Friday, January 16 / 12PM / Oakes Mural Room

Georgine Clarsen is Lecturer at the School of History and Politics, Faculty of Art, University of Wollongong, Australia, and Research Fellow at the Center for Cultural Studies during Winter 2004. Trained as a historian, she also received a Certificate in Automotive Engineering from Sydney Technical College. Her areas of interest include history of technology, tourism and travel, twentieth-century modernity, women and war, feminist historiography, history of the body, and a history of physical performance in Australia. She has published widely in the history of women and motoring in Australia and elsewhere. Her talk is from a book in progress entitled Auto-Erotic: Early Women Motorists’ Love of Cars (forthcoming from Johns Hopkins).

Tuesday, December 2 / 4:30 PM / Stevenson 150

A program of one and a half hours based on the just-published book, Juniper Fuse (Wesleyan), which presents the fruits of a 25-year poetic investigation of the origins of image-making (and, by implication, the roots of poetry) via the Ice Age decorated caves of southwestern France. Eliot Weinberger writes of Juniper Fuse:

“The invention of the historical other has become almost programmatic in twentieth-century American poetry; for Pound, ancient China; for H.D., classical Greece; for Olson, Mesopotamia; for Snyder, the Neolithic. Eshleman has pushed the historical back about as far as it can go: to the Upper Paleolithic, and the earliest surviving images made by humans. As a result of his literal and imaginative explorations of the painted and gouged caves, Eshleman has constructed a myth, perhaps the first compelling post-Darwinian myth: that the Paleolithic represents the “crisis” of the human “separating out” of the animal, the original birth and original fall of man. From that moment, human history spins out: from the repression of the animal within to the current extinction of the animals without: the inversion from matriarchy to patriarchy, and the denial of the feminine; the transformation of the fecund underworld into the Hell of suffering; and the rising of Hell, in the twentieth century, to the surface of the earth: Dachau, Hiroshima. The poet’s journey is an archetypal scenario of descent and rebirth: he has traveled to the origin of humanness to reach the millennium, end and beginning.”

Clayton Eshleman, a seminal figure in American poetry, has published 13 collections of poetry with Black Sparrow Press, and several collections of essays, most recently Companion Spider (Wesleyan), with an introduction by Adrienne Rich. He is also the primary American translator of Cesar Vallejo, Aime´ Ce´saire, Antonin Artaud, and Michel Deguy. He founded and edited two pioneering literary journals, Caterpillar and Sulfur. He has received the National Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and several prestigious awards for translation. Eshleman is currently a professor in the English Department at Eastern Michigan University.

Co-sponsored by the IHR, the Living Writers Research Unit, and the department of Anthropology

Documentary Film, 2002 / 98 min.

Thursday, November 13 / 5:30 PM / Cowell Conference Room

A SCREENING AND DISCUSSION WITH DIRECTOR LALIT VACHANI
Moderator: Radhika Mongia (Women’s Studies, UC Santa Cruz)

Vachani’s 1993 film, The Boy in the Branch, explored the indoctrination of four young Hindu boys in a branch of the RSS, one of the foremost Hindu fundamentalist organizations in India. On December 6, 1992 (as the film was nearing completion) members of the RSS and its affiliates destroyed the Babri mosque at Ayodhya. Where were the four boys when the mosque was razed to the ground? What did they think about the deaths of at least 1500 people (mostly Muslim) in the riots that followed the demolition? What happened to them between 1992 and 2000, as the RSS and Hindu nationalism had moved from the margins to the center of Indian politics? Vachani’s new film, The Men in the Tree, returns to the subjects of his previous film, eight years later, to document the setbacks and chilling triumphs of Hindu nationalism. The film raises crucial questions about Hindu fundamentalism, “long-distance nationalism,” and international funding sources (e.g., Silicon Valley) for the Hindu Right, and the complex intersections of religion, culture, and ideology.

Sponsored by the Religion and Culture Research Cluster 

Thursday, November 6 / 4PM / Cowell Conference Room

Norman Klein—novelist, cultural critic, curator, and faculty member at California Institute for the Arts—has written on digital media, architecture, film, games and gaming, and special effects. He is one of the most original and distinctive interpreters of the emergent cultural and technological forms characteristic of what he terms “horizontal culture.” His books include Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon (Verso, 1996), The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (Verso, 1997), and the book/DVD-ROM Bleeding Through—Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986 (Cantz, 2003). His most recent book, The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects, is forthcoming from The New Press in 2004. Klein writes,

“As in our era, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century illusion serviced a global culture and even relied on ‘software’ of a kind: solid geometry for architecture, optics, sculpture, painting, and theater. As if from a cryonic thaw, these forms have reemerged very clearly in recent decades. And to manage all this friendly disaster, modern special effects have evolved a unique grammar as precise as the rules of film, theater, and music.” 

His talk explores mapping as a model of narrative and interpretive strategy, and treats computer games, urban architecture, digital narratives, and cinema.

Wednesday, October 15 / 7PM / Oakes Mural Room

Francia and Shaw will discuss their recently edited anthology, Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899-1999 (NYU, 2002). Using the Philippine-American War as its departure point in analyzing U.S.-Philippine relations, Vestiges of War retrieves this willfully forgotten event and places it where it properly belongs: as the catalyst that led to increasing U.S. interventionism and expansionism in the Asia Pacific region. Integrating critical and visual art essays, archival and contemporary photographs, plays, and poetry, the book addresses complex Philippine and U.S. perspectives and experiences in the light of American colonialism.

Luis H. Francia is a poet, journalist, critic, and fiction writer who writes for the Village Voice and other publications. His books include The Arctic Archipelago and Other Poems (Ateneo de Manila University, 1992), Memories of Overdevelopment (Anvil, 1998) and Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago (Kaya, 2001) He edited Brown River, White Ocean (Rutgers, 1993), a major anthology of Philippine literature in English.

Angel Velasco Shaw is a film/video maker based in New York whose nationally and internationally screened works include Balikbayan/Return to Home, Nailed, Asian Boys, and Umbilical Cord. She has been teaching media, cultural and community studies in the Asian/ Pacific/American Studies Program and Institute at New York University since 1995.

LECTURE
The Execution of Tosaka Jun and Other Stories: Forgetting History, Returning to Memory, and the Status of Japan’s Postwar
Thursday, May 22
4 PM, Oakes Mural Room

SEMINAR
Shadowing History: National Narratives and the Persistence of the Everyday
Friday, May 23
10 AM, Oakes Mural Room

Readings are available in advance. For campus mailing of the readings,
please contact Stephanie Casher at scasher@cats.ucsc.edu.

Harry Harootunian is Professor of History and Director of the East Asian Studies Program at New York University. He has also taught at the University of Rochester and the University of Chicago, and was Dean of Humanities at UC Santa Cruz. Former editor-in-chief of the Journal of Asian Studies, he is currently a co-editor of Critical Inquiry and a member of the editorial board of Hihyo Kukan, an intellectual and opinion journal published in Tokyo. Among Harootunian’s books is History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice and the Question of Everyday Life (Columbia, 2000).

In his recent book Overcome By Modernity: Commodity Form, Culture and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, 2000), Harootunian explores how Japanese writers and thinkers, faced by capitalist modernization, tried to find an authentic and stable grounding for a daily life which seemed to be always escaping, and a culture that might resist both social abstraction (reification) and the surplus of historical change. He writes that the book “is an attempt to historicize modernism (rarely done in the literature) by relating it to capitalist modernization and the problem of uneven development. It is my hope to show that an understanding of modernism from the so-called periphery will reveal something about the claims made for it at the center and its informing ideology of even development.”

Prof. Allen Chun
The Disciplinary Divide: Is There a Bottom Line in Cultural Studies?
Monday, May 12
4 pm, Oakes Mural Room

Allen Chun is a Research Fellow in the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan. He is the author of Unstructuring Chinese Society: The Fictions of Colonial Practice and the Changing Realities of ‘Land’ in the New Territories of Hong Kong (Harwood Academic Press, 2000) and articles in numerous journals. He has most recently edited a special issue in Cultural Studies 14(3-4) entitled “(Post)Colonialism and Its Discontents” as well as a special issue in Communal/Plural: Journal of Transnational & Crosscultural Studies 9(1) on “The Postnation, or Violence and the Norm.” His thematic interests cover the fields of socio-cultural theory, historical anthropology, cultural sociology of the state as well as colonial and post-colonial societies. His talk addresses the concern of a widening gap in current uses and definitions of culture in “cultural studies”, as practiced not only in its explicit institutionalized manifestations but also in disciplines as varied as anthropology, sociology, literature, media and mass communications, etc. It goes without saying that there is perhaps no holistic field of study called cultural studies, despite the eminence of some schools of thought, insofar as it has diverse interdisciplinary roots and theoretical influences. While these diverse theoretical roots have engendered the general rise of cultural studies, few people have focused on the institutional parameters that have conditioned acceptance of these same paradigms, which can serve on the other hand as sources of friction across disciplines.

Gary Pak
Reading from Asia/Pacific: Gary’s Pak’s Korean/Hawai’ian American Voice
Tuesday, May 13
4pm, Oakes Mural Room

Gary Pak is assistant professor of English at University of Hawai’i at Manoa. He is the author of various publications: A Ricepaper Airplane (novel), The Watcher of Waipuna (short story collection), and Beyond the Falls (children’s play), along with other essays and stories in contribution to literary magazines and anthologies. He got his Ph.D from University of Hawai`i at Manoa, and is now teaching creative writing, literatures of Hawai`i and the Pacific, Asian American literature, Korean American literature, modern Korean literature in translation, etc. In year 2002, he received a Fulbright grant to be a visiting professor in Korea. He will be doing a reading of his recent fictional work in the talk.

Prof. Colleen Lye
Form and History in Asian American Literature
Thursday, May 15
4 pm, Oakes Mural Room

Colleen Lye, assistant professor of English at UC Berkeley, is the author of several articles on Asian American literature and cultural studies, and serves on the editorial collective of Movements: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, a new Routledge journal forthcoming in Spring 2000 assistant professor in the Department of English at UC Berkeley. Her book, America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1882-1945, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press in 2004. Her talk considers the contemporary grounds for approaching “Asian American literature” and asks us to think about the following questions: What would it mean to practice ethnic literary inquiry today, if not to take authorial ethnicity for granted as a way of classifying literary texts? How might we go about historicizing the formation of Asian American literatures such that it would be possible to atttribute variations in modes and genres to specific historical conditions of immigrant experience and racialization? And to what extent does our apprehension of ethnic identity itself reflect the properties of its textual history?

Friday, February 21 / 5 PM / Stevenson 150

Love is, as we know, a mysterious and controlling force. It has vast power over our thoughts and life decisions. It demands our loyalty, and we, in turn, freely comply. Saying no to love isn’t simply heresy; it is tragedy – the failure to achieve what is most essentially human… For the modern lover, ‘’maturity’’ isn’t a depressing signal of impending decrepitude but a sterling achievement, the sine qua non of a lover’s qualifications to love and be loved… The prevailing cultural wisdom is that even if sexual desire tends to be a short-lived phenomenon, “mature love’’ will kick in to save the day when desire flags. The issue that remains unaddressed is whether cutting off other possibilities of romance and sexual attraction for the more muted pleasures of mature love isn’t similar to voluntarily amputating a healthy limb… But if it behooves a society to convince its citizenry that wanting change means personal failure or wanting to start over is shameful or simply wanting more satisfaction than what you have is an illicit thing, clearly grisly acts of self-mutilation will be required.

Laura Kipnis, “Against Love: A Treatise on the Tyranny of Two,”
New York Times Magazine, October 14, 2001

After an art school education and a period working as a video artist-critic, Laura Kipnis now teaches media and cultural studies at Northwestern, where she is Professor of Radio-TV-Film. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim
Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts for film making and cultural criticism. Her video work includes A Man’s Woman and Marx: The Video. Her previous books are Ecstasy Unlimited: On
Sex, Capital, Gender, and Aesthetics (Minnesota,1993); and Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America (Duke,1999); her next book, Against Love: A Polemic will be published in September by Pantheon.

Professor Kipnis’s talk is presented in conjunction with the Center for Cultural Studies Queer Theory Research Cluster conference. This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies, the Feminist Studies Research Unit of the Institute for Humanities Research, and The Siegfried B. and Elisabeth Mignon Puknat Literary Studies Endowment.