Colloquium Series
In spring 2005, 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 THE OAKES MURAL ROOM
April 6
Eduardo Mendieta
(Philosophy, Stony Brook University, SUNY)
The “Clash of Civilizations” and the Just War Tradition
April 13
Tony Crowley
(Language, Literature and Cultural Theory, University of Manchester, UK)
James Joyce and the Politics of Language in Ireland: From Finnegans Wake to Human Rights
April 20
Kirsten Gruesz
(Literature, UC Santa Cruz)
The Gulf of Mexico System and the Abjection of Latin America
April 27
Chris Vaughan
(Communication, Santa Clara University)
Mediated Memory of the Dawn of American Globalization: 1898 and its Legacies
May 4
Radhika Mongia
(Women’s Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Contract and Consent: The Post-Abolition Discourse on Freedom
May 11
Edward Casey
(Philosophy, Stony Brook University, SUNY)
Coming to the Edge: Reflections on the Borders and Boundaries
May 18
Ravi Rajan
(Environmental Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Spiderman India and the Globalization Myth
May 25
Mark Anderson
(Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz)
“This is the Black Power We Wear”: ‘Black America’ and the Contradictions of Consumption in Honduras
Participants
EDUARDO MENDIETA, is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University. His books include Latin American Philosphy: Currents, Issues, Debates (ed., Indiana, 2003) and The Adventures of Transcendental Philosphy: Karl Otto Apel’s Semiotics and Discourse Ethics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). He has translated and edited the works of Karl-Otto Apel, Jurgen Habermas, and Enrique Dussel. In 2004-2005 he is a Rockefeller Resident Fellow at the Center for Cultural Studies. His talk is part of his current book project on war, space, and philosophy.
TONY CROWLEY is Professor of Language, Literature and Cultural Theory at the University of Manchester, U.K. His talk is based on two forthcoming works: Wars of Words: The Politics of Language in Ireland 1537-2004 (Oxford, 2005), and In the Shadow of his Language: James Joyce and the Language Questions (Oxford, forthcoming 2007). Wars of Words includes an account of the roles of language in cultural and theoretical debates around race, national and cultural identity, gender, literature, religion, theories of legitimacy, historicity and cultural memory. The talk will discuss the language of Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s critique of cultural nationalism, and the importance of the politics of language (including language rights) to the future formation of both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
KIRSTEN GRUESZ is Associate Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz, and works on American, Latina/o, and hemispheric cultural politics and literatures. Her 2001 Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (Princeton) was an important intervention into the transnational study of literature of the Americas. Her talk is part of an essay series in progress that “posits the Gulf of Mexico as a different kind of border zone that could reorient our thinking about relations between the U.S., Mexico, and Central America. Coastal cities from St. Petersburg to Campeche have been linked ecologically, economically, and culturally at specific historical moments. This talk focuses on the proposed transoceanic canal across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which would have made New Orleans the key port in the nation, and on that city’s role in establishing U.S. hegemony over the region from the late nineteenth century forward.”
CHRIS VAUGHAN is Associate Professor and Director of the Journalism Program in the Department of Communication at Santa Clara University. He has published widely as a journalist, and his scholarly works include many articles on the U.S. press in the context of the colonization of the Philippines. He is the author of Imperial Subjects: U.S. Media and the Philippines (Illinois, forthcoming). He writes that “a century after its unilaterally declared conclusion in 1902, the so-called Philippine Insurrection remains obscure, forgotten by many and never encountered at all by most, but the Moro wars that followed are being given fresh attention because of the re-insertion of American troops through the back door of the War on Terror. The strands of memory do not always tie up neatly, but tugging on them does reveal a process that adds insight into how contemporary notions of the American identity in global historical contexts is created.”
RADHIKA MONGIA is Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at UC Santa Cruz, and is currently completing a book titled “Genealogies of Globalization: Migration, Colonialism, and the State” that focuses on the relationship between colonial migration law and the formations of the modern nation-state system. She has published in Public Culture and Cultural Studies. Her talk argues that “abolition might well provide the best explanation for the global transformations of nineteenth-century contract law. It further suggests that the paradigmatic site for the separation of ‘consent’ from the notion of ‘equality in exchange’ that characterizes the nineteenth-century reformulation of the contract, and indeed of liberalism, is to be found not within the metropolitan heartland, but within the peripheral sites of Mauritius, the Caribbean, and India that the paper examines.”
EDWARD CASEY is Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University, SUNY. The author of many books and articles, Professor Casey is widely recognized as the central philosopher on place. His three books on place stand as the foundational points of reference on the topic—Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Indiana, 1993), The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (California, 1997), and Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps (Minnesota, 2002). About his talk, he writes, “[e]xtending my earlier work on place, I here explore the role of edges in human and non-human environments. In this presentation, I will take up the contrasting character of boundaries and borders, which I distinguish at several levels. I shall pay particular attention to the instance of the U.S.–Mexican border, focusing on various of its geographic, historical, and cultural vicissitudes.”
RAVI RAJAN is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at UC Santa Cruz. He is the author of Modernizing Nature: Tropical Forestry and the Contested Legacy of Colonial Ecodevelopment, 1800–2000(Oxford, forthcoming 2005), and of several scholarly papers and edited anthologies, newspaper columns and radio shows. He is currently at work on a book entitled: “Sustenance, Security and Suffrage: Environmentalism and Justice in the Twenty-First Century.” His talk “will explore the emergence of the Spiderman India comic series against the backdrop of the cultural and economic changes that are shaking and shaping modern India. In doing so, it will enter the world of super heroes, villains, politicians, businessmen, cricketers, hockey players, scientists, astronauts, avant garde scholars, novelists, natural disasters, national triumphs, software programmers, BPOs and the Walter Mitty-like ruminations of the popular media and the imagination.”
MARK ANDERSON is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. His research interests include race, indigenism, diaspora, transnationalism, and Latin America. He has published articles in Transforming Anthropology, Journal of American Folklore, and Mesoamerica, and is currently working on a manuscript titled “Indigenous Rights and Black Diasporas: Garifuna and the Politics of Race and Culture in Honduras.” The project analyzes the multiple ways Garifuna identify as “Black” yet also claim a status of indigenous. The work explores everyday and organized struggles over the meanings of race, culture and identity in the context of neoliberal multiculturalism. His talk will explore how Honduran Garifuna relate to the racial geography they call “Black America.”
