A MULTI-MEDIA DIALOGUE

Friday, March 16 / 3 PM / Kresge 159

An evening-long conference of papers and creative responses to Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone With Lungs (California, 2005) and Ammiel Alcalay’s From the Warring Factions (Beyond Baroque, 2002).

“The role of the artist has always been that of image maker. Different
times require different images.” —Ammiel Alcalay

We invite graduate students and faculty to participate in this event dedicated to the ongoing memory of the war in Iraq. We welcome formal papers and creative responses in different media. Event followed by discussion and pot luck dinner.

Sponsored by the Poetry and Politics Research Cluster

Tuesday, March 13 / 12 PM / Humanities 210

Jared Sexton is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine, where he is also affiliated with the Critical Theory Institute and the Center in Law, Culture, and Society. His research and teaching interests include black cultural studies, race and sexuality, policing and mass imprisonment, and contemporary U.S. film culture. He is the author most recently of the forthcoming book, Amalgamation Schemes: A Critique of Multiracialism (Minnesota).

In addition to the talk by Professor Sexton, the Black Cultural Studies Research Cluster will be holding a bi-monthly reading/discussion group during the winter quarter.

To receive updates please contact: blackculturalstudies@ucsc.edu

Sponsored by the Black Cultural Studies Research Cluster

Friday, March 9 / 2 PM / Humanities 210

The Critical Race Studies Cluster is sponsoring the first of two events focusing on racism in the post-Civil Rights era. The post-Civil Rights era has witnessed the effects of shrinking investments in public goods such as affordable housing, public transportation, living wages and fair labor practices, public education, and social welfare. These effects have disproportionately affected working-class communities of color. The crises and contradictions of the post-Civil Rights era were illuminated during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, when new forms of racism and disenfranchisement were added to already existing, intergenerational structures of oppression.

Please join us in a discussion with activist and scholar, Eric Mann, about his new book, Katrina’s Legacy: White Racism and Black Reconstruction in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast (Frontlines, 2006). We will attempt to merge academic and activist perspectives to establish discourses that identify the complexities of racism in the post-Civil Rights era, as well as think through strategies that challenge contemporary forms of oppression.

Eric Mann is the director of the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles and sits on the Bus Riders Union Planning Committee. He has been a civil rights, anti-Vietnam war, labor, and environmental organizer with the Congress of Racial Equality, the Students for a Democratic Society, the League of Revolutionary Struggle (ML), and the United Auto Workers, including eight years on auto assembly lines. In 2001 he was a delegate to the U.N. World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, where he participated in the protests against the U.S. government’s walk-out. He returned to South Africa in 2002 as part of a Strategy Center delegation to the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. He is the co-host of the weekly radio show “Voices from the Frontlines” on KPFK Pacifica in Los Angeles. His books include Comrade George: An Investigation into the Life, Political Thought, and Assassination of George Jackson (Harper and Row, 1974), Taking on General Motors: Insurgency in a United Auto Workers Local (Center for Labor Research and Education, 1987), L.A.’s Lethal Air: New Strategies for Environmental Organizing (Labor/Community Strategy Center, 1991), The 2004 Presidential Elections: A Turning Point for the U.S. Left (Progressives and Independents to Defeat Bush, 2001), and Dispatches from Durban: Firsthand Commentaries on the World Conference Against Racism and Post-September 11 Movement Strategies (Frontlines, 2002).

Sponsored by the Critical Race Studies Research Cluster

WITH PANELISTS: Giovanni Arrighi, Gopal Balakrishnan, Robert Brenner, Barbara Epstein, and Wang Hui

Saturday / January 27 / 2–5 PM / Humanities Lecture Hall

In January of 2000, the New Left Review launched a new series of its journal; its orientation was outlined in Perry Anderson’s analytical and programmatic essay “Renewals.” The essay took stock of the state of capital, and of opposition to it, at the close of the decade that had witnessed the collapse of the USSR and its allied regimes, the indisputable rise of China as a new economic power, and the consolidation of the global neoliberal order. It suggested that an engagement with the period demanded recognition of a terrain that had shifted in major ways since the time of the journal’s founding in the early 1960s. While some on the left criticized the move for its seeming abandonment of a revolutionary agenda, Anderson’s essay held that an intellectual journal’s “first commitment must be to an accurate description of the world, no matter what its bearing on morale might be.” Indeed, noting that the advance of neo-liberalism through the 1990s met with almost no resistance world-wide, Anderson commented:

No collective agency able to match the power of capital is yet on the horizon. We are at a time, as genetic engineering looms, when the only revolutionary force capable of disturbing its equilibrium appears to be scientific progress itself—the forces of production, so unpopular with Marxists convinced of the primacy of relations of production when a socialist movement was still alive. But if the human energies for a change of system are ever released again, it will be from within the metabolism of capitalism itself. We cannot turn away from it.

In his writing since “Renewals,” Anderson has maintained that the consolidation he described had remained fundamentally unshaken, that neo-conservatism was not a repudiation of neo-liberalism, but its continuation. In this symposium, we take stock of the present state of capitalism, its opposing forces, and the intellectual and theoretical agenda that the present age requires, through a reconsideration of “Renewals.”

All audience members are requested to read “Renewals” prior to the event. It can be accessed at http://www.newleftreview.net/A2092. 

The symposium will begin with some remarks by Perry Anderson followed by our panelists’ comments, and then a discussion with audience members and panelists.

PANELISTS

Perry Anderson is an editor of New Left Review and Professor of History at UCLA. His most recent book is Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (Verso, 2005). His book of interviews with Jean-Paul Sartre has just been reissued.

Giovanni Arrighi is Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins. His The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (Verso, 1994) is a major work in world-systems history and theory. He has also written widely on the rise of East Asia. His book Adam Smith in Beijing is forthcoming.

Gopal Balakrishnan is Associate Professor in the History of Consciousness department at UCSC and writes on intellectual history and political economy. His current project is a book on war and inter-state relations.

Robert Brenner is Professor of History at UCLA, and writes on economic history and political economy. His 2006 The Economics of Global Turbulence (Verso) is an analysis of the contemporary character of global capitalism.

Barbara Epstein is Professor in the History of Consciousness department at UCSC and a historian of social movements. She is currently completing a book on Jewish communist anti-Nazi resistance in Minsk.

Wang Hui is Professor of History at Qinghua University in Beijing.

This symposium is part of the year-long event series in the final year of the Rockefeller-funded Other Globalizations program at the Center for Cultural Studies.

LECTURE
“Modern China’ and the History of Chinese Thought”
Thursday, January 25 / 4 PM / Cowell Conference Room

SEMINAR
“Depoliticized Politics, Multiple Components of Hegemony, and the Eclipse of the Sixties”
Friday, January 26 / 4– 6 PM / Merrill College, Baobab Lounge

WANG HUI is one of contemporary China’s foremost intellectuals and scholars, and has emerged as a critical voice in the tradition of the great twentieth-century revolutionary social critic Lu Xun, on whom he has written extensively. Professor of History at Qinghua University in Beijing and the author and editor of many books, Wang Hui is also editor of Dushu (Reading), China’s premier journal of ideas. The English-language translation of his book of essays China’s New Order: Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition (Harvard, 2003 and 2006) brought his work to a wider audience, and established his reputation outside of China as a significant analyst and critic of contemporary capitalism in China. A recent profile in the New York Times Magazine gave further prominence to his critical positions.

In 2004, Wang Hui’s four-volume Zhongguo xiandai sixiangde xingqi (The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought) was published in Beijing. It is a major reinterpretation of the history of Chinese thought from pre-imperial times through the present, and has had an enormous influence on contemporary discussions of national identity, politics, and the nature of state, region, and empire. Wang Hui’s lecture at UCSC draws from this book to interrogate the constructions of both “China” and its “modernity.”

Although China’s New Order contains important reflections on the Tianammen movement of 1989 and its aftermath, it would be inaccurate to describe Wang Hui as a dissident. The current Chinese leadership, through a range of social initiatives aimed at China’s growing inequality, has registered the force and truth of Wang Hui’s critiques, although the regime’s capacity to address these problems remains uncertain. Indeed, it is to the character of contemporary politics, and of political possibility in the present, that Wang Hui has devoted recent attention, as in the topic of our seminar, centered on an essay published this winter in English translation in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. “Depoliticizing Politics” raises the spectre of the end of politics under the turn to neo-liberal capitalism in China, and traces this depoliticizing tendency to the end of the Cultural Revolution.

The lecture is open to everyone. Those planning to attend the seminar should read Wang Hui’s essay in advance, available by request from cult@ucsc.edu. 

These events are part of a year-long lecture/seminar series in the final year of the Rockefeller-funded Other Globalizations program at the Center for Cultural Studies.

Friday, November 3 / 5PM / Oakes Mural Room

Madeleine Yue Dong is an Associate Professor of History and International Studies at the University of Washington, and author of Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories, 1911-1937 (California, 2003). Professor Dong’s current research includes a monograph entitled Stories from the Wilderness: Unofficial Histories of the Qing. Her talk grows out of her work with the “Modern Girl Around the World” research group at the University of Washington, which has a forthcoming co-edited volume by that name, including an essay by Professor Dong entitled “The Chinese Modern Girl as Spectacle and Caricature.” The group’s project “analyzes the emergence of the Modern Girl, a figure who appeared around the world in cities from Tokyo to Berlin, Beijing to Bombay, Johannesburg to New York City in the early to mid-twentieth century. Modern Girls were known by a variety of names including flappers, garçonnes, moga, modeng xiaojie, schoolgirls, vamps, and neue Frauen. By wearing provocative fashions and pursuing romantic love, Modern Girls appeared to disregard the roles of dutiful daughter, wife, and mother.”

Sponsored by the Asia Pacific America Research Cluster

Tuesday, October 24 / 7:30-9:00 PM / Oakes Learning Center

Tagged by La Jornada, Mexico’s left wing daily, as “the new John Reed”, and winner of both the American Book Award and the ACLU’s coveted Uppie (for Upton Sinclair) prize, John Ross is touring the West Coast with two newly-published books: Zapatistas! Making Another World Possible: Chronicles of Resistance 2000-2004 (Nation) and Bomba, a new chapbook of poetry.

ZAPATISTAS! follows on the heels of his highly praised autobiography Murdered By Capitalism : A Memoir of 150 Years of Life & Death on the U.S. Left (Nation, 2004), which earned kudos from Beat Generation Godfather Lawrence Ferlinghetti and America’s most elusive novelist Thomas Pynchon, who called the work “a rip snorting and honorable account of an American outlaw tradition.”

BOMBA! the author’s ninth chapbook of personal and political poetry, is inspired by Ross’s visits to Palestine to pick in the olive harvest, and to Iraq, where he was a human shield on the eve of the U.S. invasion.

John Ross publishes in San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Texas Observer, Noticias Aliadas (Lima), La Jornada,  and the on-line journal Counterpunch. He has lived in the old quarter of Mexico City for the past 20 years.

Chapbooks will be available for sale at the event and Ross’s books will be available at the Literary Guillotine.

Sponsored by the Anarchisms Research Cluster

FILM SCREENING
Sunday, October 22 / 7:30 PM / Classroom Unit 1
Tropical Malady (DVD Projection)

LECTURE
Monday, October 23 / 4 PM / Oakes Learning Center
Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Nationalists between Cosmopolitans and
the Sticks, or, The Curious Reception in Thailand of Tropical Malady

Anderson discusses the difficulties encountered by Bangkok intellectuals when the film Tropical Malady won the Cannes Jury Prize in 2002. A film regularly regarded with uneasy puzzlement in the metropolis is nonetheless quite comprehensible to upcountry folk. It provides the occasion for some reflections on the contradictions of “global culture.”

NOTE: In addition to the Sunday screening, Tropical Malady will be available throughout the fall quarter, on reserve in the McHenry Library Media Center.

SEMINAR
Tuesday, October 24 / 4 PM / Oakes Mural Room
Early Globalization and the Struggle against High Imperialism

The seminar is based on Anderson’s latest book, Under Three Flags (Verso, 2005) and reading should be completed in advance. The reading, material from Under Three Flags on “elementary space-time buckling” in the age of early globalization, will be available at the Center for Cultural Studies or by email request (cult@ucsc.edu). Anderson will frame the discussion with a brief introduction, focusing on the technological advances, primarily the telegraph, which created the bases for coordinated global coalitions of different enemies of imperialism in the period between 1885 and 1914. Considering the nature of these coalitions among colonial nationalist revolutionaries, transnational anarchist groupings, and the liberal press, Anderson will conclude with what he calls “some tentative parallels with the present conditions we endure.”

BENEDICT ANDERSON has long been recognized as one of the world’s most influential scholars of Southeast Asia, beginning with his seminal articles on the 1965 coup and massacres in Indonesia. His later work included studies on Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand, and in 1983 he published Imagined Communities, which, as all of our readers know, introduced an enormously productive range of concepts and approaches to cultural, literary, and historical studies of nationalism, identity, political economy, and ideology. Anderson’s approach to the nation is like no one else’s, taking in such diverse determinants as mass print media—especially the novel and newspaper—temporality, and utopianism. On the one hand, for Anderson, without shame there is no nationalism: “If you feel no shame for your country, you cannot be a nationalist.” (Anderson himself has, like many other theorists of nationalism, an international background. Born in China to an English mother and an Anglo-Irish father, he spent part of his youth in California, studied in England and the U.S., and did many years of research in Indonesia and Thailand.) On the other hand, he comments, “I must be the only one writing about nationalism who doesn’t think it ugly. I actually think that nationalism can be an attractive ideology. I like its Utopian elements.”

This contradiction animates all of Anderson’s work. His latest book, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (Verso, 2005), features a multinational cast of characters, including key figures in the Cuban, Puerto Rican and Filipino independence movements, and traces the origins of a single compelling phrase, “el demonio de las comparaciones,” borrowed from José Rizal, Anderson’s longtime inspiration and genius loci, as the name for the kind of haunting or double vision that underwrote early nationalism. Anderson began The Spectre of Comparisons (Verso, 1998) with that phrase, and he complicates it, along with the imagined community and the role of vernacular media central to it, in Under Three Flags. He describes the book as “an experiment in…political astronomy. It attempts to map the gravitational force of anarchism between militant nationalisms on opposite sides of the planet.” The book is innovatively transnational in a number of ways, not least of which is its consideration of anarchism, whose formative revolutionary internationalist character has been hitherto under-analyzed in the U.S. academy. Although Rizal, a hero of Filipino nationalism, is a central figure, Anderson’s book shows that nationalism is a construct adaptable to many circumstances and that even the most beloved local revolutionary hero may be the product of transnational forces, marching under several flags. Rizal’s worlds thus constitute, for Anderson, “the age of early globalization.” The various phenomena he tracks illuminate our own period’s “long-distance nationalism” and “email/Internet nationalism,” and provide considerations of global modes of revolutionary change as well.

Anderson’s lecture and seminar continue this inquiry into the mutations—spatial, temporal and ideological—of nationalism, cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, and internationalism, and what they mean for and about the present. His lecture on the Cannes prize-winning, avant-garde Thai film Tropical Malady reveals unlikely, and sometimes comic, new limits to transnational comprehension among today’s cosmopolitans. It focuses on the contradictions in its “reception” back home, where villagers understand it easily, while “transnational intellectual elites” are bewildered (how can both the villagers and Cannes agree, leaving us out?), and on the difficulties of combining “global cultural chic” with “representing the modernity of our beloved nation.”

This event is part of two projects. It is the last of three in a multi-phase series on temporality and comparative U.S. studies, co-sponsored by UC Santa Cruz and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The Santa Cruz phase was supported by the Center for Cultural Studies, the IHR Research Unit Cuba in Americas and Transatlantic Contexts, and the Department of Literature; the Madison phase was supported by the Department of English and the Jean Wall Bennett Symposium. It also forms part of the yearlong lecture/seminar series in the final year of the Rockefeller-funded Other Globalizations program at the Center for Cultural Studies.