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’.”

Colloquium Series

In winter 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 ROOMJanuary 14
Donna Haraway
(History of Consciousness, UCSC)
Companion Species & Other Messmates: Canine Insight on Acquiring Genomes in Technoculture

January 21
Manuela Ribeiro Sanches
(Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa)
Where is the Post-Colonial?: In-Betweenness, Identity and “Lusophonia” in Trans/National Contexts

January 28
Megan Thomas
(Politics, UCSC)
Authority, Authenticity, and the Native Voice: Ethnographies of and by Filipinos in the Late 19th Century

February 4
Deborah Whaley
(Center for Cultural Studies, UCSC)
Disciplining Women, Respectable Pledges, and the Meaning of a “Soror”: Reconstituting the Cultural Politics of Violence in a Predominantly Black Sorority

February 11
Peter Limbrick
(Film and Digital Media, UCSC)
Cinema’s Imperial Mode: British Empire Films and their Transnational Contexts

February 18
Scott Barclay
(Politics, UCSC)
Cause Lawyers as Legal Innovators for the State: The Case of Civil Unions in Vermont and the Religious Law Conflict in Israel

February 25
Earl Jackson
(Literature, UCSC)
Is Gone Better? Existence as Practice and Theory in Korean Cinema

March 3
Anna Tsing
(Anthropology, UCSC)
Engaged Universals

Participants

DONNA HARAWAY’s most recent book is The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Prickly Paradigm, 2003). Of her talk she writes, “The root meaning of ‘companion’ in companion species is ‘com panis’ or ‘with bread.’ I am interested in messmates; i.e., in those who eat together—or eat each other—in evolutionary, social, and intimate personal history. Thinking well about messmates turns out to require a baroque array of temporalities and spatialities. The current landscape in cultural studies is cluttered with descriptions of entanglements of bodies, meanings, monies, histories, agencies, and much else. I want to further complicate the knot by tying in some threads from human-dog relatings. I am, in short, interested in those who ‘partake of each other’ in species-making ways. Derrida will make a cameo appearance, followed by a restorative cast of middle-aged women who breed dogs and know rather more about animals.”

MANUELA RIBEIRO SANCHES is Assistant Professor in the Department of German Studies at the University of Lisbon, and a Resident Scholar at the Center for Cultural Studies. She writes, “Portugal has defined its national identity through its colonial and imperial histories, thus making of its post-colonial condition a contradictory question that unites in a most obvious way the rupture or the continuities that link the country to its former colonies. How is this ‘in-betweenness’ to be interpreted? What are the ‘origins’ of discourses on Portuguese hybridity? How is the post-colonial understood in contemporary Portugal, and how does this understanding influence the reception of postcolonial studies in ‘Lusophone’ contexts? How can post-colonial studies contribute to a decentering of these approaches and understandings?”

MEGAN THOMAS is Assistant Professor of Politics. Her talk draws on her book project, Orientalist Enlightenment: The Emergence of Nationalist Thought in the Philippines, 1880-1898, examining texts written by educated, creolized natives of the Philippines during the last decades of Spanish colonial rule at the end of the 19th century. She notes, “Those authors, some of whom were central figures in the nationalist movement, wrote folkloristic and ethnographic accounts of different ethnolinguistic groups in the Philippines. They self-consciously adopted the European sciences of folklore and ethnography and yet they claim authority as experts precisely because of their status as natives, even when writing about a group of which they were not a member. These texts call colonial authority into question and prefigure later debates about the theory and practice of ethnographic fieldwork.”

DEBORAH WHALEY, Resident Scholar at the Center for Cultural Studies, has taught at the University of Kansas and at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Whaley is author of “To Capture a Vision Fair: Margaret Walker and the Predicament of the African American Female Intellectual,” in Maryemma Graham (ed.), Fields Watered with Blood: Critical Essays on Margaret Walker
(Georgia, 2001) and “The Neo-Soul Vibe and the Postmodern Aesthetic: Black Popular Music and Culture for the Soul Babies of History,” American Studies (Fall 2002). Her talk “will explore the way a historically Black sorority creates and struggles to make meaning of the use of violence as a rite of passage. Black sorority women use ethnic-specific rites to redistribute cultural flows of power within their subculture and in so doing, they produce new registers for understanding the complex social function of violence and the cultural politics of Black feminine identities.”

PETER LIMBRICK is Assistant Professor of Film and Digital Media. His book project, On Location: Cinema, Empire, and Colonial Space, traces the production and circulation of films of and about empire and colonialism. It is, he writes, “particularly concerned with the ways in which race, gender, and sexuality are conceived and maintained through the representations of colonial and postcolonial spaces and geographies. The project tangles with established connections between cinema, nation, and genre to instead propose an imperial cinematic mode that can be traced through widely dispersed historical moments and contexts.”

SCOTT BARCLAY, Visiting Associate Professor in the Legal Studies Program, is the author of An Appealing Act: Why People Appeal in Civil Cases(Northwestern, 1999) and co-author of “The States and Differing Impetus for Divergent Paths on Gay Rights, 1990-2001,” Policy Studies Journal 31 (2003). His current research considers the legal, social, and political struggle over same-sex marriage. He writes, “Cause lawyers—lawyers who systematically pursue a cause on behalf of a socially marginalized group—develop new legal rights as a means to alleviate the targeting of this oppressive authority against a particularly marginalized social group. Instead of operating only from an oppositional position…some cause lawyers enter into a symbiotic relationship with selected parts of the state. … In this symbiotic relationship, the law becomes the shared language that allows these actors with divergent goals temporarily to occupy a common space.”

EARL JACKSON, Associate Professor of Literature, in Spring 2004 will be Visiting Professor of Cinema Studies at Korean National University of the Arts. He is the author of Strategies of Deviance: Essays in Gay Male Representational Agency(Indiana, 1995) and “Polylogic Perversity,” GLQ 9.4 (Winter 2003). About this talk he writes, “Given Korea�s turbulent modern history, it is not surprising that a considerable number of Korean films raise questions concerning the meaning of human life in general and specific individual lives. It is important to read these questions not thematically but cinematically. Obaltan[Aimless Bullet, 1960] is a fictional drama and considered a masterpiece of the Korean golden age. Nappeun Yonghwa[Bad Movie, 1997] is an experimental quasi-documentary featuring runaway or abandoned youth and homeless adults. Each foregrounds the tensions between the represented subject and the system of representation and illuminates the political stakes therein.” In conjunction with this talk, Obaltan will be shown on Tuesday, February 24th at 7 PM in Social Sciences I, Room 159. 

ANNA TSING is author of In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place (Princeton, 1993) and co-editor of Nature in the Global South: Environmental Projects in South and Southeast Asia (Duke, 2003). Her talk is drawn from her forthcoming book Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connections, of which she writes, “Environmental activists, illegal loggers, transnational mining corporations, nature hikers, crony capitalists, and village elders vie for attention in this book, in which Indonesian rainforest politics provides the site for an exploration of the contingencies of global connection. Here global capitalism and utopian social mobilizations make appearances through the grip of cultural encounter, and liberal universals are realized in the sticky materiality of ‘friction.’”