2001-02 Calendar of Events

(see bottom of page regarding event registration)

Efi Hatzimanolis, More Multicultural Suxess Stories: Surveillance and Incommensurability in Minority Australian Film

Professor Hatzimanolis' paper will examine minority Australian films (Greek and Arab Australian) in terms of how the films visualize ethnic minority experience and how these visualizations concern wider questions about the specificities and the value of analytical categories of subjectivity and identity politics together with the uses of minority narratives in producing new categories of cultural critique. Professor Hatzimanolis will then show how the analysis of these films reminds us of the proximity between the processes of visualizing ethnicity and the recognition/subjectification of ethnic identities under official regimes of Multiculturalism.

306 Royce Hall, 4:00pm - 6:00pm

Sponsored by the Transnational and Transcolonial Studies Multicampus Research Group

October 8, 2001:

Luisa Passerini, Europe and Love: A Research Project

A central question of this project is the conceptualization, in historical perspective, of the relationship between the love of the lovers' couple and the love which keeps the community together. Various intellectual and cultural traditions assume a direct link between the two loves, while others understand this link as indirect. This issue is linked with the conceptualizing gender relationships and the changes in the connection between the public and private spheres.

314 Royce Hall, 4:00pm - 6:00pm

October 19, 2001:

A Symposium on Jacques RanciËre's "10 Theses on Politics"

314 Royce Hall, 1:00pm - 4:00pm

Click here for program details

November 29, 2001:

Myung Mi Kim, In dialogue with Shu-mei Shih
Provisional Languages and Times

4:30 - 6:30pm, 243 Royce Hall (EALC Faculty Lounge)

This event will begin with a critical introduction of the poetry of Myung Mi Kim by Shu-mei Shih, followed by the poetís reading of her recent work and a dialogue/conversation between the poet and the critic. They will explore, individually and together, the provisionality of languages, times, concepts, identities, spaces, and memories in the writing of poetry for an Asian/American poet.

Myung Mi Kim is an award-winning poet and the author of four books of poetry, Under Flag (1991), The Bounty (1996), DURA (1998) and Commons (forthcoming in 2002 from the University of California Press). She has published in major poetry journals and her work has been anthologized widely. She is the recipient of the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative North American Poetry and several awards from the Fund for Poetry, among others. She is currently a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University.

Shu-mei Shih holds a joint appointment in Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Asian American Studies at UCLA. She is the author of The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China (2001), and a forthcoming book entitled Visuality and Identity.

Sponsored by the Transnational and Transcolonial Studies Multicampus Research Group

November 30 - December 1, 2001:

The Life and Times of Enrico Fermi

314 Royce Hall

Program details

February 11, 2002:

Martha Nussbaum
"Shame, Stigma, and the Law"

314 Royce Hall, 4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.

Shame is a pervasive experience in human life: we all have characteristics that we prefer to hide, and feel pain when they are revealed. Shame is also a pervasive source of social custom. All societies stigmatize some groups of people, shaming them for what or who they are. Recently social theorists have suggested that shame ought to play a larger role in American social life than it currently plays: for example, we should bring back punishments based upon the public shaming of the offender. In this lecture, Professor Nussbaum will argue that we can better assess such proposals if we have a deeper understanding of shame and its roots in childhood. But once we have such an understanding we will see that shame provides very unreliable and slippery guidance, and often allies itself with aggression of the powerful against the powerless.

Martha Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, with appointments in the Philosophy Department, Law School, and Divinity School. She is an Associate in the Classics Department, an Affiliate of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and a Board member of the Center for Gender Studies. Her most recent books are Women and Human Development (2000) and Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001). She is the winner of the Grawemeyer Award in Education for 2002.

February 13, 2002:

Traise Yamamoto
"An Apology to Althea Connor: Private Memory, Public Racialization and Making a Language"

355 Kinsey Hall, 4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.

"An Apology to Althea Connor: Private Memory, Public Racialization, and Making a Language" explores cross-identification between Asian Americans and African Americans and the often fraught issues of ideological caregiving that arise. Intercut with personal narrative, Yamamoto discusses the faultlines between private and public languages for racialization and how they crucially limit the extent to which we can think beyond the black-white dyad. The paper includes a coda that focuses on the autobiographical aftermath of the writing of "An Apology," prompting questions about the ethics and responsibilities of writing in autobiographical modes.

Traise Yamamoto is Associate Professor of English at the University of Calfornia, Riverside. She is the author of Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body (University of California Press, 1999). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in several journals and anthologies, including The New Republic, Poetry Northwest, Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Poets, Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies, and Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry. She is one of the subjects in a forthcoming documentary on Asian American women poets, "Between the Lines." She is currently working on a manuscript of short fiction, as well as a scholarly study on pleasure and the problematic subject in Asian American literature.

Sponsored by the Transnational and Transcolonial Studies Multicampus Research Group , and co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Women

February 25, 2002:

Werner Sollors
"The Rise of Ethnic Modernism in the US 1910 - 1950"

306 Royce Hall, 4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.

At the beginning of the 20th century, modern art seemed like a strange European invention, modern music and jazz had subcultural or popular, not national or artistic significance, and the best modernist literature had not found many sympathetic readers. American intellectuals could believe that modern art was not art, that modern music was not music or merely entertainment, and that even the best modernist literature was simply an elaborately disguised failure. And the Saturday Evening Post expressed its hostility to modern art as alien to America in countless articles, often with the reassuringly homey realism of Norman Rockwellís cover art. By mid-century, agencies of the United States government proudly adopted abstract art, modern jazz, and the 1950 Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner as true expressions of the American spirit that could be officially endorsed for export around the globe. President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent tape-recorded greetings for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Museum of Modern Art, praising "healthy controversy and progress in art." The State Department sent Dizzy Gillespie on a tour of the Near and Middle East. In 1962, even Norman Rockwell painted a modernist canvas for a Saturday Evening Post cover entitled "The Connoisseur."

The lecture explores this dramatic change and how ethnic artists participated in the development of an American literary modernism that would carry the day only after World War II.

Werner Sollors teaches Afro-American Studies and English at Harvard University and is the author of Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Literature and Culture (1986) and Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (pb. 1999). Recently, he edited Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of America (1998), Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law (2000), The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans (expanded edition 2000), The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature (co-ed. 2000), The Norton Critical Edition of Olaudah Equiano (2000), and Charles Chesnuttís Novels, Short Stories, Essays for the Library of America (2002).

February 27, 2002:

Tony Gleaton, photographer
"(Re) Constructing Mestizaje: Africa's Legacy in Mexico, Central & South America"

314 Royce Hall, 4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.

"The photographs which I create are as much an effort to define my own life, with its heritage encompassing Africa and Europe, as it is an endeavor to throw open the discourse on the broader aspects of ëmestizajeí ... the ëassimilationí of Asians, Africans and Europeans with indigenous Americans.
The images I produce, most often, are ones in which people directly and openly look into the camera, yet the most important aspect of these portraits is that they give a narrative voice by visual means to people deemed invisible by the greater part of society ... and deliberately craft an ëalternative iconographyí of what beauty and family and love and goodness might stand for -- one that is inclusive, not exclusive." - Tony Gleaton

For more than 28 years, Tony Gleaton has pursued photography throughout North and South America. He began his career as a photographic assistant in New York, and eventually made his way to the American West, where he formed the core of his project COWBOYS: Reconstructing an American Myth, a series of photographs and portraits of African-, Native-, Euro-, Mexican and Mexican-American Cowboys. For the next several years, he made extensive travels throughout Mexico, where he developed his most well known project, Africaís Legacy in Mexico, photographs of present day descendants of the black African slaves brought to New Spain from 1500 through the 1700s. This lecture is taken from Gleatonís project, Tengo Casi 500 AÒos: Africaís Legacy in Mexico, Central & South America, which is an expansion of the above work to include Central and South America. For more information, go to: http://www.artepublico.com .

Sponsored by the Transnational and Transcolonial Studies Multicampus Research Group

March 4, 2002:

Toward an Anthropological Humanism? - conference

314 Royce Hall, 9:30 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.

Click here for program details Sponsored by the Department of French and Francophone Studies and co-sponsored by the Center for Modern & Contemporary Studies, the Transnational and Transcolonial Studies Multicampus Research Group , and Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology

March 8 - 9, 2002:

Translating the Nation in East Asia - a conference

314 Royce Hall

Click here for program details

Organizers: Ted Huters and John Duncan, East Asian Languages and Cultures

April 5, 2002:

Diaspora, Descent, and Dissent
The First Transnational and Transcolonial Studies Multicampus Research Group Graduate Student Conference

314 Royce Hall

Click here for program details

April 12 - 13, 2002:

Religion and Society in the Late Ottoman Empire - a conference

This event is held at 314 Royce Hall

Click here for program details

Organizer: Jim Gelvin, Department of History

May 1, 2002:

Sneja Gunew
"Transcultural Contexts: Affective Translations

314 Royce Hall, 4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.

The paper explores the continuing project of trying to effect cultural translations, or simply contact moments, without effacing the elements of incommensurability and defining difference which are generated, particularly when these occur between subjects unevenly situated in relation to global power. Increasingly these moments are played out in transcultural contexts with global consequences and affiliations. The concept of ëaffectí is gaining momentum in recent debates, particularly when attached to notions of the ësocial,í for example, in relation to ëshame,í to ëmelancholiaí and to ëhauntingsí to name only a few.

The paper draws on the interdisciplinary project ìTranscultural Canada: Cultural Mingling Between, Among, Within Culturesî (http://transculturalisms.arts.ubc.ca), which is attempts to produce new models for productively representing hybridity/mÈtissage within a framework of transcultural translation. It is organised around the four themes: Ethnic and Indigenous relations; ëMixed raceí identities; Performing hybridity: new art forms; Globalization/Immigration/Citizenship.

Sneja Gunew has taught in England, Australia and Canada. She has published widely on multicultural, postcolonial and feminist critical theory and is currently Professor of English and Womenís Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. She will be Director of the Centre for Research in Womenís Studies and Gender Relations (July 2002-7). She has edited (with Anna Yeatman) Feminism and the Politics of Difference and (with Fazal Rizvi) Culture, Difference and the Arts . Her most recent book is Framing Marginality: Multicultural Literary Studies , and Postcolonial Multiculturalisms: Bodies, Communities, Nations is forthcoming by Routledge. Her current work is in comparative multiculturalism and in diasporic literatures and their intersections with national and global cultural formations using theoretical frameworks deriving from feminist, postcolonial, and critical multicultural theory. She is one of six directors of the three-year Transculturalisms/MÈtissage project co-ordinated by the International Council for Canadian Studies.

Sponsored by the Transnational and Transcolonial Studies Multicampus Research Group

May 8, 2002:

Arif Dirlik
"Literature/Identity: Transnationalism, Narrative and Representation"

306 Royce Hall, 4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.

A discussion of the relationship between literature and history in the representation/construction of identity. The questions raised by this relationship pertain most importantly to the politics of literature, and its implications for issues of the public and the private. The ethnicization of literature undermines the autonomy of the author but also, contradictorily, negates the public significance of ethnic literature by imprisoning it in an ethnic cultural space. History is important in restoring a sense of the public in ethnicized literature.

Arif Dirlik is Knight Professor of Social Science at the University of Oregon, and Professor of History and Anthropology. His most recent book-length works are Postmodernity's Histories: The Past as Legacy and Project , and two edited volumes, Places and Politics in an Age of Globalization (with Roxann Prazniak), and Chinese on the American Frontier .

Co-sponsored by the Transnational and Transcolonial Studies Multicampus Research Group and CIRA (Comparative
Interdisciplinary Research on Asia, ISOP)

May 13, 2002:

Ian Hacking, "Body Parts: Large and Small"
Kanner Lecture Series

6:00 PM - Reception
7:00 PM - Lecture
California Room, Faculty Center Building

New technologies are radically changing our relationships to our bodies. On the large scale, we have organ transplants. The purchase and sale of body parts. A new meaning for death ñ brain death. Sex change. Intense new desires: an obsessive need to have a healthy limb amputated. On the small scale we have genetic medicine, the Icelandic sale, or at any rate lease, of genetic codes and genealogies of the entire population. In the realm of fantasy, large and small, we have cyborgs. These topics are much discussed one by one. This lecture takes them as instances of major changes in how we conceive of our bodies. It links them to some traditional philosophy, for example Kant. And it concludes that in an era when philosophers say we have finally got away from Cartesian theories of knowledge, we are implicitly restoring a Cartesian vision of mind and body.

Ian Hacking holds the chair of philosophy and history of scientific concepts, CollËge de France, and is a University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He was born and grew up in Vancouver, Canada. His doctoral work was completed at Cambridge University. He has taught at the University of British Columbia, Cambridge University and Stanford University. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the American Academy of Arts and Science, and the British Academy, and an honorary fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He has written several books, including Historical Ontology (2002); Probability and Inductive Logic (2001); The Social Construction of What? (1999); Le plus pur nominalisme (1993); The Taming of Chance (1990); and Why does Language Matter to Philosophy? (1975).

The Kanner Lectures are funded by a generous endowment created by Penny Kanner, Ph.D. These lectures are devoted to the relationship of new science and technologies to public welfare and cultural life in the 21st century. This is the second lecture in this series.

May 31, 2002: (event is being postponed until October, 2002; was previously scheduled for May 17)

Madhu Dubey
"Postmodernism and Racial Difference"

Sponsored by the Transnational and Transcolonial Studies Multicampus Research Group

EVENT REGISTRATION

At most events, limited seating is available, but reservations are not required. Parking is available on the UCLA Campus for $6.00. Please see an attendant at any parking information kiosk to be directed to the available lot closest to the above venues.

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