Colloquium Series

In winter 2008, the Center for Cultural Studies will continue to host a Wednesday colloquium series, which features current cultural studies work by campus faculty and visitors. The sessions are informal, normally consisting of a 30-40 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center will provide coffee, tea, and cookies.

ScheduleALL COLLOQUIA ARE IN HUMANITIES 1, ROOM 210

January 16
B. Ruby Rich
(Community Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
From ID to IQ: Looking Back at the New Queer Cinema Movement

January 23
Roland Greene
(English and Comparative Literature, Stanford University)
Piracy and Early Modern Globalization: Limahong in Luzon, 1574

January 30
Wendy Brown
(Political Science, UC Berkeley)
Porous Sovereignty, Walled Democracy

February 6
Jelani Mahiri
(University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, UC Santa Cruz)
Of Oxen, Slaves, Cowboys and Indians: Analyzing the Legend of Bumba-meuboi, a Brazilian Musical Drama

February 13
Ian Hacking
(Visiting Professor, Philosophy, UC Santa Cruz)
Will You Be Known by Your Genes or The Company You Keep?

February 20
Sarika Chandra
(Center for Cultural Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
From Fictional Capital to Capital as Fiction: Globalization and the Intellectual
Convergence of Business and the Humanities

February 27
Eric Porter
(American Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Race Music and Reconstruction in Post-Katrina New Orleans

March 5
Christopher Connery
(Literature, UC Santa Cruz)
Political Tourism in a Problem Country: Teaching Moby Dickin Cyprus

Participants

B. RUBY RICHis Professor of Community Studies at UCSC. She is the author of Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement (Duke, 1998). Her current project, for which she just completed a residency at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, is a new volume tentatively titled: The Rise and Fall of the New Queer Cinema, combining her early definitive essays in this field with new writing that reconsiders New Queer Cinema’s later development and looks beyond the Anglo-American models that defined its early years. This talk looks at current manifestations of the NQC energy and examines the extent to which it has moved beyond the big screen into the art world and the internet, and beyond early identity politics into less easily defined terrains as seen, for example, in the work of François Ozon, which she is now researching. In 2007, Professor Rich received Yale University’s James Brudner Award for outstanding contributions to gay and lesbian scholarship, and in 2006 she received an Honorary Life Membership Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

ROLAND GREENE is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His research and teaching are chiefly concerned with the early modern literatures of England, Latin Europe, and the transatlantic world. He has recently finished a book about the early modern cultural semantics of five words: blood, invention, language, resistance, and world. He is also interested in the literary and cultural expressions of contemporary Latinity, especially Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Cuban-American poetry and other writings, as well as their counterparts in Latin America; in modern and contemporary poetry, especially the experimental traditions of the Americas; and in the problems and opportunities of comparative literature.

WENDY BROWN is Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, where she is also a member of the Critical Theory faculty. Her most recent books are Edgework: Essays on Knowledge and Politics(Princeton, 2005), Regulating Aversion: A Critique of Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire(Princeton, 2006), and Les Habits Neufs de la Politique Mondiale: Neoliberalisme et Neo-Conservatisme (Les Prairies Ordinaires, 2007). She is working on a project that refracts the newly ubiquitous phenomenon of nation-state walling through the theoretical problematic of sovereignty.

JELANI MAHIRI completed his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in Sociocultural Anthropology and is currently a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology at UCSC. His research is concerned with forms and ideologies of work, leisure, education, and expressive culture as ways to understand broader issues of social inequality, civic participation, identity, and creativity in the past and present. He is currently working on two book projects; the first, provisionally titled Laboring at the Interstices: Camelôs [Unlicensed Sidewalk Vendors] and The Struggle for a Space to Work in São Paulo, Brazil, expands upon informal economy studies and recent research on cities and citizenship to rethink the articulation of work and citizenship in the formation of modern subjectivities in contemporary Brazil. A second book project, tentatively titled Accenting Play, explores the bumba-meu-boi, or “oxdance,” an enormously popular, though underexplored, Brazilian musical drama. Linking the particulars of performances to issues of power and representation, the book will examine bumba-meu-boi celebrations as polysemous, multi-functional, and multi-sensory events: as brincadeira or “play” as participants refer to it, as religious devotion, as entertainment, as touristic destination, and as economic development opportunity.

IAN HACKING is teaching in the UCSC Philosophy Department this term. He recently retired from the Collège de France, where he was chair of Philosophy and History of Scientific Concepts. His most recent books include Mad Travellers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illness (Free Association Books, 1999), The Social Construction of What? (Harvard, 1999), An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic(Cambridge, 2001), and Historical Ontology(Harvard, 2002). A new edition of The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge) appeared in 2006. His talk for the colloquium is a follow-up on a piece published in Daedalus, Fall, 2006, whose intended title was “Biosocial Identity: Which Biology? Whose Society?” The essay is online at
http://www.amacad.org/publications/hackingWeb.pdf

SARIKA CHANDRA is Assistant Professor of English at Wayne State University. She works in the areas of globalization studies and contemporary American literary/cultural studies. She is currently completing a book manuscript titled Dislocalism: Re-Assessing Americanism in the Age of Globalizationthat examines the rhetoric of obsolescence and innovation in a contemporary global context, and analyzes how particular genres such as American travel, tourist, and immigration narratives adapt to the new reality of globalization. The book also analyzes the ways globalization both stands for real changes in the economy and yet serves the highly ideological function of representing such changes as politically and economically inevitable. Her second book project centers on the topic of globalization and food, dealing with issues of agribusiness, scarcity, politics, and culture. Her talk addresses the implications of (inter)disciplinary practices as literary/cultural studies turns to issues of economics, finance, and corporatization so as to understand globalization even as business and management theory turns to notions of culture and literary fiction for the same ends.

ERIC PORTER is Associate Professor of American Studies at UCSC. His research interests include black cultural and intellectual history, U.S. cultural history, critical race studies, and jazz studies. He is the author of What Is This Thing Called Jazz?(California, 2002), winner of an American Book Award, and is currently completing a book on W.E.B. Du Bois’s writings from the 1940s and 1950s. This talk draws from a new, collaborative project (with UCSC Art professor Lewis Watts) that examines the transformation of the New Orleans music scene after Hurricane Katrina and the complex racial politics of the mobilization of music to rebuild and repopulate the city.

CHRISTOPHER CONNERY is Professor of World Literature and Cultural Studies at UCSC. Trained in East Asian Studies, several articles and his first book, Empire of the Text: Writing and Authority in Early Imperial China (Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), were on early imperial Chinese literati culture. He has also published a number of pieces and edited journal issues from two on-going research projects, one on the ocean in capitalist thought, and one on the global 1960s. His co-edited volume with Rob Wilson, The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization (New Pacific Press) appeared in autumn, 2007. His talk is based on his reading and experiences in Nicosia, Cyprus, where he went in the autumn of 2007 to teach in the English department and to consider questions of the political.

Colloquium Series

In fall 2007, the Center for Cultural Studies will continue to host a Wednesday colloquium series, which features current cultural studies work by campus faculty and visitors. The sessions are informal, normally consisting of a 30-40 minute presentation followed by discussion. We gather at noon, with presentations beginning at 12:15. Participants are encouraged to bring their own lunches; the Center will provide coffee, tea, and cookies. 

Schedule ALL COLLOQUIA ARE IN HUMANITIES 1, Rm. 210
October 10
Susan Gillman
(Literarture, UC Santa Cruz)
Otra Caliban/Encore Caliban: Adaptation, Translation, and Americas Studies

October 17
Lisa Rofel
(Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz)
The Traffic in Money Boys: Neoliberalism, Desire, and Normativity in China

October 24
Barbara Spackman
(Italian and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley)
Hygiene in the Harem

October 31
Susan Harding
(Anthropology,
UC Santa Cruz)
Get Religion

November 7
Paul Roth
(Philosophy, UC Santa Cruz)
The Disappearance of the Empirical

November 14
Renee Tajima-Peña
(Community Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Calavera Highway: Haunted Landscapes,
Contested Memory, and How to Cope with 3,000 Miles of In-laws and Learn to Love it

November 21
Harry Berger Jr.
(Emeritus, Literature & Art History, UC Santa Cruz)
On the Perverse Henrification of George Bush, or, Why Praising Bush as Shakespeare’s Henry V is Really Dumb
November 28
Angela Davis
(History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz)
The Prison: A Sign of U.S. Democracy?
Participants
SUSAN GILLMAN is Professor of Literature at UCSC. She is the author, most recently, of Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (Chicago, 2003), and co-editor (with Alys Eve Weinbaum) of Next to the Color Line (Minnesota, 2007). Her new project (tentatively titled Incomparably Yours: Adaptation, Translation, Americas Studies) uses theories of adaptation to understand the field variously called hemispheric studies, post-nationalist American Studies, or comparative U.S. studies. The archive is drawn from works famous for their travels on stage and in film, the hypertext networks of the Uncle Tom’s Cabin/Cecilia Valdés/Ramona complex, the multiple editions of the slave narrative/testimonio complex, and contextual examples of specific situations in which some nations need other nations’ histories as models. This talk lays out the Fernández Retamar-Martí/Caliban-Ramona nexus of adaptation and translation to which the book as a whole is indebted.

LISA ROFELis Professor of Cultural Anthropology at UCSC. Her new book is Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality and Public Culture (Duke, 2007). She is currently at work on three projects: a forthcoming issue of positions: east asia cultures critique entitled Across the Strai(gh)ts: Transnationalism and Chinese Queer Politics, co-edited with Petrus Liu, which stages a dialogue on the divergent views of the question, what do “Chinese” and “Chinese politics” mean, and how do queer developments open up and shape this debate?; a project on independent documentary filmmaking in China: The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record (Minnesota), co-edited with Chris Berry and Lu Xinyu; and a collaborative project with Sylvia Yanagisako on The Twenty-First Century Silk Road, between Italy and China.

BARBARA SPACKMAN is Cecchetti Professor of Italian Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, where she also chairs the Italian Studies Department. She is the author of Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D’Annunzio(Cornell, 1989) and Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minnesota, 1996). She is currently working on a study entitled Detourism: Traveling Fictions from Italy to Islam, which looks at the Italian peninsula as a place traveled from, and reads the accounts of a handful of women, from early nineteenth-century travelers to post-Napoleonic Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, to an early twentieth-century Italian convert to Islam. The larger stakes of the project involve claims about the specificity of Italian Orientalism and the conditions of its production.

SUSAN HARDING is Professor of Anthropology at UCSC and author of The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton 2000). During the 1980s and 1990s, American fundamentalists plumbed hitherto secular and liberal institutions and practices, not to be assimilated but to assimilate, to consume, digest, and convert the politics they encountered to their ends. Voices are now emerging that are turning the tables. The current project examines the voices of these other Christians, some of them liberal, lapsed, or ethnic, but most of them more moderate evangelical Christians, that are taking up the narrative and rhetorical forms of the religious right, performing them with a difference, and swerving them to other ends. This talk will take a look at green evangelicalism, the emerging church movement, and “Big Love.”

PAUL ROTH is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at UCSC, author of Meaning and Method in the Social Sciences: A Case for Methodological Pluralism (Cornell, 1987 and 1989) and editor, with Stephen P. Turner, of The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences(Blackwell, 2003). His most recently published work concerns theories of historical explanation (to appear in the Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of History), disciplinary “border disputes” in science studies (to appear in the Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Science), explanations of genocide (to appear in the Oxford Handbook on Genocide), and “philosophical naturalism” (published in The Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology, ed. Stephen Turner & Mark Risjord). 

RENEE TAJIMA-PEÑA is an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker and Associate Professor and founding faculty of the Social Documentation Program in the Community Studies Department at UCSC. She is completing the feature-length Calavera Highway, a road documentary that follows her husband Armando Peña and his brother Carlos as they carry their mother’s ashes back to South Texas and reunite with their brothers. Calavera Highwaywill be broadcast on the PBS documentary series “P.O.V.” in the fall of 2008. She is also executive producing Whatever It Takes, a documentary about a high school in the South Bronx that is a part of the “small schools” movement.

HARRY BERGER JR. is Professor Emeritus of Literature and Art History and the author, most recently, of Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief: Rembrandt’s “Night Watch” and other Dutch Group Portraits (Fordham, 2007) and Situated Utterances: Texts, Bodies, and Cultural Representations(Fordham, 2005). His current projects include Apprehension: Dialogical Warfare in Plato’s Writing, which argues that Platonic writing is a critique of the interlocutory events it dramatizes. The study targets the dominant practices and discourses of Athenian public life as language games shaped and encouraged by speech-centered institutions. Plato represents Socratic method or philosophy as a failed attempt to overcome the influence of those language games. Obliged to argue on the grounds provided by his interlocutors, Socrates is unable to free his method from the constraints of its rhetorical predicament.

ANGELA DAVIS is Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at UCSC. She is the author of eight books, and most recently Abolition Democracy(Seven Stories, 2005) and Are Prisons Obsolete? (Seven Stories, 2003). She is currently completing a book on Prisons and American History. A persistent theme of her work has been the range of social problems associated with incarceration and the generalized criminalization of those communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination. She is especially concerned with the general tendency to devote more resources and attention to the prison system than to educational institutions. Having helped to popularize the notion of a “prison industrial complex,” she now urges her audiences to think seriously about the future possibility of a world without prisons and to help forge a 21st century abolitionist movement.