Center for Modern & Contemporary Studies Calendar - Past Events for this Academic Year

Conference: "JEWISH LA--THEN AND NOW"

"JEWISH LA-- THEN AND NOW"

A three-day national conference on the history of Los Angeles Jews.

Day 1: LA JEWISH STORIES -- Saturday, November 12, 6-9PM at the Skirball Cultural Center

Day 2: JEWISH LA INSIDE AND OUT -- Sunday, November 13, 10AM-6PM at the Autry National Center

Day 3: WHAT'S WESTERN ABOUT THE LA JEWISH EXPERIENCE? -- Monday, November 14, 10AM-6PM at the UCLA Faculty Center

PRE-REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED. PLEASE RSVP TO CJS@HUMNET.UCLA.EDU.

For more information, please visit www.lajh.org.

-- submitted by Vivian Holenbeck (vdios@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, see http://www.lajh.org

UC T&TSMRG Volume "Minor Transnationalism" Reception

Susan Koshy, "Sexual Naturalization: Asian Americans and Miscegenation"

Michael Bourdaghs, "The Dawn That Never Comes: Shimazaki Toson and Japanese Nationalism"

Ali Behdad, "A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the US"

Rafael Perrez-Torres, "To Alcatraz, Death Row and Back: Memories of an East L.A. Outlaw"

Moradewun Adejunmobi, "Vernacular Palaver: Imaginations of the Local and Non-Native Languages in West Africa"

Books will be available for sale and "Minor Transnationalism" will be available for signing.

-- submitted by Mark Pokorski (mpok@humanities.ucla.edu)

Call for Papers - The Art of Rights: Human Rights in Comparative Perspective

The Art of Rights: Human Rights in Comparative Perspective

The planning committee of the MRG Graduate student conference is pleased to announce an interdisciplinary conference with keynote speaker

Greg Mullins

May 19, 2006 University of California, Los Angeles

Despite repeated proclamations of “never again,” war and genocide still haunt collective realities and shape imaginations. Human rights remains a pressing topic that affects disciplines from history to the performing arts and from literature to sociology. If, as Susan Sontag claims, narratives can incite us to "translate" compassion into action, then literature can be read as a form of human rights work. Breaches of human rights in literature are evidenced in works ranging from Holocaust narratives, such as Imre Kertész’s Fateless, to stories of civil war and torture; from Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy to Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker. Of course, literature is not the only form of representation that allows for this process of translating compassion: the visual arts and social sciences from history to public policy have similar effects.

In a general sense, this conference proposes to bring literature and the arts into dialogue with the social sciences in order to confront the ethics of representation in the context of an increasingly globalized and violent world. Taking human rights as our central focus, we will consider the following questions: How do literature and the arts re-imagine complex social realities such as genocide, war, and systematized discrimination? How do these forms of representation differ from and/or complement the work of scholars in public health, history, sociology or development? Finally, how can the humanities and social sciences work together to fight for human rights?

Our speaker Greg Mullins is an Associate Professor of English at Evergreen College. His book Colonial Affairs (2002) is a study of sexuality and colonialism as represented in American and Moroccan literature written in Tangier from 1945-1970. He is currently writing a book on the discursive and cultural politics of human rights.

We welcome 250-word abstracts for papers related to the topic of representing human rights. Conference presentations should be twenty minutes in length and may address the topic from any period or discipline: literature, sociology, history, cultural studies, gender studies, film, theater, the performing arts, political science, public policy, etc. Please submit 250-word abstracts by email attachment no later than January 27, 2006 to Amy Marczewski, conference chair, at MRGconf@humnet.ucla.edu. Possible paper topics may include but are not limited to:

• Representing human rights: historiography of human rights, theater/the novel/visual arts as social commentary, performing human rights • Gendered rights: feminisms, reproductive/queer rights, gendered division of labor, gendered discrimination • Case studies: translating experiences, comparative studies (Sudan, Armenia, Rwanda, Cambodia, the Holocaust…) • Tensions between local and global: human rights: grassroots or international movements?, transnationalism and human rights • “The Wretched of the Earth”: theorizing human rights, writing rights, the nation-state and the regulation of human bodies, supra-national organizations’ role in regulating human rights • Other human rights issues: exile, refugees, linguistic rights

Financial assistance will be available to cover lodging costs in Los Angeles. For more information, please see our website at http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/transnation.

-- submitted by Mark Pokorski (mpok@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact MRGconf@humnet.ucla.edu

Fourth annual, international Graduate Student Colloquium in Armenian Studies at UCLA on March 3rd, 2006

Studies from multiple fields will be presented, including history, psychology, linguistics, literature, theology and art history.  Topics to be presented are grouped within the following sessions:  A Comparative Look at 19th and 20th Century Armenian Drama, Social and Religious Issues:  Cultural Concerns among Armenian Communities, Revisiting the Past and Theorizing the Present:  Topic is Armenian Art, and Questions of Memory and Identity in Modern Armenian Literature and Film.  Presenters are graduate students coming from universities and countries all around the world, including UCLA, Oxford University (England), Haigazian University (Lebanon), Central European University (Hungary), Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel) and multiple institutes within the Republic of Armenia.

The Graduate Student Colloquium in Armenian Studies is yet another step in the development of the rich tradition of Armenian Studies at UCLA.  Organized by graduate students, for graduate students, it provides an opportunity for students to actively and significantly contribute to the academic environment on campus.

The event is free of charge and open to the public.

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Schedule viewable/download-able at:

http:// www.studentgroups.ucla.edu/agsa/ documents/030306gscias-schedule.pdf

-- submitted by Ara Soghomonian (ara@humnet.ucla.edu@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact agsaucla@ucla.edu

CJS Lecture "ANTI-SEMITISM IN EUROPE TODAY"

The UCLA Center for Jewish Studies

Presents

"ANTI-SEMITISM IN EUROPE TODAY"

A Lecture by Bernard-Henri Levy

Tuesday, April 11, 2006 • Korn Convocation Hall • 7:30 pm

With the generous support of Lya Cordova-Latta

Cosponsored by the UCLA Center for European and Eurasian Studies, the UCLA Department of French and Francophone Studies, and the Consulate General of France in Los Angeles

Pre-Registration is not required. Seating is limited and available on a first-come, first- served basis. Parking is available in Lot 5 for $8.

-- submitted by Vivian Holenbeck (vdios@humanities.ucla.edu)

"ANTI-SEMITISM IN EUROPE TODAY" by BHL

The UCLA Center for Jewish Studies

Presents

"ANTI-SEMITISM IN EUROPE TODAY"

A Lecture by BERNARD-HENRI LEVY

Tuesday, April 11, 2006 • Korn Convocation Hall • 7:30 pm

With the generous support of Lya Cordova-Latta

Cosponsored by the UCLA Center for European and Eurasian Studies, the UCLA Department of French and Francophone Studies, and the Consulate General of France in Los Angeles

Pre-Registration is not required. Seating is limited and available on a first-come, first- served basis. Parking is available in Lot 5 for $8.

-- submitted by Vivian Holenbeck (vdios@humanities.ucla.edu)

CJS Lecture by BHL "Anti-Semitism in Europe Today"

The UCLA Center for Jewish Studies

Presents

"ANTI-SEMITISM IN EUROPE TODAY”

a lecture by Bernard-Henri Lévy

Tuesday, April 11, 2006 • Korn Convocation Hall • 7:30 pm

With the generous support of Lya Cordova-Latta

Cosponsored by the UCLA Center for European and Eurasian Studies, the UCLA Department of French and Francophone Studies, and the Consulate General of France in Los Angeles

Pre-Registration is not required. Seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis.

-- submitted by Vivian Holenbeck (vdios@humanities.ucla.edu)

Creolization of Theory

“Creolization of Theory”

May 5-6, 2006 UCLA Royce 306 & 314

Pronouncements that "theory is over" abound in literary and cultural studies. These claims themselves arise, however, from various positions that may be called theoretical, clamoring to claim the space left vacant by the "death of theory." Exactly what version of "theory" has died? What seeks to be its heir?

From minor and minoritized perspectives, "theory" may have been fatally flawed by its Eurocentric universalism, but it has also opened up other "creolized" possibilities. How then might "theory" be creolized, complicated, reinvented, and made usable in our transnationalized and globalized present? How might our investigations of minor formations as creolized objects of study necessitate, and thus enable, a new creolized theory on the deathbed of "theory?" Does the creolization of theory then promise a theory of creolization as paradigmatic for the theory of the future?

Conference Schedule

Friday May 5, 2006 Royce Hall 306

9:45 am: Introduction: Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, Co-directors of the Transnational and Transcolonial Studies MRG 10:00 am: Session 1: Creolized Theory, Minority Theory

Barnor Hesse, Northwestern University, “Creolizing the Political”

discussant: Mark Sawyer, UCLA

Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, UC Irvine, “Minority Theory, Revisited”

discussant: Rafael Peréz-Torres, UCLA

1:00 pm Lunch

2:30 pm Session 2: Post-Slavery, Postcolonial and Post-Fordist Equivalences

Anne Donadey, San Diego State University, “Post-Slavery and Postcolonial Representations: Comparative Approaches”

discussant: Liz Constable, UC Davis

Neferti Tadiar, UC Santa Cruz, “Poetics of Filipina Export: Contributions Towards a Theory of Post-Fordist Servility”

discussant: Karl Britto, UC Berkeley

5:30 pm Reception

Saturday May 6, 2006 Royce Hall 314

10:00 am Session 3: Limits of Postcolonial Theory

Ping-hui Liao, Tsinghua University, “On Post-Socialist Mimicry”

discussant: Shu-mei Shih, UCLA

Pheng Cheah, UC Berkeley, “Crises of Money”

discussant: Stathis Gourgouris, UCLA

1:00 pm Lunch

2:30 pm Session 4: Language and Desire in the Theory of the Archive

Anjali Arondekar, UC Santa Cruz, “Archival Attachments: On Sexuality and Colonial Historiography”

discussant: Parama Roy, UC Riverside

Eleanor Kaufman, UCLA, “Monolingualism of the Archive”

discussant: Françoise Lionnet, UCLA

-- submitted by Mark Pokorski (mpok@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, see http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/transnation/

The Art of Rights: Human Rights in Comparative Perspective

The Fifth Annual MRG Graduate Student Conference Sponsored by

the UC Transnational & Transcolonial Studies Multicampus Research Group

“The Art of Rights: Human Rights in Comparative Perspective”

19 May 2006, University of California, Los Angeles. 314 Royce Hall.

Despite repeated proclamations of “never again,” war and genocide still haunt collective realities and shape imaginations. Human rights remains a pressing topic that affects disciplines from history to the performing arts and from literature to sociology. In a general sense, this conference proposes to bring literature and the arts into dialogue with the social sciences in order to confront the ethics of representation in the context of an increasingly globalized and violent world. Taking human rights as our central focus, we will consider the following questions: How do literature and the arts re-imagine complex social realities such as genocide, war, and systematized discrimination? How do these forms of representation differ from and/or complement the work of scholars in public health, history, sociology or development? Finally, how can the humanities and social sciences work together to fight for human rights?

Conference Schedule:

Breakfast and Opening Remarks: 9:00-9:30 Session 1: 9:30-11:00 Human Rights Violations Seen Through Literature

MODERATOR: Jeff Schroeder, Department of Comparative Literature, UCLA

Dahlia Setiyawan, Department of History, UCLA “I Can Still Hear Them Weeping: The Short Story as a Source for Indonesian Conceptualizations of the Mass Killings of 1965-66”

Flor Gragera de León, Fulbright Scholar/Department of Spanish, Princeton University “Testimony a/s/nd Trial: History and Fiction Hand in Hand to Fight for Prisoners’ Rights in Democratic Spain”

Cherif Correa, Department of African Languages and Literature, University of Wisconsin-Madison “Islam and the Question of Agency in the Senegalese Woman's Search for Identity in Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter”

Session 2: 11:00-12:30 Enacting and Performing Human Rights MODERATOR: Christina Firpo, Department of History, UCLA Randall Jay Williams, Department of Literature, University of California, San Diego “Homonormativity and the Human Rights Industry: Murder in Mexico, the International Lesbian & Gay Human Rights Commission, and the Rise of Democratic Fundamentalism”

Selena Burns, School of Education, New York University “Theatre for Change: Torture as Performance, Audience Complicity, and Citizen Complacency in Griselda Gambaro's Information for Foreigners” Luis Ramos, Department of Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley “Of Landmines and Killing Fields: Remembering Cambodia’s Recent Past”

LUNCH: 12:30-1:30

Session 3: 1:30-3:30 Human Rights: Rhetoric and Reality

MODERATOR: Kathleen Washburn, Department of English, UCLA Christine Hong, Department of English, University of California, Berkeley “‘Flying Home’: the ‘Black Eagle’ and the Vertigo of U.S. Human Rights in Ralph Ellison’s Wartime Writings” Glenn Mitoma, Department of Cultural Studies, Claremont Graduate University “An Empire of Rights: Carlos P. Romulo and the Representation of the American Rights Tradition” Yael Schacher, Department of History, Harvard University “Hiroshima and the Estrangement of John Hersey” Chandra Garber, Department of Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine “It’s Not What You Say, but How You Say It: Mapping Language in Human Rights and Cultural Identity”

Keynote Address: 4:00-5:30

Welcome: Françoise Lionnet & Shu-Mei Shih, Co-Chairs, University of California Multicampus Research Group on Transnational and Transcolonial Studies

Introduction: Amy Marczewski, Department of French and Francophone Studies, UCLA Professor Greg Mullins, “Remembering Wrongs, Imagining Rights: Labors of Literature and Human Rights”

Greg Mullins is an Associate Professor of English at Evergreen College. His book Colonial Affairs (2002) is a study of sexuality and colonialism as represented in American and Moroccan literature written in Tangier from 1945-1970. He is currently writing a book on the discursive and cultural politics of human rights. Reception to follow. Royce 306 Terrace.

Organized by: Amy Marczewski, Department of French and Francophone Studies, Chair Christina Firpo, Department of History Jeff Schroeder, Department of Comparative Literature Jennifer Thackston-Johnson, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures

To attend: This program is free and open to the public. No reservations are required, however, seating is limited.

-- submitted by Mark Pokorski (mpok@humanities.ucla.edu)

Shu Lea Cheang's "Fresh Kill"

presents

Shu Lea Cheang's "Fresh Kill"

Film Screening followed by Artist's Reflections and Q&A with Director Shu Lea Cheang

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

James Bridges Theater, 1409 Melnitz Hall

7:00 pm

"Fresh Kill" tells the story of two young lesbian parents (Sarita Choudhury of MISSISSIPPI MASALA and Erin McMurtry) who get caught up in a global exchange of industrial waste via contaminated sushi. The place is New York and the time is now. Raw fish lips are the rage on trendy menus across Manhattan. A ghost barge, bearing nuclear refuse, circles the planet in search of a willing port. Household pets start to glow ominously and then disappear altogether. The sky opens up and snows soap flakes. People start speaking in tongues. The crisis escalates when a multinational corporation is implicated and the couple's infant daughter mysteriously vanishes. After uncovering censored information, a group of young New Yorkers makes an unlikely alliance with activists in the developing world and strikes back.

Visit http://humnet.ucla.edu/mellon for more information

This event is sponsored by the Dean, College of Letters and Sciences, and the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships in the Humanities

-- submitted by Laura Clennon (clennon@humnet.ucla.edu@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact clennon@humnet.ucla.edu

“American Judaism Today: Polarization and Post-Denominalization”

“American Judaism Today: Polarization and Post-Denominalization”

The Naftulin Family Lecture on Studies in Jewish Identity Samuel Heilman (Queens College)

Limited Seating. Please RSVP at CJSRSVP@humnet.ucla.edu

-- submitted by UCLA Center for Jewish Studies (cjs2@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact cjsrsvp@humnet.ucla.edu

"From Hebrew to Ladino: Manuscripts and Books Among the Jews of Medieval Spain and the 'Sephardi Diaspora'"

"From Hebrew to Ladino: Manuscripts and Books Among the Jews of Medieval Spain and the 'Sephardi Diaspora'" The Maurice Amado Symposium in Sephardic Studies Evelyn Cohen (The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York) Moshe Lazar (USC) Shalom Sabar (UCLA / Hebrew University)

Limited Seating. Please RSVP at CJSRSVP@humnet.ucla.edu For more information contact CJS (310) 825-5387.

-- submitted by UCLA Center for Jewish Studies (cjs2@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact cjsrsvp@humnet.ucla.edu

Mark Z. Danielewski reading: Only Revolutions

-- submitted by Susan Skarzynski (susan@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact friends@english.ucla.edu

CJS SEMINAR: The Jew as Critic

Presents

'The Jew as Critic'

A Series in Modern Jewish Culture

By Kenneth Turan (Film Critic, LA Times)

Wednesday, November 28, 2007 4:00PM

Pre-registration is required. Please RSVP at (310) 267- 5327 or at cjsrsvp@humnet.ucla.edu

For more information about the event or the speaker, please visit our website.

-- submitted by Bora Kim (cjs2@humanities.ucla.edu)

CJS SEMINAR: The 'Jewish Question' Among the German-Speaking Exiles in Los Angeles

Presents

"The 'Jewish Question' Among the German-Speaking Exiles in Los Angeles"

Seminar on the LA Jewish Experince

By Ehrhard Bahr (UCLA)

Tuesday, January 29, 2008 4:00PM

Pre-registration is required. Please RSVP at (310) 267- 5327 or at cjsrsvp@humnet.ucla.edu

For more information about the event or the speaker, please visit our website.

-- submitted by Bora Kim (cjs2@humanities.ucla.edu)

Race from Humanism

“Race from Humanism”

Thursday, March 13, 2008 4:30pm 314 Royce Hall

-- submitted by (catharinemcgraw@humanities.ucla.edu)

Elizabeth Povinelli Lecture

“Beyond Autonomy and Genealogy: Economies of Abandonment”

Thursday, April 10, 2008 4:30pm 314 Royce Hall

Elizabeth Povinelli is professor of Anthropology & Gender Studies and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Law & Culture. Her writing has focused on developing a critical theory of late liberalism, grounded in theories of the translation, transfiguration and the circulation of values, materialities, and socialities within settler liberalisms. She looks at how the distinction between individual freedom and social bondage subtends and animates most theories and practices of sexuality in postcolonial liberalisms. Her publications include: The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism; The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality; and Labor's Lot: The Power, History, and Culture of Aboriginal Action.

-- submitted by Catharine McGraw (catharinemcgraw@humanities.ucla.edu)

Professor Richard Yarborough discusses The Street by Ann Petry

Professor Yarborough teaches African American literature and 19th- and 20-century American fiction. He is also a Faculty Research Associate with UCLA's Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, which he directed for six years. The recipient of the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award in 1987, he has been recognized as an Outstanding Faculty Member by the African Student Union in 1997 and he has received commendations from the City of Los Angeles (1990) and the County of Los Angeles (1991). He has published extensively on African American literature, and he is the Associate General Editor of the Heath Anthology of American Literature (5th ed., 2006). Since 1988 he has been the editor of The Library of Black Literature reprint series published by the University Press of New England.

-- submitted by Susan Skarzynski (susan@humanities.ucla.edu)

For more information, contact friends@english.ucla.edu