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.

LECTURE
TIMOTHY MITCHELL
McJihad: Islam in the U.S. Global Order
Tuesday, February 18
4 PM, Oakes Mural Room

COLLOQUIUM
LILA ABU-LUGHOD
Development Realism and the Problem of Feminism
Wednesday, February 19
12 PM, Oakes Mural Room
(Cultural Studies colloquium series)

SEMINAR
TIMOTHY MITCHELL
Para-sites of Capitalism: Can the Mosquito Speak?
Wednesday, February 19
4 PM, Oakes Mural Room

The reading for this seminar is chapter 1 of Mitchell’s new book Rule of
Experts. Copies are available in advance from the Center for Cultural
Studies; contact scasher@cats.ucsc.edu.

TIMOTHY MITCHELL is Professor of Politics at New York University and Director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies. He is a political theorist who writes about modern regimes of power and knowledge through studies of colonialism, the political economy of development, agrarian politics, and the discourse of twentieth-century economics. He is the author of Colonising Egypt (California, 1991) and the editor of Questions of Modernity (Minnesota, 2000). His most recent book, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity, was published by the University of California Press in November 2002. Through a series of interrelated essays, the book examines whether one can account for the power of global capitalism without attributing to capital a logic and coherence it may not have, and whether one can understand the powers of techno-science without reproducing its own understanding of the world. The book also argues that “the economy” emerged as a distinct object of knowledge and practice only in the twentieth century. Mitchell has published articles in the American Political Science Review, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Cultural Studies, Theory and Society, the Review of African Political Economy, the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Social Text, and other publications. His books and articles have been translated into more than ten languages, including Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Turkish, Japanese, and Chinese.

LILA ABU-LUGHOD is Professor of Anthropology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Columbia University. Her early work was on emotion, poetry, and gender ideology in a Bedouin community in Egypt. As an anthropologist of the Middle East, she began to think about ethnographic writing itself, contributing to the critique of the concept of culture. Interests in gender in the Arab world and in postcolonial theory led to work on the history and contemporary politics of Middle Eastern feminisms. Her books include Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (California, 1993), which won the Victor Turner Prize of the American Anthropological Association. She is editor of Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East (Princeton, 1998) and co-editor of Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (California, 2002). In the book manuscript she has just finished, The Melodrama of Nationhood: Cultural Politics and Egyptian Television, she explores issues of national pedagogy, class politics, religious identity, and modern subjectivities through analysis of the production and consumption, by socially marginal women, of popular Egyptian television soap operas. This project has led her to reflect on theoretical and methodological questions in the anthropology of media, especially in the context of the cultural production of nations. Her colloquium talk is drawn from The Melodrama of Nationhood.

Sponsored by the Civilizational Thinking Research Cluster, with funding from the Ford Foundation.

Friday, February 7 / 12 PM / Oakes Mural Room

Feminist theologian Kathleen Sands is Associate Professor in the Program in the Study of Religion at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She has risen rapidly to prominence as a scholar and professional leader in the field of Religious Studies. She edited the volume God Forbid: Religion and Sex in American Public Life (Oxford, 2000), a compilation of essays introducing scholarly religious studies perspectives on the family, gay rights, abortion, welfare, and prostitution. Sands earned her M.T.S. in theology from Harvard Divinity School and her Ph.D. in theology and ethics from the Boston College Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She received a research fellowship from the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life from the Harvard Divinity School in 1997. During the academic year 2000-2001, she held a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship that allowed her to lay the groundwork for a critical study of religion, paralleling the critical studies of gender, race, and sexuality. She is currently writing a book that applies critical studies in religion to law and policy issues in the U.S., including “faith-based initiatives,” First Nations religious rights, and the rights of sexual minorities.

Sponsored by the Religion and Culture Research Cluster

Tuesday, February 4 / 4 PM / Oakes Mural Room

Yunte Huang is Assistant Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. He received his B.A. from Beijing University and his Ph.D. from SUNY Buffalo. His Chinese-language publications include his own poetry and translations from English, including Language poetry and Ezra Pound’s Cantos. In 1997 he published Shi: A Radical Reading of Chinese Poetry (Roof Press), a multiply versioned and trans-lingual English translation of eleven Chinese poems, seeking to foreground and complicate issues of translation and trans-lingualism. His recent Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature (California, 2002) includes studies of Ernest Fenollosa, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, and Maxine Hong Kingston, juxtaposed with representations of China in ethnographies and in popular culture. His wide range of interests includes American modernism, Asian American literature, twentieth-century American poetry and poetics, translation, and the field imaginaries of Chinese literature and Asian Studies. His talk is part of a larger project, a sustained critique of America-centeredness and standard-English-only norms in Asian American literature.

Sponsored by the Asia-Pacific-America Research Cluster

Friday January 31 / 12 PM / Oakes Mural Room

Carlos Monsiváis is one of Latin America’s foremost cultural critics, and has been for many North Americans the source of some of the most acute and trenchant commentary on Mexican politics, U.S.-Mexico relations, and contemporary Mexican cultural practices. He is the author of Amor Perdido (Lost Love), Escenas de Pudor y Liviandad (Scenes of Frivolity and Shame), Entrada Libre (Free Entry), and Rituales del Caos (The Rituals of Chaos). Mexican Postcards, an English translation of essays on topics such as Latino hip hop, Dolores del Rio, boleros, and melodrama, was published by Verso in 1997. Sr. Monsiváis’s paper discusses post-NAFTA Mexico and questions of cultural nationalism.

“It’s not a bad joke to declare that in the era of postnationalism we live in Post México, a country that survived nationalism, but not the necessity of saving a common language, a common culture, an obligation of social justice. In Post México we face the same problems, but we select the traditions we need, and we decide to survive a racist and overwhelming globalization. In the time of post, Post México is a still a nation, and a cherished one for its people. Post México gringo y querido, as the ancient song declares.”
—from “Will Nacionalism Be Bilingual?”

Participants in the seminar should complete the readings in advance. Readings are available at the Center for Cultural Studies. For campus mailing of readings, please contact Stephanie Casher at scasher@cats.ucsc.edu.

Sr. Monsiváis’s visit to Santa Cruz will also feature a talk in Spanish, “El otro crimen del Padre Amaro,” sponsored by the Chicano/Latino Research Center, on Thursday, January 30, at 4 PM in the Stevenson Fireside Lounge. The Spanish-language talk is on the recent controversial Mexican film, “El crimen del Padre Amaro,” which will be screened on the evening of Tuesday, January 28. Contact the Chicano/Latino Research Center for screening details, clrc@ucsc.edu.

Thursday, November 21 | 4pm | Oakes Mural Room

Aamir Mufti has emerged in recent years as one of the most interesting voices in colonial and postcolonial literary and cultural studies. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, and taught previously at the University of Michigan. His research interests are wide-ranging— Marxism and aesthetics, minority cultures in Europe and elsewhere, exile and displacement, human rights, refugees and the right to asylum, modernism and fascism, language conflicts, and the history of anthropology. Many of these concerns are often considered under the rubric “postcolonial.” Mufti prefers the term by which Edward Said characterized his own critical practice: secular criticism, whose referent is not only the religious/secular divide, but a range of belief systems, including the national. These concerns are elaborated in Mufti’s article, “Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture” (Critical Inquiry, Autumn, 1998), and in his introductory writing and editorial work in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, co-edited with Anne McClintock and Ella Shohat (University of Minnesota, 1997). He has also written on blasphemy and literature, the post-literate public sphere, and the Urdu-language short story. His book, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and Dilemas in Postcolonial Culture, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. His talk this fall comes out of this project, and suggests that the legacy of the Jewish question in Europe informs and shapes the contemporary, crisis of secularism in postcolonial societies.