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May 1/May 24, 2001 – Civilizational Thinking Seminar

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Michael Shanks
(Classics and Cultural Anthropology, Stanford)

35 Moments in The Construction of an Archaeological Site. Or, the Impossibility of Archaeology

Tuesday, May 1 | Oakes Mural Room | 4:00 PM

Professor Shanks is an archaelogist who, in his own words, “taking the broadest view of the subject, works on what is left of the past.” From 1993-98 he was Head of Archaeology at the University of Wales, Lampeter and helped build there a department with a new interdisciplinary agenda. In seven books and other publications, the latest of which is Theater/Archaeology, forthcoming from Routledge-“the (re)articulation of ruin/trace as real-time event”-he has tried to contribute to a critique of anthropological archaeology which would radically revise it as a disciplinary and cultural field.

 

Stephen Caton
(Anthropology, Harvard University)

America–the Land Without History

Thursday, May 24 | Oakes Mural Room | 4:00 PM

Professor Caton is a Middle East specialist and anthropological linguist by training, but of late has become interested in writing a biography of one of his ancestors, a prominent lawyer and judge who lived in the midwest in the nineteenth-century United States. This paper examines his amateur scientific writings, along with a number of other, more professional pieces written about the same time by the noted anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan and the celebrated historian Frederick Jackson Turner, and examines the way in which the categories of “science,” and particularly of “natural history,” were constructed at the time. It will be argued that the production of what was then called scientific knowledge is complexly related to issues of regionalism and civilization as discussed in this seminar.

The Civilizational Thinking project is supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation.

 

Spring 2001 Colloquium Series

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Colloquium Series

In Spring 2001, 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 4
Radhika Mongia
(Women’s Studies, UC Santa Cruz )
Rethinking State Sovereignty or, Colonial Genealogies of the Modern State 

April 11
Anjali Arondekar
(Women’s Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
The Story of an India-Rubber Dildo: Locations of Desiere in Colonial Pornography 

April 18
Frazer Ward
(Art History, Maryland Institute, College of Art)
Notes on Approaching Marina Abramovic’s Rhythm 

April 25
Caroline Streeter
(UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Sociology and the Center for Cultural Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
“I’m thinking if that Oprah got her a gun…”: African American Celebrity and Popular Culture in Gayl Jones’s ‘Mosquito and The Healing'”

May 2 
John Dean
(American Literature and Cultural Studies, University of Versailles St. Quentin en Yvelines)
How Twentieth Century American Subcultures Have Contributed to the Nation’s Pantheon of Popular Heroes

May 9
Bettina Aptheker
Memoir, Memory, and the Collective (De)Construction of Women’s History

May 16
Bob White
(Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz )
Cuban ‘Rumba’ and Other Cosmopolitanisms in the Belgian Congo (1949-1999)

May 23
Christopher Breu
(English, Illinois State University)
Come Fly With Me: Frank Sinatra and the Short American Century 

 

Participants

Radhika Mongia is Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies, UCSC. She is currently working on a book-length project, titled Genealogies of Globalization: Migration, Colonialism, and the State. The project focuses on the emergence of state technologies for controlling international migration examining, in particular, how the distinction between ‘legal’ and’illegal’ migration is historically produced. “Race, Natonality, Mobility: A History of the Passport,” a portion of this research, appeared in Public Culture, in Public Culture in 1999.

Anjali Arondekar is Assistant Professor in Women’s Studies at UCSC, having recently arrived from Smith College where she was the Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow (1999-2001). Her research interests include queer studies, Victorian studies, critical race studies and post-colonial theory. She has published variously in the Journal of Asian Studies,Symploke, Post-Modern Culture and The Village Voice. Her most recent article, “Lingering Pleasures, Perverted Texts,” is forthcoming in collection entitled Queer Texts/Colonial Texts(University of Minnesota Press, 2002). She is currently co-editing a collection, Queer Postcolonialities: Borders, Limits and Margins, with Professor Geeta Patel, and also working on a book manuscript titled A Perverse Empire: Victorian Sexuality and the Indian Colony.

Frazer Ward is Assistant Professor of Art History at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, and currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Stanford University. He is working on a project dealing with Vietnam-era performance art, examining the ethical implications of the ways in which publics constitute themselves around violence and its representations. He has recently written an essay surveying Vito Acconci’s career, an essay on Chris Burden’s Shoot for the journal October, and guest-edited an issue of the journal Documents on the topic of privacy.

Caroline Streeter is a UC President�s Postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Cultural Studies and the Department of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. She received her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality from UC Berkeley in 2000. Her postdoctoral research investigates how cultural work by black women negotiates the complex terrain of consumption in mass commercial culture. Shehas been active in the area of mixed-race scholarship, and her areas of research interest include narratives of race mixing in African American literature, film, and visual art, along with the politicized emergence of mixed-race identities i the post-Civil Right era. She is published in The Multiracial Experience (Sage, 1996) and has an essay in the forthcoming New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century.

John Dean is on the faculty of the University of Versailles St. Quentin en Yvelines, where he teaches American literature and cultural studies. He has held research positions at the University of Strasbourg and the Kennedy Institute for American Studies in Berlin. His publications include European Readings of American Popular Culture (1996) and Restless Wanderers: Shakespeare and the Pattern of Romance(1979), several volumes on the United States published in French, a large number of articles on French and English language science fiction, as well as poetry, fiction, scholarly articles, and journalism on a wide range of topics. While at the Center this spring, he will work on several projects, among them a book on the hero and heroine in American popular culture.

Bettina Aptheker is Professor and Chair of Women’s Studies. Her books include: The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis, second edition, Cornell University Press, 1999; Tapestries of Life: Women’s Work, Women’s Consciousness and the Meaning of Daily Experience, University of Massachusetts Press, 1989; Woman’s Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex and Class in American History, University of Massachusetts Press, 1982. She is near completion of work on a memoir.

Bob White, Assistant Professor in Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz, specializes in popular culture and politics in francophone Africa. His primary research examines the production and meaning of popular dance music in Congo-Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo), where he conducted fieldwork and worked as a musician in a local band from 1995-1996. He has published several articles on this subject: “Modernity’s Trickster: ‘Dipping’ and ‘Throwing’ in Congolese Popular Dance Music” (forthcoming in Research in African Literatures, special issue on performance), and “Soukouss or Sell-Out? Congolese Popular Dance Music on the World Market,” in Commodities and Globalization: Anthropological Perspectives, Angelique Haugerud, M. Priscilla Stone, and Peter D. Little (eds.), forthcoming.

Christopher Breu is an Assistant Professor of English at Illinois State University, where he teaches courses in twentieth-century American literature, popular culture, and critical theory. He is currently completing work on a book manuscript entitled Hard-Boiled Masculinities: Fantasizing Gender in American Literature and Popular Culture, 1920-45. In addition, he has published on a diverse array of subjects including Maryse Cond�’s _I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem and contemporary techno and indie-rock. His current work on Frank Sinatra represents the beginning of a larger project on internal struggles over politics and culture in the United States and their relationship to the emergence of the U.S. as a global hegemon in the middle years of the twentieth century.

April 24, 2001 – Istvan Rev: "Hypnosis and the Hungarian Revolution"

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Tuesday, April 24 | Oakes Mural Room | 4:00 PM

 

Istvan Rev is Professor of History and Political Science at Central European University, Budapest, where he is also the Academic Director of the Open Society Archive. He has been a visiting faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley on several occasions. Since the early 1980s Rev has published widely on the political cultural, and architectural history of Hungary and other Eastern bloc countries. Since the political transformations of 1989, he has emerged as one of the most highly regarded writers on issues of post-socialism, publishing on various dimensions of the transition-such as official and popular memory, state discourse and popular resistance, andthe status of socialist-era monuments-in journals such as Daedalus, Dissent, and Representations. His articles include . “The Advantages of being Atomized” (1987), “In Mendacio Veritas” (1991), and The Archeology of Resurrection (1991) . He is currently completing a book for Stanford University Press on retroactive justice.

 

April 19/May 4, 2001 – Visual and Performance Studies Speaker Series: Performing the Image

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John Lechte (Senior Lecturer, Sociology, Macquarie University) 
The Time-Image and Seduction
Thursday, April 19 | Social Sciences II, Room 265 | 4:00PM

 

Professor Lechte has published numerous articles and books on Julia Kristeva, psychoanalysis and culture, and Australian history. His books include:  Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Semiotics to Postmodernism (1994); After the Revolution: On Kristeva (1998). Presently, he completing a book called On the Imaginary: Its Life and Death. His paper will examine the time image in light of Deleuze’s work.

Peggy Phelan (Performance Studies, Tisch School, New York University) 
The Photography of Francesca Woodman: Death and the Image One More Time
Friday, May 4 | Kresge 159 | 4:00PM

 

Professor Phelan works at the intersection of performance, visuality and gender. Her books include Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993) and Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (1996). She has co-edited two collections: Acting Out: Feminist Performances and The Ends of Performance(1998). Phelan is writing a book entitled:  Death in America: Ronald Reagan and Andy Warhol. She is currently a Visiting Professor at Stanford University.

 

April 12, 2001 – Mary E. John: "Is Nature: Culture as Culture: Politics? Transnational Feminisms and South Asian Predicaments"

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Thursday, April 12 | Oakes Mural Room | 12:00 PM

 

This talk moves forward from the arguments of “discrepant dislocations”, first explored in John’s (1996) and draws on her current participation in feminist debates in India. The nature/culture problematic has been paradigmatic for western feminism. It has enabled major advances in feminist theory, of which the sex/gender distinction would be just one. This problematic constitutes the staple of feminist theory in much of the world, including India. Theorizing the subject of “women,” the women’s movement and feminism over the last two centuries in India, however, brings a somewhat different problematic to the fore, best captured by the tensions and conflicts between culture and politics. Taking its cue from problems and impasses besetting the women’s movement in India today (such as the question of a uniform civil code and political representation for women) this paper argues for the urgency of comparative and transnational feminisms to tackle the problems of the present.

Mary E. John completed her Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness Program in 1991. She is currently Senior Fellow at the Centre for Women’s Development Studies, New Delhi, India. Her publications include A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of Modern India (co-edited with Janaki Nair, Kali for Women. New Delhi, 1998 and Zed Press, 2000). She is currently completing a project on the history of women’s studies in India.

 

April 11, 2001 – Sheila Rowbotham: "Promise of a Dream"

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Wednesday, April 11 | Kresge 159 | 7:00 PM

Sheila Rowbotham is one of the leading British socialist feminists of the past 30 years. She is the author of numerous books, including Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World (1973),  Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women’s Oppression and the Fight Against It (1973),  The Past is Before Us: Feminism in Action Since the 1960s (1989), and more recently, Women Encounter Technology: Changing Patterns of Employment in the Third World (1995), and Threads Through Time: Writings on History and Autobiography (1999).

She is also the author of a memoir, “Promise of a Dream,” recently published by University of Manchester Press. During her visit to UCSC, she will read from the memoir and hold a booksigning.

Co-sponsored by the Women’s Studies Department, the Institute for Humanities Research, the Center for Cultural Studies, and the Women’s Center.

 

March 8, 2001 – Rebecca Solnit: "Annihilating Time and Space: Some Notes on Place, Pace and Technology"

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Thursday, March 8 | Oakes Mural Room | 4:00PM

 

This talk with slides draws on Rebecca Solnit’s current book in progress, which traces the genesis of the Hollywood film industry and of Silicon Valley through an examination of transformations in the technologies of everyday life dating from the 1870s. The talk also draws on her two most recently published books, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Viking, 2000), and Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism (Verso, 2000). At the center of all three books is a concern with pace in contemporary life: the acceleration of everyday life through technology, the rhetoric celebrating efficiency and convenience as ultimate ideals, and with the pace at which place is experienced or obliterated. Solnit’s current project examines phenomena ranging from the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 to Richard Misrach’s photographs of race cars in the Bonneville Salt Flats– where the world’s speed records were set– to the spread of Starbucks and pedestrian fatalities in contemporary San Francisco.

Rebecca Solnit is a writer, art critic, museum exhibition curator, and political activist. She won wide acclaim and recognition for her 1994 book, Savage Dreams : A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West (Vintage). Centering on counter-histories of Yosemite National Park and the landscape of Nevada’s nuclear test sites, Savage Dreams is a destabilizing and demystifying intervention into the tragic and romantic mythopoetics of place in the American West. Her 1997 A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland (Verso) is a travel narrative which navigates through ideas about remembering and forgetting, identity and landscape, and patterns of movement, from colonialism to tourism and nomadism. Her recently published Wanderlust, Solnit writes, is a history of “walking as a cultural activity, from the peripatetic philosophers of ancient Greece to the contemporary paleontological arguments about bipedal evolution, from an aesthetic pleasure in eighteenth-century England to the growth of politically active walking clubs at the turn of the century and the birth of the outdoor industry and climbing gyms, as well as histories of the rise and fall of urban walking as a pleasure, pedestrian uprisings, and the gender politics of public space.” Hollow City combines text by Solnit with photo essays by photographer Susan Schwartzenberg, and traces the devastation that has come in the wake of San Francisco’s dot-com fueled gentrification: skyrocketing residential and commercial rents that are driving out artists, activists, and the poor, the homogenization of the city’s appearance, industries and population, the decay of public life and the erasure of the sites of civic memory.

 

Winter 2001 Colloquium Series

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Colloquium Series
In winter 2001, 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 10
Earl Jackson
(Literature, UC Santa Cruz )
Toward a Post-Wave East Asian Cinema 

January 17
Wlad Godzich
(Dean of Humanities, UC Santa Cruz)
Reconstructing the Subject  

January 27
Margaret Jolly
(Gender Relations Centre, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University)
Looking Back? Gender, Race and Sexuality in Pacific Cinema  

January 31
Dana Frank
(American Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
GIRL STRIKERS OCCUPY CHAIN STORE, WIN BIG: the Detroit Woolworth’s Sit-Down Strike 

February 7 
Ann Saetnan
(Sociology and Political Science, Norweigan University of Science and Technology)
Elicited Whispers, Broken Sound Barriers  

February 14
Rob Wilson
(Literature, UC Santa Cruz)
Global/local rumblings inside Empire: Gladiator and sublime spectacle 

February 21
Marcial Gonzalez
(English, UC Berkeley )
Fredric Jameson’s Arrested Dialectic and the ‘Absent First Step of Renewed Praxis’ 

February 28
Alexandra Stern
(History, UC Santa Cruz)
Modern Racial Formations: Interrogating the History of Eugenics in California  

March 7
Renya Ramirez
(American Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Sarah Morgan’s Government Story: A Redefinition of Culture, Community and Citizenship 
 

Participants

Earl Jackson is Associate Professor of Literature at UCSC. His research interests include new Asian cinema, science fiction, suspense, and genre fiction, gay male sexuality, digital media, and Japanese literature and poetics. He has published poetry, fiction, and many articles, and is involved in numerous web-based critical and literary activities. His books include Fantastic Living: The Speculative Autobiographies of Samuel Delany(forthcoming, Oxford) and Strategies of Deviance: Essays in Gay Male Representational Agency(Indiana, 1994). His web projects can be found at www.letsdeviant.com and www.anotherscene.com. Professor Jackson’s talk is from a current project on New Asian cinema.

Wlad Godzich is Dean of Humanities at UCSC, having recently arrived from the University of Geneva, where he was Professor of English and Chair of Emergent Literature. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including The Culture of Literacy(Harvard, 1994), Philosophie einer un-europ�ischen Literaturkritik(Philosophy of a Non-European Literary Criticism, Wilhelm Fink, 1988), and An Essay in Prosaics: The Emergence of Prose in the French Middle Ages(co-authored with Jeffrey Kittay, Minnesota, 1987). Dean Godzich’s current research interests include theories and modes of subjectivity, globalization and culture, and the field he founded: emergent literature.

Dana Frank is a Professor of American Studies at UCSC, where she teaches labor history, political economy, race, gender, and the cultural politics of class. She is the author of Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism(Beacon Press, 1999), which was excerpted in the Washington Postand won the Book of the Year Award from the International Labor History Association. She is also the author of Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919-1929(Cambridge, 1994), and reviews books regularly for The Nation. Her current project, on the Detroit Woolworth’s sit-down strike of 1937, is part of a forthcoming book with Robin D. G. Kelley and Howard Zinn, in which each author tells the story of a different strike.

Margaret Jolly is Professor and Head of the Gender Relations Project at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University. She has been at ANU since 1989. One of the world’s distinguished scholars of Pacific Island anthropology and cultural studies, Professor Jolly has published a wide-ranging series of books and articles, including Women of the Place: Kastom, Colonialism and Gender in Vanuatu (1994). A recent manuscript, An Ocean of Difference: Colonialisms, Maternalisms, and Feminisms in the Pacific, is under review. While at the Center, Professor Jolly will pursue research on gender, indigeneity, and diaspora in the Pacific with a particular emphasis on cinema and the visual arts.

Ann Saetnan is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. Her research focuses on science and technology as they relate to gender and to work. Her co-edited volume, Localizing and Globalizing Reproductive Technologies,was just published by Ohio State University Press. While at the Center, Professor Saetnan will work on her new book project, provisionally titled Ultrasonic Discourse,a mapping of the debates surrounding the use of ultrasound in pregnancy in Norway.

Rob Wilson joins the UCSC faculty this quarter as Professor of Literature, after having been a faculty member at the University of Hawaii at Manoa since 1976. He is one of the world�s most prominent scholars of Hawaiian and Pacific literatures and cultural production, as well as of American literature and poetics. His books include Reimagining the American Pacific: From �South Pacific� to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond(Duke, 2000), American Sublime: The Genealogy of a Poetic Genre(Wisconsin, 1991), as well as the co-edited volumes Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics and Identity in the New Pacific(Rowman and Littlefield, 1999) and Global/Local: Cultural Production in the Transnational Imaginary.

Marcial Gonzalez received his Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University in 2000, and became an Assistant Professor in the English Department at UC Berkeley in the fall of 2000. He works on Chicana/o literary and cultural studies, and is currently working on a book manuscript titled Postmodernism, History and the Chicana/o Novel: Toward a Dialectical Literary Criticism,a study of several important Chicana/o novels published from 1970-1992, which includes an argument that the postmodern critique of history has limited the potential for Chicana/o studies to develop an effective social criticism. An earlier version of his talk this quarter won the Michael Sprinker Award for best dissertation chapter from the Marxist Literary Group of the MLA in June 2000.

Alexandra Stern is Assistant Professor of History at UCSC, having completed her Ph.D. in History at the University of Chicago in 1999. From 1999-2000 she was interim director of the Historical Center for Health Sciences at the University of Michigan. Her work is on the history of science and technology, specifically eugenics. Recent articles include “Buildings, Boundaries, and Blood: Medicalization and Nation-Building on the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1910-1930” (Hispanic American Historical Review, Feb. 1999) and “Responsible Mothers and Normal Children: Eugenics, Welfare, and Nationalism in Post-Revolutionary Mexico, 1900-1940” (Journal of Historical Sociology,Fall 1999). Her talk is from a book in progress on eugenics and the U.S.-Mexican borderland.

Renya Ramirez is Assistant Professor of American Studies. She received her Ph.D. from the School of Education at Stanford University in 1999, and her Masters degree in Anthropology from Stanford in 1998. She has published several articles and given many papers on contemporary Native American issues, several of which draw on her fieldwork, which explored Native American healing practices and community formation in San Jose, California. Among the articles is “Healing Through Grief: Urban Indians Re-imagining Culture and Community in San Jose, California” (Journal of American Indian Culture and Research,1999). Her work is part of an attempt to establish new frameworks for the study of urban Indians.

February 8, 2001 – Sheldon Pollock: "Cosmopolitanism and the Vernacular"

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Thursday, February 8| Oakes Mural Room | 4:00 PM

Reading:“Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History,” from Public Culture 12.3 (2000)

Sheldon Pollock is George V. Bobrinskoy Professor of Sanskrit and Indic Studies at the University of Chicago. His work over the past ten years has sought to illuminate the relationship between culture and polity in precapitalist South Asia. His nearly complete book on this subject–The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit and Power in India to 1500— is forthcoming from UC Press. These same concerns motivated a seven-year collaborative research project Professor Pollock just concluded with seventeen scholars from India, Europe, and the US on Literary Cultures in History (in press). His next project addresses the state of Indian learning on the threshold of western modernity; the first component is a small cooperative initiative among eight scholars from Europe and the US called Sanskrit Knowledge Systems on the Eve of Colonialism(1550-1750), and is expected to run from 2001-2004. Professor Pollock’s work on Indian literary and vernacular cultures s is central to an understanding of global literacy and vernacularization, and has been of great importance to scholars both within and without South Asian Studies.

 

February 1-2, 2001 – Kuan-hsing Chen: Lecture & Seminar

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Lecture:
Club 51: On the Question of the Culture of U.S. Imperialism
Thursday, February 1/ 4:00PM/ Oakes Mural Room

Seminar:
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Politics and Prospects
Friday, February 2/ 10:00AM-12:00PM/ Oakes Mural Room

Seminar Reading: Editorial Statement from the inaugural issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Movements.
Copies of the readings are available to the UCSC community at the Center for Cultural Studies office or may be requested via email cult@hum.ucsc.edu). Please make email requests at least one week in advance.

Kuan-hsing Chen is Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Coordinator of the Center for Asia-Pacific/Cultural Studies at National Tsing-Hua University in Taiwan. He held previous appointments at City University of New York and UC Berkeley, and is founding editor of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Movements, a Routledge journal that began publication in 1999. His publications, in English and Chinese, consist of work in cultural studies, including a volume on Stuart Hall, and on imperialism and postcolonial criticism. His recent edited volume, Trajectories: Cultural Studies Inter-Asia(Routledge, 2000, in English and Chinese), has contributed to the reshaping of cultural study in East Asia, and has created important common ground for scholars from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, China, Australia, the US, and elsewhere in the Asia Pacific region. Kuan-hsing Chen’s work has treated subjects as diverse as karaoke, Taiwanese new cinema, Samuel Huntington’s civilizationalist work, and new Taiwanese subjectivity. Forthcoming books include Intellectual Moods and Geo-Colonial Sites: Cultural Studies from the Postmodern to Decolonization(in press in Chinese), and The Imperialist Eye: The Decolonization Question.

Kuan-hsing Chen’s talk stems from his work on Taiwanese nation formation and US imperialism. “Club 51” refers to a bizarre Taiwanese political organization advocating US statehood for Taiwan. Chen’s analysis suggests that the Club 51 phenomenon represents what is in fact a new politics of place in the global era, whose significance goes beyond issues of PRC-Taiwanese relations. For his seminar, Chen will discuss the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies project. This will be of particular interest to local scholars who may want to participate in the journal’s activities, which include conferences, special issues, and colloquia. Chen and his colleagues founded the journal at what they considered a crucial moment in Asian cultural politics.

Since the 1980’s, a pervasive rhetoric of the ‘rise of Asia’ has come to mean more than the concentrated flow of capital into and out of the region. It has come to constitute a structure of feeling that is ubiquitous yet ambiguously felt throughout Asia. Historically, this feeling of the ‘rise of Asia’ is complicated by the region’s colonial past. While Asia’s political, cultural and economic position in the global system will continue to fluctuate, there is a need to question and critique the rhetorical unities of both the ‘rise’ and of ‘Asia’…On the other hand, no matter whether there are common experiences shared by sub-regional histories, there is an urgent need for forging political links across these sub-regions. Hence, ‘Inter-Asia’ cultural studies.