Colloquium Series

In Spring 2000, 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 and tea.

ScheduleApril 12 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Jonathan Hunt
(English, Santa Clara University)
The Ominous Bicycle

April 19 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Ulla Haselstein
(American Literature, University of Munich)
‘To give one’s self’: The ethics of the gift in Harriet Jacobs’Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

April 26 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Shu-mei Shih
(Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies, UCLA)
The End of Nostalgia and the Problem of National Allegory

May 3 OAKES MURAL ROOM
David Anthony
(History, UC Santa Cruz)
African Americans and South Africans: Narratives of A Jouney

May 10 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Pheng Cheah
(Rhetoric, UC Berkeley)
Chinese Cosmopolitanism in Two Senses and Postcolonial National Memory

May 17 OAKES MUAL ROOM
Hugh Raffles
(Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz)
The Dreamlife of Ecology

May 24 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Melissa Orlie
(Political Science, Criticism & Interpretive Theory, and Women’s Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Political Capitalism, the Desire for Freedom,and the Consumption of Politics

Presenters

Jonathan Hunt is Lecturer in the Department of English at Santa Clara University and an associate editor of College English. His dissertation, Naturalist Democracy (UC Santa Cruz Department of Literature, 1996) examines 19th-century French and U.S. literary naturalism’s participation in and resistance to the political and cultural project of producing the democratic citizen. He writes, “This talk, which might be considered an exercise in critical bicycle historiography, is part of a new project on obsolescence and nostalgia, and has its roots in literary naturalism’s anxious fixation on the mechanical technologies of the steam age. These technologies, particularly the railroad, both demonstrated the racial and cultural superiority of the economic core and ominously figured the eclipse of the human subject in a relentless determinism. The bicycle, widely popularized in the 1880s and 1890s, is a uniquely human-powered product of the industrial era, and thus becomes the site of a particular set of cybernetic anxieties. This project examines the wobbly path of these anxieties through the bicycle’s twentieth-century trajectory of obsolescence.” 

Ulla Haselstein is Professor of American Literature at the University of Munich, where she directs the graduate program in gender studies and the America Institute. She is the author of the 1991 book Entziffernde Hermeneutik: Studien zum Begriff der Lekture in der psychoanalytischen Theorie des Unbewubten (Deciphering Hermeneutics: Studies in the Concept of Reading in Psychoanalytic Theories of the Unconscious) and the forthcoming Die Gabe der Zivilisation: Interkultureller Austausch und literarische Textpraxis in Amerika, 1661-1861 (The Gift of Civilization: Intercultural Exchange and Literary Textual Practice in America, 1661-1861). Her many articles range across topics such as contemporary U.S. fiction, Derridean theory, psychoanalysis, and feminist literary theory. Her talk concerns the circulations of the female body as gift in the economics of slavery, of love and of textuality. 

Shu-mei Shih is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies at UCLA. Her book, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937, is forthcoming from the University of California Press this year. Shih’s current project is entitled “Visuality and Identity: Cultural Transactions Across the Chinese Pacific.” Her research interests include Chinese literary modernism in local/global circulation, the politics of transnationality in art and cinema from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Asian America, and third world feminisms. Her talk looks at post- 1997 Hong Kong cinema and art as ironic commentaries on the nostalgic search for cultural identity and the national allegory paradigm of third world cultural production.

David Anthony is Associate Professor of History at UCSC and Provost of Oakes College. His research interests encompass the history of Africa and the African diaspora. He has written on the urban history of Dares Salaam, and is currently at work on Pan African Enigma: The Life and Times of Max Yergan, 1892-1975, which explores the life of an activist whose venues spanned South Africa and the United States, and whose politics ranged from communism to extreme conservatism. Because it will be the first full-length published biography on this controversial subject, the Yergan work has spawned ancillary discoveries which may help point the way to new vistas in research on Africa’s diaspora. In his colloquium talk, Anthony will discuss his ongoing research with Professor Robert Edgar, a historian at Howard University, chronicling the relationship between African Americans and South Africans from the late eighteenth century, when African American sailors began venturing to South Africa, to 1965. Anthony and Edgar are preparing a multivolume collage of primary documents, including diaries, private papers, travelers’ accounts, autobiographies, speeches, songs and hymns, government documents, missionary journals, magazines, newspapers, books, and interviews from the United States, Europe, and South Africa. 

Pheng Cheah is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. He is co-editor of Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minnesota, 1998) and Thinking Through the Body of the Law(Allen and Unwin and New York University Press, 1996), and author of “Universal Areas: Asian Studies in a World in Motion,” Traces, Vol. 1, no. 1 (forthcoming, Fall 2000). He is currently working on a book entitled Spectral Nationality, which looks at the philosopheme of culture as freedom in modern philosophy, primarily in the work of Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Marx, and the vicissitudes of this philosopheme in decolonizing nationalism and contemporary postcoloniality. His talk, on the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, is from a second book in progress on global financialization and the inhuman.

Hugh Raffles is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UCSC. His research concerns questions of locality and region-making, exploring the links between some highly material “local” practices of place-making in the eastern Amazon, and the role of traveling naturalists in the generation of Euro-American imaginaries of Amazonia since the 16th century. His book On the Nature of the Amazon is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. Raffles’s colloquium talk offers a preliminary account of fieldwork among ecological researchers on the devastated mahogany “frontier” of southeastern Amazonia. He writes, “My concern is to detail the simultaneously historical, intertextual, intersubjective, and political-economic exigencies through which this particular scientific work materializes Amazonia in discourse and in place. Scientists working in the midst of such knotted social relations display sophisticated understandings of both constraints and opportunities as they struggle to salvage dreams of conservation from the excess of transregional realpolitik.”

Melissa Orlie is Associate Professor of Political Science, Criticism & Interpretive Theory, and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research explores sources of normativity and ethical motivation from a perspective that is political rather than epistemological, driven by issues of meaning and inspiration rather than justification and prescription. She is the author of Living Ethically, Acting Politically (Cornell, 1997). Her current work focuses upon the evaluative aspirations and distinctions ineluctably at work in our everyday conduct, what she describes as our capacity to imagine and accept responsibility for something beyond what we already know or have achieved. She is currently at work on a book entitled Suffering Humanity: Aspiration and Joy after Nietzsche & Freud. Her colloquium talk uses Michel Foucault’s analytic of ethics to reconsider commodity consumption as the dominant practice of the self in the regime of political capitalism. 

Colloquium Series

In Winter 2000, 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 and tea.

ScheduleJanuary 12 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Manuela Ribeiro Sanches
(German Studies, University of Lisbon)
Color of Skin, Shape of the Body: “Race” Difference and the Nature of “Man” in 18th-Century Germany

January 19 COWELL PROVOST HOUSE
Peter Euben (Politics, UCSC)
The Polis, Globalization and the Politics of Place

January 26 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Helene Moglen (Literature, UCSC)
The Trauma of Gender: Psychosexuality and the Bimodal Novel 

February 2 COWELL PROVOST HOUSE
Barry D. Adam
(Sociology, University of Windsor)
Globalization/Mobilization: Gay and Lesbian Movements

February 9 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Amelie Hastie
(Film and Digital Media, UCSC)
The Cam�ra Stylo: Intermedial Authorship and Film History

February 16 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Susan Gillman (Literature, UCSC)
The Occult History of Du Bois

February 23 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Dana Takagi (Sociology, UCSC)
Native Nationalisms and Incommensurability; or, Why We Would Rather Not Talk About God

March 1 COWELL PROVOST HOUSE
Kerwin Klein (History, UC Berkeley)
The Culture Concept and Historical Discourse, or What Was the New Cultural History? 

Presenters

Manuela Ribeiro Sanches is Assistant Professor in the Department of German Studies at the University of Lisbon, Portugal. She has published extensively on Georg Forster, a naturalist who participated in Cook’s second voyage and who was to die in exile in Paris in 1794. This talk, part of her work in progress in German anthropology in the 18th century, reflects on the debates about “race” and difference that opposed Forster to Immanuel Kant, a major figure in German anthropology. She places this debate in the contexts of European colonialism, the abolitionist movement, and the appeal to universal human rights, as well as the French Revolution and the way it affected an emergent German anthropology. How were questions of difference approached and interpreted by an academic discourse apparently removed from the colonial centers? How was difference perceived, narrated, classified? How was “race” represented and constructed? How did it relate to cultural difference? And how are these issues to be read from a postcolonial perspective?

Helene Moglen is Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz. She has published extensively on the English novel- including books on Laurence Sterne and Charlotte Bronte- and has written on issues relevant to feminist theory, psycho-analysis and education. In her forthcoming book, The Trauma of Gender: A Feminist Theory of the English Novel, she offers an innovative theory of the novel’s form and function. Her book seeks to move beyond long-dominant accounts that have focused almost exclusively on the realist tradition of the novel and the class interests which that tradition serves. Instead, she insists that the modern novel has been essentially bimodal, and that its bimodaliity has functioned to manage the strains and contradictions of the sex-gender system. Further, she suggests that the principal theoretical models through which the novel has been studied are themselves structured by competing narrative modes: the same modes that have shaped the novel and exposed its ambivalent attitudes about sexuality and gender. In her paper, she will set out the theoretical argument of her book, and will ask others to join her in considering its applicability to diverse national literatures, from the 18th through the 20th centuries, and to other disciplinary discourses.

Peter Euben is Professor of Politics at UC Santa Cruz. He is the author of The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken (1990), Corrupting Youth: Political Education and Democratic Culture (1997) and the forthcoming Platonic Noise: Essays on the Modernity of Classical Political Thought (2000). He also co-edited Athenian Democratic Thought and the Reconstitution of American Democracy. His current work focuses on the necessity of utopia and the idea of ironic politics. His colloquium talk asks whether there is an illuminating analogy to be drawn between the experience of political dislocation and the theoretical struggles to understand it that accompanied the eclipse of the classical polis, and our experience of globalization and attempts to understand it theoretically. It explores two oppositions: that between the classical polis and the moral critique leveled at it by Cynics and Stoics, and between neo-Stoic cosmopolitanism of Martha Nussbaum and political critics of her moral universalism.

Barry D. Adam is Professor of Sociology at the University of Windsor. He is author or co-editor of The Survival of Domination, The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement, Experiencing HIV, and The Global Emergence of Gay and Lesbian Politics, as well as articles on new social movement theory, neighborhood mobilization in Sandinista Nicaragua, HIV transmission, and gay and lesbian studies. A central theme of his work is the subjectivity of inferiorized peoples, that is, the ways in which people build identity, community, and a sense of efficacy in highly adverse social conditions. This talk seeks to sort through the thickets of globalization discourse to better understand how social movements develop on a transnational basis. Using gay and lesbian movements as an example, the talk will address ways in which globalizing forces articulate with movement formation.

Amelie Hastie is Assistant Professor of Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz. An assistant editor of Camera Obscura, she is the author of “Fashion, Femininity, and Historical Design: The Visual Texture of Three Hong Kong Films” Post Script (Fall 1999), and “A Fabricated Space: Assimilating the Individual on Star Trek: The Next Generation” in the edited volume Enterprise Zones: Liminal Positions on Star Trek. Her work in progress “examines the role of writing in the construction of cinematic histories, theories, and even images, especially as such writings point toward the multiple roles women have played as ‘authors’ within the production of films and the production of our knowledge about them.” She reconnects the visual and written forms through an exploration of writings by three primary figures who worked in the silent film industry and later took up writing in an attempt to secure their places in film history: early film director Alice Guy-Blach� and silent film stars Louise Brooks and Colleen Moore. Hastie considers how each woman is configured in a complex intertextual system of narrative films, documentaries, their own writings and writings about them, and other diverse objects they have collected and/or produced.

Susan Gillman, Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz, has long been interested in how popular genres give voice to racial and national affinities and conflicts. Her previous work on Mark Twain, including Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain’s America (Chicago, 1989) and an essay collection, co-edited with Forrest Robinson, Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson: Race, Conflict, and Culture (Duke, 1990), focuses on Twain’s uses of the discourses of detective and fantasy fiction (legal, scientific, medical, psychological) in his ongoing exploration of race as a “fiction of law and custom.” The point of departure for her new book, American Race Melodramas, 1877-1915, is a pattern of derogatory references to a wide variety of late 19th-century race writing as “melodramatic.” American race melodrama was a malleable cultural mode that cut across periods, genres and ideologies. Responding to the historically specific situation of post-Reconstruction U.S. nationalism and global internationalism, when the discipline of American history was both politicized and popularized, late 19th-century race melodramas emerge as an explicitly historiographic mode. Gillman’s talk explores W. E. B. Du Bois’s philosophy of history as a project combining his lifelong engagements with science and mysticism, providing Du Bois with a bridge between objectivity and activism, politics and poetry, as well as a means of uncovering the mystical history of race consciousness itself.

Dana Takagi is Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. Her research interests center on Asian Americans, rights discourses of minority and indigenous peoples, and contemporary nationalism in the age of globalization. She is author of The Retreat from Race: Asian American Admissions and Racial Politics (1993), which won the Gustavus-Myer Center for Human Rights Outstanding Book Award and the National Book Award of the Association of Asian American Studies. She also co-edits the UC Press book series “American Crossroads.” Her most recent article is “Forget Postcolonialism: Self Determination and Sovereignty in Hawaii” (Colorlines, Winter 1999). This talk is drawn from her research on Hawaiian nationalism(s), multiculturalism and various kinds of “rights” discourses in the Pacific, and the expression of nationalist precepts in the odd venues of popular culture, especially card games and collectibles such as Magic and Poke �mon. Professor Takagi�s presentation is also offered as part of the Sociology Department�s colloquium series.

Kerwin Klein is Assistant Professor of History at UC Berkeley. He is the author of Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest of Native America, 1890-1990(University of California, 1997) and “The Emergence of ‘Memory’ in Historical Discourse,” (Representations, forthcoming). Klein is a member of the editorial boards of Representations and the Pacific Historical Review. He is at work on two books: Frontier Tales, which explores the relationship between decolonization and philosophy of history in the Americas, and Charles Manson and the Meaning of History, an account of California and philosophy of history in pop culture.

Colloquium Series

In Fall 1999, 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 and tea.

ScheduleOctober 6 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Richard Terdiman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz)
Enlightenment Representation and the Critique of Postmodernity

October 13 SILVERMAN LOUNGE
Anthony Chennells (English, University of Zimbabwe)
Early Rhodesian Women Novelists and White Rhodesian Nationalism

October 20 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Lisa Rofel (Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz)
Qualities of Desire: Imagining Gay Identities in China

October 27 SILVERMAN LOUNGE
Carla Freccero (Literature, UC Santa Cruz)
Queer Encounters: Early Modern France and the New World

November 3 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Cristina Lucia Ruotolo (Humanities, San Francisco State University)
Music, Audience, and Femininity in Turn-of-the-Century America

November 10 SILVERMAN LOUNGE
Lionel Cantu (Sociology, UC Santa Cruz)
Queer Diasporas: U.S. Immigration and the Political Economy of Sexual Identity

November 17 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Christopher Nealon (English, UC Berkeley)
The Ambivalence of Lesbian Pulp Fiction

Participants

Richard Terdiman is Professor of Literature at UCSC. His work is primarily in French literature and history, and he is the author of several books that deal with representation, the social formation and reception of theory, and the role of memory in culture, including Discourse/ Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (1985) and Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (1993). His talk is drawn from a book in progress that deals with Enlightenment pre-occupations with some of the theoretical choices also prominent in poststructuralism. It might be thought of as something like “Diderot Reads Derrida.” In addition to his current work on the Enlightenment and postmodernity, he is also completing a book on social time.

Anthony Chennells is Associate Professor of English at the University of Zimbabwe. He has published extensively on South African and Zimbabwean literature, history and culture. His co-authored Expanding Perspectives on Dambudzo Marechera appeared last year. During Southern Rhodesia’s ninety-year history, settlers produced over three hundred novels, most of which were published in London. Professor Chennells, whose family settled in Rhodesia more than a hundred years ago, has studied this body of writing to trace how it contributed to the myth of a discrete Rhodesian identity which was neither British nor South African, leading to Ian Smith’s declaration of Rhodesian independence in 1965 and to the liberation war from which Zimbabwe was born in 1980. Several scholars are now beginning to re-examine the women novelists in this group to see how they were implicated in the Rhodesian imperial and nationalist projects. This paper is a contribution to that discussion..

Lisa Rofel is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. Her book Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China After Socialism was published this spring by UC Press. This study of three generations of Chinese women silk workers proposes a cross-cultural approach to modernity that “treats it as a located cultural imaginary, arising from and perpetuating relations of difference across an East-West divide.” Rofel argues that “other modernities” are neither exclusively local nor variations on a universal model. Rather, “[t]hey are forced cross-cultural translations of various projects of science and management called modernity.” Rofel is also co-editor of Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State (Harvard, 1994). Her talk is part of a current project on transnational culture, cosmopolitanism, and gender and sexuality in contemporary China.

Carla Freccero is Professor in the Literature Department at UC Santa Cruz, and specializes in early modern cultural studies, feminist and queer theory, and U.S. popular culture. Her first book, a study of Rabelais, is entitled Father Figures (Cornell 1991). She is co-editor, with Louise Fradenburg, of Premodern Sexualities(Routledge 1996), and most recently the author of Popular Culture: An Introduction (NYU 1999). Her talk is part of a book-length project on 16th-century French writings about South America and the Tupinamba Indians. This talk focuses on Jean de Lery’s History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, an account of a Protestant preacher’s exile among the Tupi in the 1550s near the bay of Rio. Claude Levi-Strauss called de Lery’s book the first modern ethnography. Using rhetorical and psychoanalytic methods of discourse analysis, the talk explores a configuration of European homoerotic ideological fantasies surrounding the ‘New World’ man.

Cristina Lucia Ruotolo is Assistant Professor of Humanities at San Francisco State University. She completed her Ph.D. in English at Yale University, and her Master’s in Violin Performance at the New England Conservatory of Music. She has been a violinist in the San Jose Symphony and the Marin Symphony orchestras. Professor Ruotolo’s talk is from a book in progress that explores the dramatic changes in American music cultures beginning in the 1890s from the perspective of their impact on and presence in literature, particularly works by Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, James Weldon Johnson and Theodore Dreiser. She writes, “With the development of a centralized music publishing industry (“Tin Pan Alley”), of African American influence on both popular and classical music, and of a strong female presence in public audiences and on the stage, music began to have„ and to be perceived as having„a powerful role in shaping its audience’s sense of self and place. At issue in debates, and for these four writers, is the nature and extent of that power. Does music merely arouse emotions and states of being that already exist within the listening self? Or does music have the capacity to enter into and change a listener’s way of being„to, for example, infuse a young white man with not only black sounds but blackness itself? Or to lead a young middle-class woman into prostitution? In my talk I will bring such questions to bear on Willa Cather’s Song of the Lark and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.”

Lionel Cantu is a new Assistant Professor of Sociology at UCSC, and has received a post-doctoral fellowship at UC Davis for 1999-2000 to work with anthropologist Roger Rouse on the linkages between global capitalism, sexual commodification, migration, and sexual identities. A Ph.D. in Social Science from UC Irvine, Cantu’s work centers on the intersections of Chicano/ Latino studies, gay and lesbian studies, social movements, globalization, and immigration. His dissertation, “Border Crossings: Mexican Men and the Sexuality of Migration,” is representative of that project. His publications include the forthcoming article “Entre Hombres/Between Men: Latino Masculinities and Homosexualities, and other studies of Latina/o literary and cultural production.

Christopher Nealon is Assistant Professor in the English Department at UC Berkeley, having received his Ph.D. from Cornell two years ago. He works on U.S. lesbian and gay literary and cultural studies, and is also a published poet. His first book, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Invention Before Stonewall, is forthcoming from Duke, and his articles include “The Modernity of Queer Studies” and “Affect-Genealogy: Feeling and Affiliation in Willa Cather.” Nealon’s talk centers on Ann Bannon’s lesbian pulp novels of the 1950s and 1960s and the ambiguous reception of those novels. Nealon reads the problematics of Bannon’s model of lesbian bodies as gender-inverted to suggest that the novels offer contemporary readers a signal example of how to produce a livable relationship between historical possibilities and historical limits.