Colloquium Series

In winter 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

January 12
Eduardo Mendieta
(Philosophy, Stony Brook University, SUNY)
The Spaces of War and the Wars for Space: Technology, Law, City

January 19
M. Theresa Hernandez
(Social Work and Anthropology, University of Houston)
Cemeteries of Ambivalent Desire

January 26
Tony Crowley
(English Literature and Language, University of Manchester, UK)
James Joyce and the Politics of Language in Ireland: From Finnegans Wake to Human Rights

February 2
Dean Mathiowetz
(Politics, UC Santa Cruz)
Smuggling the “Self” into “Interest”: A Critical Reflection on a Liberal Dissimulation

February 9
Vilashini Cooppan
(Literature, UC Santa Cruz)
Global Literature: Race, Writing, and the World System

February 16
Kären Wigen
(History, Stanford University)
Sacred Peaks, Secular Visions: Reorienting Mountains in Modern Japan

February 23
Jason Ferreira
(President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, UC Santa Cruz)
Medicine of Memory: Third World Radicalism in 1960s San Francisco and the Politics of Multiracial Unity

March 2
David Marriott
(History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz)
Spooks(II): That Within

Participants

EDUARDO MENDIETA, currently Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for Cultural Studies, is the author of The Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy: Karl-Otto Apel’s Semiotics and Discourse Ethics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), and editor of numerous works including Latin American Philosophy: Currents, Issues, Debates (Indiana, 2003). He writes, “This talk considers the way in which types of war correlate with particular topologies (earth, sea, air), which in turn correlate with different legal orders (European, American, Global, etc). The city registers these dialectical interplays, becoming a palimpsest of the war for space, but also a supplement that challenges the logic of war.”

MARIE THERESA HERNANDEZ is the author of Delirio: The Fantastic, The Demonic, and The Réel: The Buried History of Nuevo León (University of Texas, 2002). Her current project, The Prophecy: Death, Legacy, History, and the Survival of Jim Crow, critiques the history of a strategic plantation county in southeast Texas, the site of the state’s first official white colony. Hernandez analyzes the county’s genealogy of origins and tragedy, using literature, anthropology, and ethnography to explore the past and the present of its narrative.

TONY CROWLEY‘s 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, 2007). Wars of Wordsincludes 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.

DEAN MATHIOWETZ, Assistant Professor in the Politics Department at UC Santa Cruz, is working on a manuscript entitled “The Politics of Interest.” He writes, “Liberal theories of politics are typically defended on the basis of their reverence for individual self-interest. In the talk, I criticize Stephen Holmes’s influential historical defense of liberalism on the basis that he smuggles into the foundations of his argument what his liberalism presumes: the stable, identifiable self. I observe the migrations of the word ‘interest’ through his own argument to mark the restrictions and exclusions he needs to define the ‘self’, and explore the potential that invocations of ‘interest’ hold for a politics beyond liberalism.”

VILASHINI COOPPAN is Assistant Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz, completing a manuscript entitled “Inner Territories: Fictions and Fantasms of the Nation of Postcolonial Writing.” Her talk will explore the transnational literary traffic that emerged as the corollary to such systems of world capital as slavery, empire, apartheid, and globalization. Tracing the connection between the ideologies of national sovereignty, racial identity, and literary genre, this project attempts to discern the cultural and political work that genre performs. The talk will trace the rise of the novel through the migrations of the slave trade, from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Behn’s Oroonoko through the British, United States, and Cuban slave narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the twentieth century postcolonial writings of the Caribbean novelist Caryl Phillips.

KÄREN WIGEN teaches Japanese history and the history of early modern mapping. Her research interests include the historical geography of East Asia, early modernity in Japan, regional economies and rhetorics, and geographies of the imagination. She is the author of The Making of a Japanese Periphery (California, 1995), which won the Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association, and co-author with Martin Lewis of The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (California, 1997). Her current work centers on the discovery of the Japanese Alps at the turn of the twentieth century.

JASON FERREIRA is completing a book manuscript entitled “All Power to the People: A Comparative History of Third World Radicalism in San Francisco, 1968-1974.” His work explores how activists of color articulated a radical Third World identity that expressed a transformative set of politics, enabling them to view their separate histories and circumstances as fundamentally related. His study outlines how the boundaries separating the different struggles of communities of color were extremely porous, allowing a profound cross-fertilization of both ideas and people.

DAVID MARRIOTT is the author of On Black Men (Columbia, 2000), Letters to Langston (forthcoming), and several essays on race and psychoanalysis, as well as Lative, Dogma, and other poetry chapbooks. His talk will explore the phenomenology of the racial double in Sartre, Fanon, and Rosenberg.

Colloquium Series
In fall 2004, 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 (Except October 27) ARE IN THE OAKES MURAL ROOM 

October 6
Angela Davis
(History of Consciousness, UCSC)
Legacies of Women of Color Feminisms

October 13
Alexei Lalo
(Philosophy and Culture Studies, European Humanities University,
Minsk, Belarus)
In the Noose of National Idiosyncrasies: Resisting Globalization and Inventing Other Modernities in the Postcommunist Western New Independent States

October 20
Candace Vogler
(Philosophy, University of Chicago)
The Element of Surprise October 27
(in Oakes 109)
Christina Jimenez
(History, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs)
The Performed City: Consumers, Sellers, and Spectators in Urban Mexico, 1880-1930 

November 3
Eugene Holland
(French and Comparative Studies, The Ohio State University)
The Death State 

November 10
Tony Crowley
(English Language and Literature, University of Manchester,UK)
Writing the Demotic: The Politics of Language in Contemporary British Fiction
November 17
Irene Gustafson
(Film and Digital Media, UCSC)
The Space of the Screen /Test
 

Participants

ANGELA DAVIS is an internationally prominent scholar, writer, and activist. Her works, and books about her and her work, have appeared in many languages. Professor Davis’s most recent books include Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (Vintage, 1999) and Are Prisons Obsolete? (Open Media, 2003).

ALEXEI LALO, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Culture Studies at the European Humanities University in Minsk, Belarus, is the author of Thomas Pynchon and His America: Enigmas, Parallels, and Cultural Contexts(Minsk: RIVSH BGU, 2001) and co-editor of Deviance in Society, Culture and Literature (UNIPAK, 2004), both published in Russian. His project, “Globalization, Russification, and ‘Double Translation’ in the Borderland Regions of the Western Newly Independent States of the Ex-USSR,” looks at contemporary Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Russia, and the Baltic States, as they enter a period of transition between one imperial legacy—the Czarist and Soviet eras—and an emergent U.S.-based globalization. Professor Lalo is interested in how these questions are being answered in the social and cultural fields, as well as in the theoretical models that regional scholars can bring to an analysis of these problems. His work focuses on a “translation” of postcolonial theory into an analysis of regional political culture.

CANDACE VOGLER is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. She is the author of a book on practical reason entitled Reasonably Vicious(Harvard, 2002); John Stuart Mill’s Deliberative Landscape (Routledge, 2001); and essays on such topics as intimacy, Rousseau and contemporary social contract theory, philosophy and literature, feminism, and sexuality studies. Her research interests center upon the strengths and limits of liberal humanism in ethics, moral psychology, social and political philosophy, gender studies, and cultural studies. Her talk is part of a philosophical examination of happiness.

CHRISTINA JIMENEZ is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, and a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. She is completing a book manuscript entitled Buying Into the Nation: Negotiating Citizenship and Modernity in Urban Mexico, 1880-1930. Based on thousands of letters and petitions to municipal and state governments, as well as legal codes and governmental memos, her work explores how urban residents were able to secure concessions and protection from the Mexican government by demanding fulfillment of their rights under the Mexican Constitution of 1857. She locates the roots of the informal economy, urban consumer culture, populist state employment, and collective petitioning in the pre-revolutionary late nineteenth century.

EUGENE HOLLAND is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University. He is the author of Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis:
The Sociopoetics of Modernism(Cambridge, 1993) and Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis (Routledge, 1999). His project, “Realizing Global Democracy: Nomad Citizenship and Other Studies in Applied Nomadology,” elaborates a concept of nomad citizenship based on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. His colloquium talk mobilizes schizoanalysis for a socioeconomic analysis of consumerism and its connection to the U.S.A.’s repression of the death instinct.

TONY CROWLEY is Professor of English Literature and Language at the University of Manchester, UK. His works include The Politics of Language: The Standard Language Question in Cultural Debates(Palgrave, 2003); Proper English? Readings in Language, History and Cultural Identity (Routledge, 1991); and the forthcoming Wars of Words: The Politics of Language in Ireland 1534-2003(Oxford, 2004). His current project, “Language and Cultural Identity in Contemporary British Writing,” argues that in the twentieth century the sense that language was constitutive of identity became popular and commonplace. He explores the experimentation and innovation of writers who have represented Black British, Asian Scottish, Welsh, Liverpudlian, London and working-class (often unemployed) experiences in modes of language adequate to those experiences.

IRENE GUSTAFSON teaches production as well as film and video criticism and theory. Her video productions include Velvets (1999) and Screen Test No. 1, No. 2, No. 3. (1998-2002), which have been screened at many galleries and festivals worldwide, including Neo-Queer: Shorts from the Queer Frontier (Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle, 2003), and the Impakt Festival (Utrecht, Netherlands, 2001). Her talk is from her current research project, centering on the form of the screen test and the spaces it both occupies and produces—short form film, industry by-product, experiment. This research takes the form of critical writing, film/video work, and curation.