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.

Colloquium Series

In spring 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 ARE IN THE OAKES MURAL ROOM
Unless Otherwise NotedApril 7
George Lipsitz
(American Studies, UCSC)
Popular Culture and Digital Capitalism: De´tournement and Retournement

April 14
Ivaylo Ditchev
(Cultural Anthropology, History and Theory of Culture,
Sofia University, Bulgaria, and Rockefeller Fellow, UC Santa Cruz)
The City as Stage of the New Life

April 21
Peregrine Horden
(Medieval History and History, University of London)
Mediterranean Excuses: Historiography of a Region Since Braudel

April 28
Carla Freccero
(Literature, UCSC)
Queer Spectrality

May 5
Ruth Frankenberg
(American Studies, UC Davis)
Living Spirit, Living Practice: Poetics, Politics, and Epistemology
Note: This colloquium, cosponsored with the Departments of Sociology and Women’s Studies, will be held in the College Eight Red Room.

May 12
David Cope
(Music, UCSC)
Experiments in Musical Intelligence

May 19
Elizabeth Castle
(President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, UCSC)
Behind the Scenes at the Big House: The Politics of Race Politics at President Clinton’s Initiative on Race

May 26
Ben Carson
(Music, UCSC)
Compositional Economy and Self-Identical Bodies in New Music

Participants

GEORGE LIPSITZ is an internationally acclaimed scholar of race, culture, social identities, and popular culture in the U.S. His many books include The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (Temple, 1998), and Dangerous Crossroads (Verso, 1994). About his talk he writes, “The best scholarship in Cultural Studies has long revolved around what the French Situationists call de´tournement—which in the age of industrial capitalism meant inflecting standardized products with local meanings. In the age of digital capitalism, however, these oppositional practices are promoted by the system itself as a form of retournement—recapturing the dynamic and resistant practices of consumption for dominant ends. Cultural production itself changes under these conditions, as capital out-sources the work of product differentiation to consumers as part of a fully integrated and linked system of production, distribution, and consumption.”

IVAYLO DITCHEV is Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the Department of History and Theory of Culture at Sofia University, Bulgaria, and a Rockefeller Fellow at UC Santa Cruz for winter and spring quarters, 2004. His publications include “The Eros of Identity,” in Balkans as Metaphor, ed. Savic Bielic (MIT, 2002), and From Belonging to Identity: Politics of the Image (LIK, 2002). Ditchev’s project, “Globalizing Civic Ritual: Imported Forms of Belonging and Legitimation in the Balkans,” centers on social life, cultures of consumption, and styles of urbanism from the Soviet period. While at UC Santa Cruz, he is working on a book-length study of imported rituals and the role of the media in the dissemination of ritual practice.

PEREGRINE HORDEN is a Reader in Medieval History and Director of Graduate Studies in History at the University of London. He has published widely in global history, medieval history, and medical history. Horden is the co-author, with N. Purcell, of The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History, a history of the relationship over the past 3,000 years. In Volume One, published by Blackwell in 2000, Horden and Purcell write, “Rather than being a problem whose relevance we should contest, the political and ethnic untidiness of the Mediterranean could turn out to be inspiring. Dense fragmentation complemented by a striving towards control of communications may be an apt summary of the Mediterranean past.”

CARLA FRECCERO’s books include Popular Culture: An Introduction (NYU 1999) and the coedited (with Louise Fradenburg) Premodern Sexualities(Routledge 1996). Her Queer/Early/Modern is forthcoming from Duke. Freccero’s historicized psychoanalytic and deconstructive readings track the envocation of ghosts—and ghostly returns—across a wide archive. In this talk, drawn from a final section of the book, Freccero reads a proleptic spectral relation to the Other in the ethnographic work of the 16th century French Calvinist Jean de Léry. Using Derrida’s concept of spectrality, Freccero proposes a model for a kind of anti-historicist historiography that brings together temporality, affect and the hope for an ethical and more just relation to the past, present, and future.

RUTH FRANKENBERG is Associate Professor of American Studies at UC Davis. Her research focus has been on whiteness, feminist and interdisciplinary theory, and, more recently, religion and spiritual practices in the contemporary United States. Her books include: White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minnesota, 1993) and the edited volume Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism(Duke, 1997). This talk will be held in the College Eight Red Room, as part of the Department of Sociology colloquium series.

DAVID COPE is an award-winning author and composer whose compositions have been widely recorded and performed in the U.S. and abroad. His New Directions in Music (Waveland) is now in its seventh edition. Since 1981, he has been working on a project titled Experiments in Musical Intelligence, a computationally based composition program which has produced works in the styles of Bach, Mozart, Stravinsky, Palestrina, and Joplin. These works have been discussed and reproduced in three of his books: Computers and Musical Style (A-R Editions, 1991), The Algorithmic Composer (A-R Editions, 2000), and Virtual Music (MIT, 2001). The project suggests that long-held conceptions of musical genius and individual style might be in need of revision. To obtain Experiments in Musical Intelligence and other music by David Cope go to
http://www.spectrumpress.com

ELIZABETH CASTLE is a Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Santa Cruz. She works in Native American Studies, with a focus on Native American women’s activism, and has published widely in that area. Her book Women Were the Backbone and Men were the Jawbone: Native American Women’s Leadership and Activism in the Red Power Movement is forthcoming in 2005 from Oxford. Her talk is based on (PIR) and as a delegate for an NGO consultative organization at the United Nation’s World Conference Against Racism (WCAR). She writes: “These events have major and relatively unexplored implications for the history of racial politics, reparations, and social movements in a global context. In addition to exploring these implications, I will share how behind-the-scenes interpersonal behaviors around race and color undermined the abilities of both PIR and WCAR.”

BEN CARSON is a composer and theorist who engages a variety of scientific and critical theories of mind in order to investigate musical consciousness. His music has been performed in cities throughout the western U.S. and Canada, as well as at international festivals. About his talk he writes, “An earlier conversation among practitioners of art music distinguishes Romantic individuation and ‘developing variation’ as alternative ‘compositional economies’ from which to understand musical subjects as allegorical expressions of human identity. Works of Schoenberg and Boulez can be heard as a ‘progressive’ revival of the aesthetics of individuation. A consideration of poet/critic Traise Yamamoto’s notions of body and identity and Chaya Czernowin’s 1999 opera Pnima Ins Innere (1999)—addressing the problem of collective memory among the descendants of victims of trauma—suggests that performative ‘embodiment’ and related ensemble practices are bases for a narrative formation of ‘unspeakable histories’.”