Colloquium Series

In Spring 2002, 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 ROOMApril 10
Erica Rand (Art, Bates College, Lewiston Maine)
“The Traffic in my Fantasy Butch: Sex, Money, Immigration, and the Statue of Liberty”

April 17 
Niamh Stephenson (Critical Psychology, University of Western Sydney, Australia)
“Interrupting Experience: Demarcating Neoliberal Technologies of the Self”

April 24 
Hayden White (History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz and Comparative Literature, Stanford University)
“The Illusion of Historical Perspective”

May 1 
Gabriela Arredondo (Latin American and Latina/o Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
“Navigating Ethno-Racial Currents: Mexicans in Chicago, 1917-1939.”

May 8 
Annette Clear (Politics, UC Santa Cruz)
“A Disarticulated State and Its Implications for Democratization in Indonesia”

May 15 
Esther Yau (Film and New Media, Occidental College, Los Angeles)
“The Spectral Present: Can Chinese Film Erotics be Different?”

May 22 
William Nickell (Language program and Literature department, UC Santa Cruz)
“Tolstoy and the Articulate Death”

May 29
Eric Porter (American Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
“Losing Face: Walter White, Hydroquinone, and the ‘Color Line'”

Participants

Erica Rand is Associate Professor of Art at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. She has written widely in the areas of queer theory, gender studies, pedagogy, and lesbian studies. Her many publications include Barbie’s Queer Accessories (Duke, 1995), an original and insightful look at the marketing strategies of the Barbie doll and at queer and other appropriations of Barbie, and many articles on a range of topics, including “Diderot and Girl-Group Erotics” (Eighteenth-Century Studies 25 Summer, 1992). Her talk is from her current book project, tentatively called “The Ellis Island Snow Globe: Sex Money Products Nation,” that concerns artifacts, politics, and practices connected to immigration at Ellis Island in New York.

Niamh Stephenson is an Associate Professor of Critical Psychology at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. Currently on sabbatical, she is a visiting research fellow in the Department of Community Studies here at UC Santa Cruz, where she is working on a book which examines the problem of experience in the social sciences. This work involves an interrogation of the relationships between anti-foundational approaches to experience, subjectivity and collectivity. She has co-edited two books on theoretical psychology and is the author of numerous articles, including “The Question of Collective Subjectivity in Memory-Work” (forthcoming in the International Journal in Critical Psychology). Her publications span her theoretical work on memory and agency and her empirical projects, which include work in the field of HIV/AIDS and on sex education in schools.

Hayden White is Professor Emeritus of History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, and Bonsall Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University (Winter term). His pathbreaking books in the field of “meta-history” have been translated into over ten languages. His latest book is Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Johns Hopkins, 1999). About his talk, which takes as its point of departure E. H. Gombrich’s studies of perspectival painting, he writes, ” I ask how does one draw a line between the past and the present? What kind of problems does the study of the recent past present that the study of the remote past does not? Are these problems a result of the feeling that we cannot get “historical perspective” on the present, the recent past, or emergent reality? I ask what is the relationship between recent (or present) events and events more remote in time (and space).”

Gabriela Arredondo is Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latina/o Studies at UC Santa Cruz, where she is also on the steering committee of the Chicano/Latino Research Center. She works on U.S. social history, Chicana/o history, comparative Latina/o histories, gender and racial formations, US-Mexico transnationalisms, and comparative im/migrations. She is a co-editor of Chicana Feminisms: Disruptions in Dialogue (Duke, 2002). Her articles include “Cartographies of Americanisms: Possibilities For Transnational Identities, Chicago, 1916-1939, ” (forthcoming Garcia, et al., eds., Geographies of Latinidad: Mapping Latina/o Studies Into the Twenty First Century). Her talk is from her current book project, “Mexican Chicago: Negotiating Race, Ethnicity and Identity, 1916-1939.”

Annette Clear Assistant Professor of Politics at UC Santa Cruz. Her recently completed PhD. dissertation (Columbia, 2002), “Democracy and Donors in Indonesia,” has been nominated for several awards, including the Bancroft Award. . Its analysis focuses on how different donor strategies of three primary donors – the United States, Japan, and the Netherlands – have influenced the process of democratization in Indonesia. Professor Clear has had extensive experience in the global non-governmental realm, holding positions with the Asia Foundation in Tokyo, Phnom Penh, and San Francisco, monitoring the 1999 parliamentary elections in Indonesia, as well as observing the East Timorese ballot for the Carter Center for Human Rights. 

Esther Yau is Associate Professor of Film and New Media at Occidental College in Los Angeles, and is one of the most important scholars writing on contemporary Chinese and Hong Kong cinema. She is editor of At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World (2001) and author of many essays on mainland Chinese and Hong Kong cinemas. She is currently working on a study of Chinese Cinema entitled “Shaking the Great Divide: Violence and Vision in Chinese Cinema. ” Her talk discusses an enigmatic Chinese film, Wushan Yunyu (Rainclouds Over Wushan, 1995) set in a town by the Yangzi River will be permanently submerged as the result of the Three Gorges Dam project.

William Nickell is lecturer in Russian language and literature at UC Santa Cruz, having received his PhD in Slavic Literatures at UC Berkeley in 1998. His published articles, written in Russian and in English, include “The Death of Tolstoy and the Genre of the Public Funeral in Russia.” (Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, Winter 2000). His talk is from his current book project, “Tolstoy in the Public Domain: His Death as a National Narrative,” about which he writes, “I approach Tolstoy not as an author, but as the subject of a public narrative regarding his death, and describe how the tropes of that narrative stimulated public discourse and reveal the various collective investments that were made in Tolstoy as a celebrity.”

Eric Porter Assistant Professor of American Studies at UC Santa Cruz, and was formerly on the American Studies faculty at the Unversity of New Mexico. He works in the fields of African American history, comparative race and ethnicity, and jazz studies. His first book, What Is This Thing Called Jazz? African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists, will be published this year by the University of California Press. His talk is part of a larger project exploring issues around race and science in black intellectual and popular discourse during the 1940s. He writes that “the project explores divergent black racial formations at this moment, as well as various ways black subjects pondered the potential freedoms that scientific ‘proof’ of the insubstantiality of racial categories might offer.”

Colloquium Series

In Winter 2002, 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 16
(English, The Ohio State University)
“Zones of Privacy: Privacy in American Law and Memoirs, 1850 to the Present”

January 23
Dimitris Papadopoulos
(Psychology, Free University, Berlin)
“Bombing as Usual: Subjectivity, Liberalism, and Technostructural Violence”

January 30
Gary Lease
(History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz)
“The Agony of the German-Jew: Hans-Joachim Schoeps, Cultural Identification, and Disintegration in 20th-Century Europe”

February 6
Wendy Chapkis
(Sociology and Women’s Sutides, University of Southern Maine)
“Protecting Innocents, Punishing Immigrants: Trafficking, Migration, and the Law”

February 13
Richard Rodríguez
(Chicano Studies, California State University at Los Angeles)
“Serial Kinship: Representing the Family in Early Chicano Publications”

February 20
Paul Ortiz
(Community Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
“Rethinking Resistance in the Jim Crow South”

February 27
Daniel Selden
(Literature, UC Santa Cruz)
“Tributary Economies: Literature and Ideology'”

March 6
Catherine Ramírez
(American Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
“Talking (Back): Mexican American Women and Caló”

Participants

Wendy Chapkis is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at the University of Southern Maine. Chapkis, who is the author of the award-winning book, Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labor (Routledge 1997), received her Ph.D. in Sociology from UCSC in 1995. She is currently a visit-ing scholar in the Department of Women’s Studies. Of her collo-quium talk she writes, “In the fall of 2000, the U.S. House and Senate joined together to unanimously pass legislation (HR 3244) providing legal residency and welfare benefits to undocumented workers and prostitutes. Not surprisingly, not all undocumented workers qualified, only those understood to have been forced to violate U.S. borders and laws as victims of ‘severe forms of trafficking.’ This presentation examines whether HR 3244 is a departure from — or conversely of a piece with — other recent U.S. immigration legislation notable primarily for its hostility to immigrants and to the poor.”

Leigh Gillmore is Associate Professor in the English Department at the Ohio State University and Research Scholar at the Center for Cultural Studies. Her research has largely centered on feminist theory and autobiography. Her most recent book is The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Cornell, 2001). In recent years, Professor Gillmore has been working on representations of sexuality in America, drawing on and connecting obscenity, privacy law, and experimental narrative. Her currentproject, she writes, “begins in an effort to understand the crafting of a legal subject in the United States endowed with privacy but not liberty…. The ironic legacy of privacy in the U.S. is that it can be extended to citizens in such a way as to reduce their liberty even as it appears to expand it…. I anticipate that legal texts will reveal places where privacy’s promise was curtailed, where privacy was welded to unfreedom to produce partial citizenship, where the problem is not privacy per se, but privacy in the absence of power.”

Gary Lease is currently Professor and Chair of History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, where his work has focused primarily on the theory of religion and contemporary efforts to disengage the academic study of religion from various religious claims and community practices. At the same time, Lease also works in German studies, concentrating on the phenomenon of German Judaism as well as the institutional and cultural history of Germany over the past two centuries. He is the author of “Odd Fellows” in the Politics of Religion: Modernism, National Socialism, and German Judaism (Berlin 1995), and of “The History of ‘Religious’ Consciousness and the Diffusion of Culture: Strategies for Surviving Dissolution”, Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 20 (1994). colloquium talk is based on a forthcoming biography of Hans-Joachim Schoeps.

Paul Ortiz is Assistant Professor in the Department of Community Studies at UC Santa Cruz, where he teaches courses on Theory and Practice of Resistance and Social Movements, the African Diaspora, and C.L.R. James. He is co-editor of Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life In The Segregated South (New York: New Press, 2001). Ortiz is completing a manuscript entitled “Invincible Against All Forms of Injustice and Oppression”: The African American Freedom Struggle in Florida, 1877-1920. His new project is a history of the Oilfield Workers’ Trade Union of Trinidad and Tobago, and the role it played in anti-colonialism, politics, and transnational unionism from 1936 to1989.

Dimitris Papadopoulosis Assistant Professor of Devel-opmental and Theoretical Psychology at the Free University in Berlin, Germany, and a Resident Scholar at the Center for Cultural Studies. His publications include his 1998 doctoral dissertation, a study of Russian psychologist L.S. Vygotsky, a co-edited volume on the culture concept in psychology (2001), and numerous articles, in English and German, on subjectivity, critical psychology, and activity theory. While at the Center, he is writing a book on the sociohistorical foundations of developmental rationality: an analysis of the historical and cultural situated-ness of developmentalism against the background of the neo-liberal, transnational, and biotechnological reorganization of social space. His colloquium talk is based on a project tracing the interdependences between theory construction in the social sciences and the social and technoscientific transformations in the post-World War II period. It focuses on the concatenation of neo-liberal governmentality, new forms of violence in the nineties, and the concept of subjectivity as utilized in the social sciences.

Catherine S. Ramirez is a Research Fellow in the Depart ment of American Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Her research inter-ests include Chicana/o literature, history, and culture; gender stu-dies and feminist theory; cultural studies; and comparative ethnic studies. She is the author of “Crimes of Fashion: The Pachuca and Chicana Style Politics” in Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 2:2 (forthcoming, March 2002), and is col-laborating with Eric Porter on a project on black and brown sci-ence fiction and popular science. Her talk explores the performance and performativity of gender, race, and class via women’s use of taboo languages, including caló (the “pachuco patois”), in the Sleepy Lagoon trial of 1942 and Chicana literature from the 1970s and 1980s. It is excerpted from a book project on the par-ticipation of Mexican American women in the zoot subculture of the early 1940s and the mean-ings that Chicana and Chicano writers and artists have ascribed to the figures of the pachuco and pachuca and the World War II period.

Richard T. Rodriguezrecently received his Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness from UC Santa Cruz, and is Assistant Professor of Chicano Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. He is currently revising a manuscript on the symbolic function of the family in relation to nationalism and masculinity in Chicano/a literary, visual, and popular culture, as well as projects which explore the connections between Chicano/a studies and cultural studies and Chicano/a working-class identities and community formations. He recently co-curated the exhibition “Gender, Genealogy, and Counter Memory: Remembering Latino/a Cultural Histories” at MACLA in San Jose.

Daniel Selden is Associate Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz, where he teaches courses in Greek and Latin liter-atures, Hellenistic culture, the classical tradition, history of criticism, and literary theory. He has just returned from two years at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, where he worked with the faculty there on Afro-Asiatic languages, literatures, and cultures. His most recent publications and lectures have dealt with the classical Egyptian backgrounds to Hellenistic Greek poetry. His current research involves the structure of tributary empires in the ancient world (Persian, Roman, Byzantine, Islamic) and the interplay between economy, philosophy, and literature.