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.

Monday, October 16 / 4PM / Cowell Conference Room

Antonis Balasopoulos is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Studies at the University of Cyprus. His recent research has focused on the cultural production of space, with particular emphasis on utopian spaces. His publications in this area include essays in the journals Gramma (2001), Utopian Studies (2004), Cultural Critique (2006), and in edited volumes, including Exploring the Utopian Impulse: Essays on the Terrain of Utopian Thought and Practice (forthcoming, Peter Lang 2007) and Futurescapes: Space in Utopian and Science Fiction (forthcoming, Rodopi 2008). He is currently working on completing two book-length studies: a monograph, Groundless Dominions: Utopia, Science Fiction and the Cultural Politics of US Expansionism, and a collection of his essays, Figures of Utopia: Literature, Politics, Philosophy. The talk is a working version of the last chapter of this collection. It argues that Derridean “hauntology” is a useful tool for comprehending the stakes in a certain strain of utopianism, and that utopianism provides a useful contextualization for a certain strain of deconstructive politics. The talk holds that a thought that attends to the areas of productive tension between Marxism, utopia, and deconstruction is vital to the maintenance of a political relation to the future, the preservation of utopianism after the end of utopia.

COLLOQUIUM
Wednesday, October 4 / 12 PM / Oakes Mural Room
The Haitian Revolution as an Episode in the History of Philosophy

This presentation in the Wednesday colloquium series (see page 3) will argue that the great slave revolt in Saint Domingue in the 1790s led to the formulation of a far more radical rejection of racial slavery than had appeared in abolitionist thinking up to this point. “The success of the Haitian Revolution in 1804, and the frustration of Napoleon’s attempt to restore slavery,” Blackburn writes, “had large implications for the whole Atlantic world.”

LECTURE
Thursday, October 5 / 4 PM / Oakes Mural Room
Longevity, the Birth Rate and Class Struggle

This lecture will look at the financialization of the new life-course, and at the prospects for a stark shortfall in pension provision rooted in the characteristic flaws of commercial organization and corporate sponsorship. Blackburn discusses financialization in the context of fundamental new demographic patterns explored in his forthcoming book Age Shock: How Finance is Failing Us.

Robin Blackburn is Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex and Visiting Distinguished Professor at the New School in New York. Long associated with the New Left Review and related projects, he is one of our period’s most important scholars writing in the Marxist tradition, and one of the world’s foremost historians of new world slavery. He has also written on labor politics, student politics, welfare, finance, and the future of socialism; his collective work includes coauthored work with Perry Anderson, Alexander Cockburn, and others. His recent work has had two major strands: a historical dimension focused on slavery, abolition, and colonialism, and a sociological dimension focusing on the financialization of the life-course and the economic challenges of an aging society. Underlying both is a concern for the ways in which property and the market shape social relationships and, conversely, how socioeconomic arrangements do–or could–constrain the market. The work on aging, pensions, and finance—particularly his politically charged and highly innovative work on pensions and their possible contribution to the building of a socialist project—has been acknowledged by many as opening up a new and important arena for transformative politics. His books, published by Verso, include The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (1988), The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (1997), Banking on Death or Investing in Life: the History and Future of Pensions (2002), Age Shock: How Finance is Failing Us (2006), and The Rise and Fall of New World Slavery, 1492-1887(forthcoming 2007). Robin Blackburn’s visit is an event in the year-long lecture/seminar series in the final year of the Rockefeller-funded Other Globalizations program at the Center for Cultural Studies.

Tuesday, May 30 / 4PM / Oakes Mural Room

This colloquium will focus on the distinctive experiences and perceptions of women of color in the physical sciences. The goal of this event is to establish communities across the disciplines and to discuss the issues surrounding the lack of representation of women of color in the physical sciences. The graduate students leading the discussion are Kirsten Howley (astrophysics), Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (astrophysics/physics), Chelsey Juarez (physical anthropology), and Karen Glocer (computer science). Students and faculty of all disciplines are invited to attend this open discussion.

Sponsored by the Research Cluster for the Study of Women of Color in Collaboration and Conflict

Thursday, May 25 / 4PM / Oakes Mural Room

Susan Leigh Star is a poet who has also taught women’s studies, information science, sociology, and science and technology studies. She is currently President of the Society for the Social Studies of Science, and is Senior Scholar and Visiting Professor in Science and Technology Studies at the University of Santa Clara. Her talk is drawn from her work on the human-infrastructure interface. She addresses the questions of how people become “non-people,” the part played by technoscience in that process, and the nature of being disconnected and dismembered. Star’s publications include Sorting Things Out (MIT, 1999), co-authored with Geoffrey Bowker.

Sponsored by the Science Studies Research Cluster

Thursday, May 18 / 3PM – 7PM / Oakes Learning Center

Marilyn Arsem has been creating live events since 1975, ranging from solo performances to large-scale, site-specific events incorporating installation and performance. Arsem has presented work at festivals, alternative spaces, galleries, museums, and universities in many countries. She has been the recipient of numerous grants, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is the founder and continues as a member of Mobius Artists Group in Boston.

Hiroko Kikuchi is a practicing artist who has performed and exhibited her work in cultural venues in the Boston area, New York, and Tokyo. Recent and upcoming projects include “Sifting the Inner Belt,” a yearlong social performance and research project (Boston Center for the Arts), and various collaborative performance art projects. She is currently Education/Outreach Coordinator and Freshman Advisor/Lecturer at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, and serves on the advisory board and steering committees of Art Interactive and Arts & Business Council of Greater Boston.

Sponsored by the Visual Studies Research Cluster

Saturday, April 29 / 1PM – 6PM / Kresge 159

FRANTZ FANON is best known as the author of Black Skin, White Masks (1952), a devastating critique of colonialism, and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), a major diagnosis of the cultural politics of decolonization written during the last years of Fanon’s life, when he was acting Ambassador of the Algerian Provisional Government to Ghana during the Algerian War of Independence. Bringing together psychoanalytic, Marxist, deconstructionist, and postcolonial approaches, this symposium will consider the relevance of Fanon’s thought for understanding contemporary crises in sovereignty and state terror, nationalism and globalization, alterity and difference, and ethics and politics.

SCHEDULE

1 – 3 PM SESSION 1
Introduction NEFERTI TADIAR
(History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz)
Chair

DAVID MARRIOTT, The Politics of Affect
VILASHINI COOPPAN, National/Global Consciousness: Frantz Fanon and the Political Imaginary

3 – 3:30 PM BREAK

3:30 – 6 PM SESSION 2
GOPAL BALAKRISHNAN, Fanon on Divine Violence
PHENG CHEAH, Crises of Money

CONCLUDING DISCUSSION

David Marriott is Associate Professor of History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz. He is author of Letters to Langston (Rutgers, forthcoming Fall 2006), Incognegro (Salt, forthcoming July 2006), and On Black Men (Columbia, 2000), and is co-editor with Vicky Lebeau of Psychoanalysis and Poetics (Fragmente, 1998).

Vilashini Cooppan is Assistant Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz. Her essays on postcolonial and world literatures, globalization theory, psychoanalysis, and nationalism have appeared in the journals symploke,
Comparative Literature Studies, and Gramma, and in several edited volumes. Her book, Inner Territories: Fictions and Fantasms of the Nation in Postcolonial Writing, is forthcoming from Stanford.

Gopal Balakrishnan is a Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for Cultural Studies at UC Santa Cruz, and an editor of the New Left Review and Verso Books. His books include The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (Verso, 2000), the edited volume Debating Empire (Verso, 2003), and the co-edited volume, with Benedict Anderson, Mapping the Nation (Verso, 1996). A collection of twelve essays is forthcoming from Verso in 2007.

Pheng Cheah is Associate Professor of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. He is author of Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Harvard, forthcoming 2006), and Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (Columbia, 2003), and co-editor, with Bruce Robbins, of Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minnesota, 1998).

Thursday, April 27 / 4:30 PM / Oakes Mural Room

Respondent: Charlotte Fonrobert, Religious Studies, Stanford University
Moderator: Robert Meister, Politics, UC Santa Cruz

Gil Anidjar is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. He is the author of “Our Place in Al-Andalus”: Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in Arab Jewish Letters(Stanford, 2002) and The Jew, the Arab: History of the Enemy (Stanford, 2003). He is currently completing a manuscript entitled: Blood: A Critique of Christianity.

Charlotte Fonrobert’s interests include Talmudic literature and culture, gender in Jewish culture, and the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in late antiquity. She is the author of Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender (Stanford, 2000). She is currently coediting the Cambridge Companion to Rabbinic Literature with Martin Jaffee.

Sponsored by the Religion and Culture Research Cluster, Jewish Studies, and the Literature Department

Friday, April 21 / 3:30 PM / Oakes Mural Room

Drawing on the work of philosopher Ernst Bloch, this paper stages a posterior glance at different moments and acts of queer futurity that offer an anticipatory illumination of queerness. It posits a concrete utopianism that can remake rationalism, delinking it from the provincial and pragmatic politics of the present to imagine a future of queer possibility.

José Esteban Muñoz is the chair of the Department of Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts and Associate Professor in Social and Cultural Analysis and Latino Studies at New York University. He is the author of Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minnesota, 1999), Cruising Utopia: the Performance and Politics of Queer Futurity (forthcoming, NYU), and co-editor of Pop Out: Queer Warhol (Duke, 1996) and Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America (Duke, 1997).

Sponsored by the Queer Theory and Critical Race Studies Research Clusters