Upcoming Events
Thirteenth Annual Cultural Studies Conference
CULTURAL STUDIES/PERFORMANCE STUDIES
FEBRUARY 6-7, 2009
Highlighting the intersection of aesthetics and politics, contemporary performance theory has deeply shaped our critical understanding of the workings of power, hegemony, and resistance. In putting cultural studies and performance studies together in productive dialogue, this year’s Cultural Studies Conference (6-7 February 2009) establishes points of contact between the reproduction and disruption of cultural processes and the workings of power. The articulation of these fields enables us to ask: How has the “performative turn” in the humanities affected the way we study cultural production and reception? What are the embodied ways that culture is transmitted and transformed through affect and signification, feeling and meaning? In what ways does the performance rubric shift our focus to the productive instability of cultural identities, identities that are always in the making and potentially open to critical revision? How does performance traffic across borders and boundaries to forge a public commons in an age of increasing global privatization? What kinds of gestures are required to alter the relationship between local communities and the state? What kinds of songs might rescore the discordant notes of an off-key democracy? What kinds of voices might sound new forms of resistance and collectivity?
A number of panels and keynote addresses will investigate performance across a wide range of media, with a focus on diaspora cultures and the critical de-composition of race. Paul Berliner (Duke University) will deliver the opening keynote, “The Heart that Remembers: A Tale of Musicians during Zimbabwe’s Liberation Struggle,” a lecture that blends scholarly research with Mbira performance. Karen Shimakawa (New York University) will deliver the closing keynote, “Habitual Performance: The Transnational Migration of ‘the Geisha.’” Their presentations will frame three panels with short papers and commentary by invited guest Alexandra Vazquez (Princeton University) and IU faculty working at the intersections of cultural studies and performance studies. On Friday, Panel I (“Rehearsing Race, Staging Politics”) features papers on the shifting boundaries of race on the vaudeville stage, masquerade and opportunism in an Asian American context, the backstage politics of mid-century black Broadway. On Saturday morning, Panel II (“Gestures and Media: Re-imagining the Nation in Film and Performance”) examines how various media address questions of national and transnational identity by looking at the global circulation of Angolan urban dance practices, spectacle as a critique of revolution in the work of the Bissauan filmmaker Flora Gomes, and the staging of racism in recent German documentary film and theater. Panel III on Saturday afternoon (“Actors and Audiences: Traversing the Boundaries of Performance) investigates the relationships and ethics of spectators and performers with papers that explore the onstage and offstage lives of road comics, the ethics of knowing and unknowing in music collection and scholarship, and local practices of HIV-prevention in Detroit Ballroom culture.
See conference schedule here.
Thursday, October 2, 2008 at 7p.m., Woodburn Hall 100
“Rigged: Election Fraud and Media Coverage, 2000-2008”
Professor Miller will talk about the problems that plague our election system, and the extent to which many Americans remain either unaware of, or unconcerned by, “a lethal combination of old-fashioned vote suppression and high-tech election fraud.” No longer dismissible as ‘conspiracy theory,' election fraud has now been confirmed repeatedly with hard evidence provided by reputable whistle-blowers, both Democratic and Republican. Despite this proof of widespread fraud in both 2000 and 2004 (as well as in 2002 and 2006), the media—and the Democratic party—have virtually ignored this crisis, even with a crucial presidential election merely weeks away. Miller will talk about the broad unwillingness throughout the political establishment, the press included, to face the facts about election fraud and the real and present danger that it poses to US democracy.
Mark Crispin Miller is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU, and is internationally known for his scholarship on mass culture, advertising, propaganda, media concentration and election politics and practices. One of the nation’s best-known advocates of democratic media reform, Miller has been interviewed on NPR, PBS, Democracy Now!, “The O’Reilly Factor,” and many other venues. His books include Boxed In: The Culture of TV; The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder; Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney’s New World Order; Fooled Again: The Real Case for Electoral Reform, and his latest, Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008, a collection of essays by expert scholars, journalists and activists. He is also a performer, whose off-Broadway show, A Patriot Act, ran in the summer of 2004. He is currently completing a new book: The Marlboro Man: An American Success Story, to be published by Yale University Press in 2009.
Sponsored by: English, Political Science, Cultural Studies, American Studies, The Poynter Center, School of Journalism, School of Law, Center on American Politics, Center for History and Memory, and Horizons of Knowledge.
Theorizing the Premodern Thing:A Symposium on Thing Theory and Medieval and Early Modern Literature and Culture
Featuring talks by Mary Baine Campbell, "Immaterial Objects: Things in Dreams"; Thomas Hahn, "Material Possessions: How a Text Re-Imagines Its Audience"; Scott Lightsey, "The Work of Making Wonders"; Kellie Robertson, "Medieval Materialisms, or What's the Matter with 'matere'?"; and Sarah Stanbury, "The Man of Law's Tale and the Roman Thing."
Saturday, October 18, 8:30-4:00
University Club, IMU
