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.

Tuesday, November 19|Oakes Mural Room|4:00 PM

Vicente Rafael, Professor of Department of Communication at UC San Diego, will give a talk titled “The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines”. This talk explores the roles of the cell phone and the crowd as two related but distinct technics in conjuring up a kind of messianic politics during “People Power II,” the recent civilian led coup that ousted Joseph “Erap” Estrada from the presidency in January of 2001. It inquires into the ways by which a middle class politics of wishfulness comes to rest on the imagined capacities of technologies to communicate at a distance and call forth, as well as defer, the arrival of justice. Finally, it asks how the promise of telecommunication holds forth the possibility of momentarily flattening social hierarchy, a possibility simultaneously longed for and dreaded by those most anxious to chart the course of this promise. Prof. Rafael holds a Ph.D in history from Cornell University and has research interests in comparative colonialism, nationalism technology and modernity, and the politics and culture of the Philippines and Filipino Americans. His recent publications include White Love and the Other Events in Filipino History (Durham: Duke UP, 2000), Figures of Criminality in Indonesia, the Philippines and Colonial Vietnam (Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 1999), and Discrepant Histories: Traslocal Essays on Filipino Cultures (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1999).

Monday, October 28
4pm, Oakes Mural Room

The Religion and Culture Cluster continues its lecture series this fall with a presentation by Professor Gauri Viswanathan, whose fields of interest are intellectual history; education, religion, and culture; 19th-century British and colonial cultural studies; and the history of disciplines. Her recent book, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton, 1998), is a major reinterpretation of conversion. Centering on colonial subjects in British India and on minority communities within Britain, she sees in religious conversion both a mode of resistance and an alternative epistemology. Outside the Fold won numerous prizes, including the 1999 Harry Levin Prize awarded by the American Comparative Literature Association for best book in comparative literature, the James Russell Lowell Prize awarded by the Modern Language Association for best work of literary criticism, and the 2000 Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Prize awarded by the Association for Asian Studies. Her first book was Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (Columbia, 1989), which demonstrated how the colonial and imperial context shaped the formation of English literary study as a field of knowledge. Professor Viswanathan recently guest-edited a special issue of Ariel: A Review of International English Literature on “Institutionalizing English Studies: the Postcolonial/Post-independence
Challenge”. She has received Guggenheim, NEH, Mellon, and American Institute of Indian Studies fellowships, and is currently research collaborator on a major international project on globalization and autonomy, based in Toronto and Hamilton, Canada.

Co-sponsored by the History of Consciousness Department

Two Lectures
Wednesday, October 16, 5-7pm
Wednesday, October 23, 5-7pm
Kresge 159

The Center for Cultural Studies is pleased to present a two-part talk by Wlad Godzich, who has over the last decade been a central figure in a number of scholarly discussions of globalization, humanism, and literature. Indeed, many of the concerns shaping Dean Godzich’s recent work on the global are present in his early work as a medievalist, where he traced the concurrent emergence of vernaculars, print technology, and political administration. With the 1988 publication of his essay “Emergent Literature and the Field of Comparative Literature” (reprinted in Godzich, The Culture of Literacy, Harvard, 1994), Professor Godzich explored an ongoing concern with the problematic of emergence, which has led not only to reconceptualizations of literary history, but to dialogues with natural and social scientists engaged in similar work on new forms of knowledge.

About his talks this quarter, Dean Godzich writes:
“The two talks bring together two lines of research I have been working on during the past decade. The first has focused on the category of the subject in the context of western modernity. It is my contention that the modern subject is characterized by a homology between discourse and action. In the first talk I will present a synoptic view of this homology and argue that it is the ground upon which the strong subject of modernity has been built. In the second talk I will turn to my other concern: globalization and its significance for scholars in the human sciences. I will use the synopsis presented in the first talk to identify areas in which the subject is affected. Some of these areas will be analyzed in some detail, others identified as research topics for the future. A surprising outcome of the juxtaposition of these two research projects has been the re-emergence of imagination as a central and dynamic category for thinking the subject in the context of globalization.”

Wlad Godzich has taught at Columbia, Yale, the University of Minnesota, the University of Toronto, and the Université de Montréal, and has held many visiting appointments in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Before coming to UC Santa Cruz he was at the Université de Genève (Switzerland) where he held the Chairs of Emergent Literature and Comparative Literature. He is the author of several books, notably The Emergence of Prose (Minnesota, 1987) and The Culture of Literacy (Harvard, 1994). He was co-editor of the acclaimed 88–volume series Theory and History of Literature, published by the University of Minnesota Press.