LECTURE:
Will to Power, Will to Live: Towards a Politics of Liberation
Monday, April 18 / 4–6 PM / Oakes Mural Room

SEMINAR:
Planetary Politics,  With Enrique Dussel, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Eduardo Mendieta
Tuesday, April 19 / 4–6 PM / Oakes Mural Room

SEMINAR READING:
• “Preface,” “Introduction,” and “The ‘World System’: Europe as ‘Center’ and Its ‘Periphery’ beyond Eurocentrism.” From Enrique Dussel, Beyond Philosophy: Ethics, History, Marxism, and Liberation Theology (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), edited and Introduction by Eduardo Mendieta.
• Enrique Dussel, “Six Theses towards a Critique of Political Reason: The Citizen as Political Agent,” Eduardo Mendieta, “Politics in an Age of Planetarization: Enrique Dussel’s Critique of Political Reason.” From David Ingram, ed. The Political (Blackwell, 2002).

Readings may be requested by email up to one week in advance from cult@ucsc.edu.

Enrique Dussel is Professor of Philosophy at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitina-Iztapalapa and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He is the main spokesperson for the Latin American movement known as liberation philosophy. He is author of over 50 books and 300 articles. His work in English includes The Underside of Modernity (Humanities, 1996), The Invention of the Americas (Continuum, 1995), Ethics and Community (Orbis, 1988), and Philosophy of Liberation (Orbis, 1985). He is presently finishing a two-volume work entitled Politics of Liberation.

The problem…is the question of the overcoming of the “world system” itself, such as it has developed until today for the last five hundred years. The problem is the exhaustion of a civilizing system that has come to its end. What presupposes the liberation of diverse types of oppressed and/or excluded populations are the overcoming of cynical-management reason (planetary administrative), of capitalism (as economic system), of liberalism (as political system), of Eurocentrism (as ideology), of machismo (in erotics), of the reign of the white race (in racism), the destruction of nature (in ecology), and so on.

— from “The ‘World System’: Europe as ‘Center’ and Its ‘Periphery’ beyond Eurocentrism”

In his Ethics of Liberation, Dussel developed an ethics that brought together the material dimension of all systems of ethical life with the formal or procedural dimension of all moral systems. The point of ethics is neither what is proper to an ethos, nor what is just, given conditions of equity, nor even what is allowed and possible within a horizon of materiality. Instead, the aim of an ethics is goodness or beneficence (bondad), which is the synthesis of the material, the formal, and the possible. Dussel argued that an ethics is not worth that name if it does not acknowledge that there are always victims of the established orders of ethos and justice. For this reason, every ethics must contain a critical dimension. In his Politics of Liberation, Dussel seeks to extend these insights to the realm of the political. In the first part of the Politics, Dussel provides a world-historical analysis of the origins of the modern political systems and their corresponding systems of political thought. In the second volume, Dussel elaborates what he has called “critical-political” principles: 1. The critical-strategic principle, or principle of liberation; 2. The critical-democratic principle, or the principle of the recognition of alterity; 3. The critical-material principle of deconstruction and creation, or the principle of solidarity.

SEMINAR PANELISTS:

Eduardo Mendieta is Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for Cultural Studies.

Nelson Maldonado-Torres is Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. His work reflects on religion, philosophical anthropology, social and cultural formations in the Americas, and the role of critical intellectual activity in the context of global coloniality. His forthcoming Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity examines Jewish, Latin American, and Black responses to modernity.

This lecture/seminar series is presented in conjunction with the Center’s Rockefeller foundation fellowship program in Other Globalizations: Histories, Trans-regionalism,and Cultural Formations.

Tuesday, April 12 / 3 PM / Baobab Lounge, Merrill College

The year 2004 marks the tenth anniversary of NAFTA, the third year after 9-11, and the third year after the beginning of the war against terrorism. Mendieta links these anniversaries and offers some points of departure to link the war on terror with the other wars that the United States has unleashed on other countries. Mendieta writes, “Bio-terrorism, like the terrorism of 9-11, takes elements from everyday life, from quotidian existence, and turns them into tools of destruction and devastation. …But unlike the terrorism of 9-11, the effects and after-effects of the bioterrorism and biopiracy of NAFTA are passed off as events in a natural history of destruction.”

Sponsored by the Latina/o Americans in a Global Perspective Research Cluster

Monday, April 11 / 4 PM / Oakes Mural Room

This roundtable discussion will consider Vivian Sobchack’s most recent book Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (California, 2004), and specifically her focus on responsible visions and carnal thoughts. Her approach emphasizes corporeal rather than intellectual engagements with film and other media, and argues that our bodies are not just visible objects but also sense-making subjects. Selections from her text will be available from the Center for Cultural Studies.

Vivian Sobchack is Professor of Critical Studies in the Department of Film and Television and Associate Dean of the School of Theater, Film, and Television at UCLA.

Sponsored by the Visual Studies Research Cluster

Saturday, February 26 / 1 PM – 5 PM / College 8, Room 240

Recent years have witnessed an explosion in mass-media representations of gays and lesbians. In response, this event engages issues of representation, spectatorship, and counter-practice.

B. RUBY RICH Queering Third Cinema
A new generation of film and video artists has further refined the radical impulse of the original New Queer Cinema. Through the work of Lucrecia Martel, Julián Hernández, Ximena Cuevas, Diego Lerman, Apichatpong Weerasethaku and others, Rich charts the shape of an unexpected revival and considers the role of location in queer aesthetics. 

B. Ruby Rich has written widely on queer film and video as well as on Latin American cinema in GLQ, The Nation, The Guardian, Village Voice, and The Advocate. She is the author of Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement (Duke, 1998) and is currently at work on The Rise and Fall of the New Queer Cinema (NYU, forthcoming). In 2004 she joined the UC Santa Cruz faculty in Community Studies.

AMY VILLAREJO Savvy Queer TV
With its appetite for innovative programming, television continues to digest queer life. The resultant queer thematics (The L Word), queer aesthetics (Queer Eye), and queer histories (Tipping the Velvet) demand a renewed materialist method of understanding. If Rich looks abroad for a vigorous queer cinema, Villarejo sorts through the detritus of commodity culture at home for a new critical engagement with television. 

Amy Villarejo is Associate Professor at Cornell University, where she teaches film and is Director of the Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program. She is author, most recently, of Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire (Duke, 2003).

RESPONDENTS:

GINA VELASCO is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Consciousness Department at UC Santa Cruz. Her work focuses on Filipino diasporic cultural production.

GREG YOUMANS is a graduate student in the History of Consciousness Department at UC Santa Cruz, where he works in American history and media studies.

Sponsored by the Queer Theory Research Cluster

EXHIBIT / 15 February – 13 March 2005 / UCSC Women’s Center

This exhibit features tapa (bark cloth) from Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, and the Marquesas, produced from the late 19th century to the present. Found throughout Oceania, tapa is an elaborately decorated textile made from the beaten bark of trees. The making of tapa and the motifs used to embellish it are deeply connected to the continuity of indigenous culture both on the islands and for those living in diaspora. Given as gifts at weddings, funerals, and other ceremonial occasions, tapa cloths remain a central form of women’s wealth in Oceanic and diasporic communities, mediating social, economic, cultural and transnational relationships.

Speaker Series

The speaker series features scholars whose talks will illustrate the continuing significance of tapa as a cultural form, in a variety of locations.

HILARY SCOTHORN Florida State University
Samoan Siapo: Invention & Interaction in the West Polynesian Trade Triangle
Tuesday, February 15 / 12-1:45 / Earth & Marine B210

CAROLINE KLARR Florida State University
Tradition & Innovation in Fijian Bark Cloth (Masi)
Thursday, February 17 / 12-1:45 / Earth & Marine B210

PING-ANN ADDO Yale University
Tongan Women, Textiles, and Transnational Identities: Reoections on Revived Bark Cloth (Tapa) Making Practices in Oakland & Auckland
Tuesday, February 22 / 12-1:45 / Earth & Marine B210

CAROL IVORY Washington State University
Marquesan Tapa for Contemporary Times: The Story of Omoa Village
Thursday, March 3 / 12-1:45 / Earth & Marine B210

For information, contact: Stacy Kamehiro, History of Art & Visual Culture Department, 459-2085, Kamehiro@ucsc.edu

Sponsored by the Pacific Islands Research Cluster and the Arts Research Institute

Friday, February 11 / Film Screening / 9am – 12pm, Communications Building, Studio C
Friday, February 11 / Discussion / 12:30pm – 2:30pm, Communications Building, Studio A

Films include director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s 1999 film, Bye-Bye Africa, which questions the possibilities of filmmaking in contemporary Chad, and director Ingrid Sinclair’s 1996 film, Flame, which traces the experiences of women guerrilla fighters in Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle. Discussion participants include Peter Limbrick (Film & Digital Media), Gina Dent (Women’s Studies), and NeEddra James (History of Consciousness).

Sponsored by the Africana Dialogues Research Cluster, with cosponsorship from the Film and Digital Media Department

READING GROUP
The Africana Dialogues Research Cluster (ADRC) will begin a reading group focusing on Africa and the disciplines. Those interested in being added to the listserv and participating in the reading group should contact Heather Turcotte, hmturcotte@juno.com, or NeEddra James, njames3000@sbcglobal.net.

Thursday, January 13 / 7 PM / Classroom Unit ll

This meeting will focus on agendas for analysis and political work during the second G.W. Bush administration. William Bennett is not the only powerful Republican who has found in the election a mandate for a successful conclusion to the culture wars, whose targets include higher education. We in the university will probably have no choice but to join this battle. But much more is at stake than an assault on universities. The coming years may see continued crisis in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy and a speeding up of political and economic restructuring in the U.S. We want to begin a discussion at UC Santa Cruz that can lead to a better understanding of the present, of the new shape of politics, and of what we can do.

This forum is intended to foster better analysis of and fresh thinking about the nature of political power, the new political role of evangelical Christianity, the cluster of issues and obfuscations represented by the term “values,” the limits and possibilities of elections and electoral politics, the culture wars, the political and economic character of the present orientation, the contestation over the Hispanic vote, the mounting assault on women’s rights, the threat to the principle of equality, the accelerated push toward privatization and the ownership of risk, the anti-gay/lesbian mobilization, the political character of popular culture and the media, and many more topics.

Our speakers, from the departments of American Studies, Anthropology, Environmental Studies, History of Consciousness, Latin American and Latina/o Studies, Literature, and Politics, have wide-ranging expertise in these and other areas, and have generously offered to help us stimulate discussion of the issues we face. We all recognize that slogans, repetition of familiar truths, and affirmations of our political virtues will not be enough. We need good, deepening, and continuing analysis, serious discussion about mobilization and politics, and new thinking.

Our panelists will give short presentations, followed by panel discussion and audience participation.

ANGELA DAVIS Professor of History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz is one of the country’s foremost activist-intellectuals. Trained as a philosopher, she has written on African American culture, politics, feminism, and music. Her latest book is Are Prisons Obsolete?.

SUSAN HARDING, Professor Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, has done extensive fieldwork on evangelical Chrisitanity. Her research, long referenced by a range of authors working in the field, culminated in the 2000 publication of The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics.

RONNIE LIPSCHUTZ, Professor of Politics at UC Santa Cruz, is the author of many books on enviornmental and ethnic politics, and on political conflict. He also writes a weekly newspaper column on national politics.

GEORGE LIPSITZ, Professor of American Studies at UC Santa Cruz, is an activist and scholar who has written on popular culture, oppositional cultural movements, race, and urban culture. In 1998 he published The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit From Identity Politics.

ROBERT MEISTER, Professor of Politics at UC Santa Cruz, is a prominent political theorist. Since the 1990 publication of the pathbreaking Political Identity: Thinking Through Marx, he has written and spoken widely on human rights, victimization, and on the US global posture since Septermber 11.

HELENE MOGLEN, Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz, in addition to many publications on English and American Literatures, has for many years been a feminist activist and organizer. Currently, she is director of UCSC’s Institute for Advanced Feminist Research.

MANUEL PASTOR, Professor of Latina/o and Latin American Studies at UCSC, is a community activist and a scholar of political economy and community. He recently published Regions that Work: How Cities and Suburbs Can Grow Together.

ALAN RICHARDS, Professor of Environmental Studies at UC Santa Cruz, has published widely on environmental politics and economics, with particular expertise in the Middle East. Recently, he has been invited by the US Army to share with its officers his dissenting views on the US role in the region. 

MODERATOR: CHRIS CONNERY

Friday, November 19 / 6 PM / College Eight, Room 240
Saturday, November 20 / 9 AM–5 PM / College Eight, Room 240

The Africana Dialogues research cluster (ADRC) will host an open house on October 6, 2004 for all those interested in participating. The cluster will also sponsor a two-day film festival on African cinema followed by a panel discussion on November 19th and 20th. The festival’s featured films explore a diverse array of issues, ranging from the economic complexities of filmmaking in postcolonial Africa and the impact of digital technologies on contemporary everyday life to cinematic representations of African liberation struggles, gender, and sexuality. Films to be screened include Afro@Digital, Bye Bye Africa, and Flame and Lumumba: La Mort du Prophete.

Thursday, November 4 / 4 PM / Oakes Mural Room

Carl Rudbeck works as a journalist and public intellectual in Sweden, and is a scholar of Arabic, political culture, and comparative literature. He worked for twelve years as the literary editor of the Svenska Dagbladet, a Stockholm daily, where he is currently a political columnist. Since 1991 he has been a fellow at Timbro, a free-market think tank in Sweden. His publications with Timbro include books on neo-liberalism and on global culture. In 2004 he chaired a Swedish parliamentary commission on Islam in Sweden.