Colloquium Series

In Winter 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.

ScheduleJanuary 13 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Elisabetta Villari (Ancient Greek History, University of Genoa)
On Some Motifs in Walter Benjamin

January 20 SILVERMAN LOUNGE
Catherine Soussloff (Art History, UC Santa Cruz)
After Aesthetics: Visual Representation, Jewish Identity, and Cultural Studies

January 27 OAKES MURAL ROOM
David Turnbill (Comparative Studies in Art, Science and Religion, Deakin University, Australia)
Travelling, Mapping, and narrating: Aboriginal, Maori, Pacific Islander and Western Ways of Knowledge and Place-making

February 3 SILVERMAN LOUNGE
Sandria Freitag (Executive Director, American Historical Association)
Acts of Seeing: Mass-Produced Visual Images in the Creation of Modern India

February 10 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Laurence Rickels (Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies, UC Santa Barbara)
Resistance in Theory

February 17 SILVERMAN LOUNGE
Manu Goswami (Politics, UC Santa Cruz)
Rethinking Modularity: Beyond Objectivist and Subjectivist Approaches to Nationalism

February 24 OAKES MURAL ROOM
Emily Honig (Women’s Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Sexing the Cultural Revolution

March 3 SILVERMAN LOUNGE
Samantha Frost (Women’s Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Faking It: Madness, Morals, and Hobbe;s “Thinking Bodies”

Participants

Elisabetta Villari is a Researcher in Ancient Greek History at the University of Genoa. She is also a visitor at the Center for the Winter Quarter. Her research encompasses two areas: the biography in Greek antiquity, and modern classical historiography and philosophy of history, with an emphasis on Walter Benjamin. She has recently published a book in Italian on Benjamin�s encounter with the late nineteenth-century German historian and philosopher Johan Jakob Bachofen, known for his theory of matriarchy. During her time at UCSC, Professor Villari will work on several ongoing research projects on Benjamin, among them an intellectual biography of his exile years in Paris.

Catherine Soussloff has taught Art History at UCSC since 1987. She presently holds the Patricia and Rowland Rebele Chair in Art History. Her book, The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept was published by University of Minnesota Press in 1987. Her edited volume, Jewish Identity in Modern Art History,, will be published by UC Press early in 1999. Two of her essays, “The Concept of the Artist” and “Historicism in Art History” were recently published in the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford, 1998). Her work in progress includes a book on Jewish identity and aesthetics, essays on performativity and the historicized body in European visual representation, and a historiography of media discourse.

David Turnbill 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.

Sandria Freitag is Executive Director of the American Historical Association and a historian of South Asia (see page 1). Freitag writes that her current work is “a theorized approach to the creation and dissemination of new visual mass media reflecting on community and national identity in South Asia, 1870-1970. The time period and technological context of the project crosses the divide between British colonial India and the independent state, and so tells us much about how a colonized area becomes ‘modern,’ particularly in the intersection of global and local visual practices and constructions of meaning.”

Laurence Rickels teaches in the Departments of Art, Comparative Literature, Germanic, Slavic, and Semitic Studies, and Film Studies at UC Santa Barbara and works as a psychotherapist at the Westside Neighborhood Medical Clinic in Santa Barbara. He is the author of Aberrations of Mourning, (1988), Der unbetra-uerbare Tod (1990), The Case of California (1991), and The Nazi Psychoanalysis Chronicles, which will be appearing in three installments with the University of Minnesota Press: 1) Only Psychoanalysis Won the World Wars; 2) Crypto Fetishism,; 3) Psy Fi. The Chronicles complete the series on Unmourningwhich began with Aberrations of Mourning and continued with The Case of California. Rickels�s current theoretical work addresses resistance to the transferential setting within theoretical bodies of work (Benjamin and DeMan) and/or receptions of Freud (M. Klein, M. Graf, and Otto Gross).

Manu Goswami received her Ph.D. in 1998 from the University of Chicago Department of Political Science. Her dissertation, entitled “The Production of ‘India’: Colonialism, Nationalism and Territorial Nativism, 1870-1948,” integrates recent developments in studies of nationalism, the political economy of globalization, and socio-spatial theory to rethink the complex dynamic between colonial modernity and anti-colonial nationalism. Professor Goswami has a forthcoming article in Comparative Studies in Society and History (vol. 40, 4, 1998) which analyzes the nationalization and naturalization of conceptions of economy and territory in late nineteenth-century colonial India from a comparative historical and global perspective. Her talk is drawn from a work-in-progress which frames contemporary debates about nationalism through the optic of recent calls to mediate the canonical opposition between objectivity and subjectivity. It attempts to propose an alternative perspective on nationalism through a critical reconstruction of Benedict Anderson�s theory of modular nationalism.

Emily Honig is Professor of Women�s Studies and History at UC Santa Cruz. A historian of China, she is the author of Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills (1986), Creating Chinese Ethnicity (1992), and Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980�s (coauthored, 1988). Her current research focuses on gender and sexuality during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-76).

Samantha Frost recently received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University, and is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Women�s Studies department at UC Santa Cruz. A political theorist with special interests in modern, contemporary, and feminist political theory, as well as histories/theories of the body, she is currently working on a project that uses Thomas Hobbes and his iconographic status within political theory to explore how bodies shape the contexts within which we make political judgments.

Colloquium Series

In fall 1998, 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. 

ScheduleOctober 14
Alice Yang Murray
(History, UC Santa Cruz )
From Relocation Center to Concentration Camp: Historianc and Reinterpretations of Internment
Cowell Provost House

October 21
Shirley Samuels
(English and American Studies, Women’s Studies, Cornell University)
Whitman and the Face of the Nation 
Oakes Mural Room

October 28
Noriko Aso
(History, UC Santa Cruz)
The “New Japan” on Display: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Commerce in Postwar Art Exhibits 
Cowell Conference Room

November 4
Yvette Huginnie
(American Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Towards a Multi-Referent Understanding of Race
Oakes Mural Room

November 11 
Stephen Best
(English, UC Berkeley)
The Fugitive’s Properties 
Cowell Conference Room

November 18
Victor Burgin
(History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz)
Jenni’s Room

December 2
Jonathan Beller
(Cultural Studies, UC Santa Cruz)
Visual Culture and Philippine Modernity
Oakes Mural Room

Participants

Alice Yang Murray is Assistant Professor of History at UCSC. Her work explores constructions of historical memory: how they reflect and facilitate political, social, and cultural change. Her book-in-progress, Better Americans in a Greater America: Japanese American Internment, Redress, and Historical Memory, 1942-1998, analyzes how changing representations of internment history by government officials, scholars, and activists affected the Japanese American redress movement. Her other published work explores how Asian American organizations have addressed issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality; the advantages and disadvantages of using oral history sources; and the challenge to traditional views of “feminist” agency and consciousness posed by the history of Korean immigrant women in America.

Shirley Samuels is Professor of English and American Studies and Director of the Women�s Studies Program at Cornell University. She is the author of Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation(Oxford University Press, 1996) and editor of The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America(Oxford University Press, 1992). Her time at the Center will be devoted to another book project, National Gender: American Iconography and the Civil War, in which Samuels will “explore the charged emphasis on gender and the use of both men and women to highlight political iconography in the sensation fiction and historical novels written about the Civil War, and …address how gender appears in the political cartoons and broadsides that were used to promote or attack slavery.”
Noriko Aso is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at UCSC; she has also taught at Portland State University and Ohio State University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1997, with a dissertation entitled New Illusions: The Emergence of a Discourse on Traditional Japanese Arts and Crafts, 1868-1945. Her talk will focus on the importance accorded refashioning Japan as a bunka kokka (cultural nation) in the postwar period, exploring the strategies deployed in representing a Japanese aesthetic heritage in three cases: early postwar department store exhibits, an exhibit commemorating the signing of the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty, and the 1964 Tokyo Olympics arts festival.

Yvette Huginnie is an Assist-ant Professor in American Studies at UCSC, where she teaches courses on the U.S. West, U.S. Labor History, and Race and Ethnicity in the U.S.. Her current research project is a book manuscript, tentatively titled Mexicans in a White Man�s Town, , which explores the intersections of racial categorization, class formation, and imperialism in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries.

Stephen Best is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of California-Berkeley, where he teaches classes in American and African-American Literature, as well as Film Studies. His talk is drawn from a book-in-progress which explores genealogies of possession in the law, with a particular emphasis on the late nineteenth-century debate surrounding mechanical reproduction and intellectual property�a debate marred by the dual fears of dubious fiduciary motive (i.e., theft, trespass, piracy, plagiary, usurpation), and the law�s grudging return to the problem of the injurious commodification of persons and personhood. Professor Best contends that, as these debates surrounding technology and property unfold, the law animates subterranean affiliations, both rhetorical and logical, between purloined intellectual properties (stolen voices, stolen images) and the expropriated and unremunerated labor and personhood (that is, the property) of slavery�an exchange and commodification rationalized by means of legal algorithms of the fugitive slave (as indebted, obligated, culpable, responsible). Professor Best�s talk will map the correspondences between Harriet Beecher Stowe�s novel Uncle Tom�s Cabin, and later film versions of the same, paying particular attention to issues of translation and adaptation when novel and film appear in the text of intellectual property law; appearances which often entail the rescripting of Uncle Tom as fugitive slave.

Victor Burgin is Professor of History of Consciousness at UCSC. His books include In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (University of California, 1997), Some Cities (University of California and Reaktion Books, 1996), and The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity(MacMillan, 1986). About his talk on “Jenni�s Room” he writes, “Shortly before her twenty-first birthday Jennifer Ringley attached a video camera to her computer and began to upload images of her college dormitory room to the Internet. Since then, at any time of day or night, anyone who logs onto her �JenniCam� web site may look into Jenni�s room. Interviews with Ringley and articles about her have tended to treat her as an exhibitionist. Everyday language has taken the word �exhibitionist� from psychiatry and psychoanalysis. In this talk I draw upon psychoanalytic theory to suggest other ways of thinking about Jenni�s room.”

Jonathan Beller was awarded a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellow in Art History and the Humanities for his research project Visual Transformations and Philippine Modernity. He is the author of PMLA in the Philippines?(1998), Capital/Cinema, in Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics/Philoso-phy/Culture (1998), and The Spectatorship of the Proletariat (1995). Beller writes that “this work is concerned with the qualitative changes in visuality wrought by culture and technology accompanying and enabling economic �development.� The Philippines is a particularly interesting scene of visual encounter given its status as an American colony: subject to U.S. media of all types, yet producing its own counter-visions. And finally, the case for the inclusion of Philippine painting among the art that counts as art history is a matter of aesthetics. The Filipino artists in whom I am interested exhibit as profound an accommodation to and analysis of the shifting conditions of visuality which they helped to bring into being as any of the Western innovators, despite the fact that their creativity has been radically under-mediated.”