferences, and job searches, it examines the language used to denote mental disability; the role of “participation” and “presence” in student learning; the role of “collegiality” in faculty work; the controversy over “security” and free speech in the wake of recent school shootings; and the status of independent scholars with mental disabilities.

“Essential Functions” talk
“Essential Functions” slides
“Essential Functions” handout

Margaret Price is Associate Professor of English at Spelman College.

On October 28, 1910, Leo Tolstoy vanished. When he turned up at Astapovo, all of Russia was following the story. In The Death of Tolstoy (Cornell, 2010), Dr. Nickell describes a Russia engaged in a war of words over how this story should be told. Drawing on newspaper accounts, personal correspondence, police reports, secret circulars, telegrams, letters, and memoirs, he examines the national and international significance of the event.

William Nickell is Lecturer in Russian at UCSC.

“Our Mediterranean: American Adaptations, 1890-1975” explores the use of adaptation to think comparatively about American literary and cultural studies. “Our Mediterranean” refers improbably both to the California coast and the Caribbean, connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Worlds.  Popularized in the 1890s, the term persists through the 1970s as a keyword in tourism, U.S. public policy, and race-climate theory. This talk examines enduring comparisons to the Mediterranean in the New World.

Susan Gillman is Professor of Literature at UCSC.

Professor Hong’s Legal Fictions: Afro-Asian Human Rights Cultural Production and the Pax Americana in the Pacific Rim examines the historic relation of post-1945 human rights literature to the Pax Americana, the U.S. military “peace” that restructured the Asia Pacific following World War II. Her second project is provisionally titled Divided Memories: Museums, Monuments, and Memoirs in the Cold War Asia Pacific.

Christine Hong is Assistant Professor of Literature at UCSC.

Professor Romero’s research includes post-1964 African American and trans-American literatures and literary history, poverty, memory, and cultural history. She is currently working on a manuscript, Wonder’s Collapse: Art at the Intersection of Embodiment and Sociality. Her talk thinks about drawing and history, and the practice and crisis of black radical movement.

Mercy Romero, UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Feminist Studies, UCSC

Courtroom sketch by Robert Templeton.

Professor Hershatter’s forthcoming book, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (California), traces a gendered history of early socialism in rural Shaanxi province, exploring how the past is remembered and understood in the light of intervening events. Her books include Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (California, 1997), and Women in China’s Long Twentieth Century (California, 2007).

Gail Hershatter is Distinguished Professor of History at UCSC.

Professor Greene’s current research interests include the ethics of reading, material textual studies, and the history of the category of the literary, and her two primary archives are seventeenth-century literature and poststructuralist philosophy. This talk explores the heart as a figure for the porosity of being in the poetry of George Herbert, and the ways faith and writing render Herbert, in the words of Jean-Luc Nancy, “closed open.”

Jody Greene is Associate Professor of Literature at UCSC.

Professor Hirschkind studies how Europe’s Islamic past inhabits its present and unsettles contemporary efforts to secure Europe’s Christian civilizational identity. He analyzes the social and political processes that sustain an active relation to Europe’s Islamic heritage in southern Spain and the potential impact they have on forms of cooperation and responsibility linking Muslim immigrants, Spanish converts, and Andalusian Catholics as subjects of Europe.

Charles Hirschkind is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley.