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.

Thursday, October 12 | Oakes Mural Room | 4:00 PM

David Theo Goldberg comes to the University of California’s Humanities Research Institute from Arizona State University, where he was Director and Professor of the School of Justice Studies, a law and social science program that focuses on issues of social, political, and economic justice, including critical issues of crime, punishment, and imprisonment. In 1999-2000, he was a visiting professor in African American and Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Combining a philosophical approach with critically engaged analyses of race and social justice, Professor Goldberg is the author of Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning(1993); Racial Subjects: Writing on Race in America(1997); and Ethical Theory and Social Issues(1990/1995). His editorial work on race, racialization and multiculturalism includes Anatomy of Racism(1990); Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader(1995); and two forthcoming co-edited collections: Race Critical Theories and Rethinking Postcolonialism. He is the founding co-editor of Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture. His current book, The Racial State(Blackwell 2001), is a study of the centrality of racial configurations to modern state formation and administration. Professor Goldberg argues that modern states assume a racial configuration in becoming modern, and in turn become modern by various and shifting deployments of racial technologies of governance. Even while assuming specific expression in different socio-cultural conditions, any particular racial state is tied into a world order of racial states that offers the conditions of possibility for the particular racial state to exist. Racial states accordingly collapse the distinction between states as forms of governmentality and states as conditions of being. “Raceless States,” a chapter from the book, argues that self-proclaimed raceless states, in their various configurations of colorblindness in the United States, racial democracy in Brazil, nonracialism in South Africa, ethnic pluralism in Europe are in fact late modern modes of the racial state.

Friday, October 11| College Eight 240| 4:30 PM

In a language and a land hostile to its operations, Fredric Jameson has crafted a dialectical critical method of singular power and efficacy. His metacriticism, ranging in register from the inescapable, hortatory “Always Historicize” to the real work of historicizing a wide range of critical, filmic, artistic, and literary genres, has been central in the continuation of a vibrant and engaged Marxist critique. Postmodernism, history, narrative, form itself—he has not only shaped our understanding and conception of these and other fundamental elements of critical discourse, but has made the political stakes of this discourse clear. Jameson’s Marxism is a capacious one—not eclectic, but attentive to the logic of the critical situation. Few critics, for instance, would be capable of making both Adorno and Brecht central to a critical project, as Jameson did in Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic (Verso, 1990) and Brecht and Method (Verso, 1998).

Jameson is the author of seventeen books and dozens of essays. His criticism is the subject of many studies, including books by Perry Anderson, Douglas Kellner, and others. His work has been translated into all the major European and Asian languages. It has been particularly important in Japan, China, and the Chinese-speaking areas. Houxiandaizhuyi he wenhua lilun (Postmodernism and Cultural Theory), published in China in 1987 and reprinted in Hong Kong and Taiwan in 1988 and 1989, had a transformative effect on Chinese critical discourse.

Periodization, historicization, and temporality have always been central concerns in Jameson’s work. His most recent book, A Singular Modernity, is being published this fall by Verso. It examines revivals of discussions of modernity and aesthetic modernism against the perceived disappearance of alternatives to capitalism, offering a meta-critique of the concept and a diagnosis of the stage of capitalism which has given birth to it. His talk at Santa Cruz represents further thinking on these questions.

“What is…identified as the history of ideas is poorly equipped to deal with intellectual regressions of this kind, which can often more plausibly be accounted for by political conjunctures and by institutional dynamics. The defeat of Marxism (if it really was defeated) checked the flow of much contemporary theory at its source, which was the Marxist problematic as such (even if it traveled via the detour of Sartrean existentialism and phenomenology). Meanwhile the professionalization (and increasingly, the privatization) of the university can explain the systematic recontainment of theoretical energy as such, as aberrant in its effects as it is anarchist in its aims. But this is precisely why such reinstutionalizations and their regressions can scarcely be numbered among the consequences of postmodernity, with the latter’s well known rhetoric of the decentered and the aleatory, the rhizomatic, the heterogeneous and the multiple. Nor can one imagine that this was exactly what Jean-Francois Lyotard had in mind when he celebrated the displacement of the “grand narratives” of history by the multiple language games of the postmodern, which surely implied the invention of new games and not the artificial resuscitation of those of the academic yesteryear.”

—from “Regressions of the Current Age,”
Preface to A Singular Modernity.

Wednesday, October 2 | 4 PM | Oakes Mural Room

Professor Ling-chi Wang is a distinguished scholar and activist on Asian American issues. He was at the center of the struggles that shaped the creation of the Ethnic Studies Department at UC Berkeley, and has been an advocate ever since of the department’s social activist agenda, particularly in the wake of the Bakke court decision and other attacks on affirmative action. He has been centrally involved in activism, scholarship and dialogues about the rights of Chinese-speaking students in K-12 education, the housing crisis in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the 1996 campaign finance scandal, and, most recently, issues around the Japanese government’s responsibility to Chinese, Koreans, and other Asian targets of Japanese aggression during World War II. He played a key role as strategist and advisor during former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Wen Ho Lee’s battle against espionage charges. His recent publications in Asian American studies include “Being Used and Being Marginalized in the Affirmative Action Debate: Re-envisioning Multiracial America from an Asian American Perspective” in Asian American Policy Review and “Structure of Dual Domination” in Amerasia Journal.

Originally trained as a specialist in ancient Semitic languages, Professor Wang has also worked extensively on the literature and culture of the Chinese diaspora. His Chinese American Poetry: An Anthology, edited with Henry Yiheng Zhao, was published in 1991 by the University of Washington Press. The Chinese Diaspora: Selected Essays, co-edited with Wang Gungwu, appeared in 1998 (Singapore: Times Academic Press). Professor Wang is currently organizing a November conference on the literatures of the Chinese diaspora. This body of literature is written in several languages: Chinese, English, Spanish, French, Malay, and Tagalog among them. Because this literature does not fall under the rubric of Chinese national literatures, it receives little attention from scholars in Taiwan and China. Treatment of Chinese diasporic literature within the fields of European or American minority literatures rarely allows for attention to the global contexts and transnational articulations of its various national sites. Professor Wang aims at the creation of a new field of study.

Tuesday, May 21 | Oakes Mural Room | 4:00 pm

E. San Juan Jr. is a cultural critic and a renowned scholar in the fields of Filipino and Asian American studies. He has published widely on cultural politics in the Philippines, Marxist theory, Filipino and Filipino-American literature, and postcolonial theory. He has been a Fellow of the Center for the Humanities and Visiting Professor of English at Wesleyan University, and Director of the Philippines Cultural Studies Center. He was also the chair of the Department of Comparative American Cultures at Washington State University, and Professor of Ethnic Studies at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. He received the 1999 Centennial Award for Literature from the Philippines Cultural Center. He is the author of Beyond Postcolonial Theory (St. Martin’s Press, 2000), From Exile to Diaspora (Westview Press, 1998), and After Post-colonialism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). His book Racial Formations/ Critical Transformations (Humanities Press, 1992) received the Distinguished Book Awards from the Association for Asian American Studies
and the Gustavus Myers Human Rights Center, Boston University. With a focus on racism and cultural studies, he will talk about the
impact of the Septmeber 11th events on the race/class dialectic.

Sponsored by Asia-Pacific-America Research Cluster, the Ad Hoc Faculty Committee on Current Events, the Institute for Humanities Research, and the History of Consciousness Department. Asia-Pacific-America Research Cluster contact: Chih-ming Wang, wchimin@hotmail.com.

Lecture  

Melinda Micco
Edward Hohfeld Professor and Associate Professor in Ethnic Studies, Mills College

Don’t Call Us Black . . . We are Seminole Freedman: History and Identity of African and Native Americans

Poetry Reading 

Jennifer Lisa Vest
Poet & Visiting Scholar in the Center for the Study of Women at UCLA

Thursday, May 16 |Oakes College, Mural Room | 4:00 p.m.

Reception afterwards

Melinda Micco (Seminole/Creek/Choctaw) received her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on multiracial identity in American Indian and African American communities, primarily in the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma where she is enrolled. She is working with her tribe to secure a multimillion dollar claim against the United States to return assets for tribal members from mineral rights. She has served as historian and consultant for the tribe and for two documentary films about Black Seminoles. Dr. Micco’s other areas of research include: indigenous women; colonial history of American Indians; film portrayals of people of color; and comparative racial theories. She is the author of numerous articles and essays including: “Inside-Outside Stories and Seminole Racial Posture” in the forthcoming book Pretending To Be Me: Ethnic Transvestism and Cross-Writing, which she co-edits; “To Be or Not to be Indian”: Construction of Identity for Native and African Americans” in African Americans and Native Americans: Explorations in Narrative, Place and Identity (forthcoming); “Empire-Building and the Construction of Black Seminole Identity” in Crossing Waters, Crossing Paths: Black and Indian Journeys in the Americas (forthcoming). She is working on a book entitled A Nation Divided: Black Seminoles in Oklahoma which will examine Black and Indian contemporary communities.

Jennifer Lisa Vest is a Mixedblood (Black and Indian) poet born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. She received her Ph.D. in Native Studies from UC Berkeley. She has been involved in organizing a number of artists’ collectives including the Berkeley group, Women of Mixed Heritage, and the D.C. groups, Daughters of the Dream (for Black women artists) and Divination (for Black women writers). In 1993 she returned to the Bay Area to form Four Corners Collective, a collective of mixed heritage artists. She has had her poetry published in two journals, The Fire This Time, and Ache and in four anthologies including Testimonies; Fast Talk; High Volume; Out of Many, One; and Face America. She has performed in and produced poetry readings and mixed media events throughout the Bay Area, Washington DC, New York, Connecticut, Boston, and Atlanta and was a member of the 1997 San Francisco Slam Team that competed in the nationals. Names, her first collection of poetry, was published by Indigenous Speak in Berkeley, CA in 1997. She is currently working on a second collection of poetry entitled Ancestor Count.
Sponsored by Native Research Cluster

Wednesday, May 8 | Oakes Mural Room | 5:00 pm

Jonathan Z. Smith is Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor of the Humanities College at the University of Chicago,
where he also serves on the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World and the Committee of History of Culture, and is an associate faculty member at the Divinity School. Jonathan Z. Smith is a historian of religions whose research has focused on such wide-ranging subjects as ritual theory, Hellenistic religions, nineteenth-century Maori cults, and the notorious events of Jonestown, Guyana. Some of his works include Map is Not Territory (Brill, 1978); Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (University of Chicago, 1982); and To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (University of Chicago Press, 1987). In his book Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity(University of Chicago, 1990), he demonstrates how four centuries of scholarship on early Christianities manifest a Catholic-Protestant polemic.

Sponsored by the Religion and Culture Research Cluster.

Tuesday, May 7 | Women’s Center | 7:00 PM

Nalo Hopkinson is the author of the short story collection Skin Folk (Warner Aspect, 2001); the science fiction novel Midnight Robber (Warner Aspect, 2000), named New York Times Notable Book of the Year and short listed for the Hugo and Nebula awards; and Brown Girl in the Ring (Warner Aspect, 1998). She also edited Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction (Invisible Cities Press, 2000). Her forthcoming novel, set in Haiti, is entitled Griffonne. 

Contact Escheese@aol.com, sealion@cats.ucsc.edu or maritza@cats.ucsc.edu for more information.

The Research Cluster for the Study of Women of Color in Collaboration and Conflict continues its series,”Turning the Tide: Recent Works by Caribbean Women Writers,” this spring with readings by Nalo Hopkinson.

Monday, April 29 | College Eight, Red Room | 2:30 pm

Lewis has served as music curator for the Kitchen in New York, and has collaborated in the “Interarts Inquiry” and “Integrative Studies Roundtable” at the Center for Black Music Research (Chicago). His published articles on music and cultural studies have appeared in journals such as Black Music Research Journal and Lenox Avenue. His forthcoming book, Power Stronger Than Itself: The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2003. Lewis has served as Darius Milhaud Professor in Composition at Mills College, lecturer in computer music at Simon Fraser University’s Contemporary Arts Summer Institute, and Visiting Artist/Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has received numerous fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and is the 1999 recipient of the Cal Arts/Alpert Award in the Arts. Lewis now serves as Professor of Music in the Critical Studies/Experimental Practices program at the University of California, SanDiego.

Sponsored by the Popular Culture Research Cluster.