Cultural Studies
Newsletter, Vol. 6
Spring 2001
| Flexible
Knowledges Conference (continued)
These kinds of questions emerge most urgently from work on globalization, transnationalism, and post-Fordist economic organizations, as well as from projects rethinking racial and gender formations within transnational frameworks. David Harvey defines decentralization and flexible accumulation as the central economic logic of late capitalism, with post-Fordism characterized in terms of the paradox that decentralization, which might seem to make it harder to impose authority, actually promotes greater control and greater economic efficiency. To what extent are universities moving toward their own specific versions of such economic models? Is cultural studies' interdisciplinary impulse in danger of being assimilated to what Masao Miyoshi has defined as the new norm for transnational corporate elites: the ability to translate across the boundaries of cultural differences? How can we work toward what Arif Dirlik has called "critical localism," at the level of our own institutional structures of knowledge production, without simply revalidating traditional disciplinary formations? Each of the three panels will address these questions from a slightly different vantage. New Cultural Studies Adjuncts Please join us in welcoming several new adjuncts to the Cultural Studies Program. Nicholas Cullather (History) specializes in U.S. foreign relations and Southeast Asia. Jane Goodman (Communication & Culture) has worked in North Africa and France on Berber world music. Her research centers on colonialism and postcolonial identity. Currently on sabbatical, Helen Gremillion holds the Peg Zeglin Brand Chair in Gender Studies. Her research and teaching interests include gender and scientific knowledges, the anthropology of the body, feminist ethnography, medical anthropology and consumer culture. Candida Jaquez (Folklore and Ethnomusicology) conducts research on Chicano popular music, Mexico, and the United States. Her recent work centers on Mariachi culture and performance. Angela Pao (Comparative Literature) is on leave this year with an NEH fellowship to conduct research for a book on non-traditional casting practices in relation to theories of race and ethnicity. Dror Wahrman (History) is currently working on his book, now titled A Cultural History of the Modern Self. He is the chair of the new Cultural History Double Major Phd, a program that he helped initiate. For more details on this program see http://www.indiana.edu/~histweb/graduatecultural_history.htm |
Recent
Events
The Cultural Studies Program co-sponsored a number of events this fall. In September, Cultural Studies joined the Victorian Studies Graduate Student Organization, the Department of English, and others for the first lectures in a series entitled "The 19th Century in the 21st," focusing on trends in literary studies, cultural studies, and cultural history. The first event featured Catherine Gallagher, Eggers Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and Christopher Herbert, Professor of English at Northwestern University. (see 'Upcoming Lectures' for details on the next installment of this lecture series) Cultural Studies also co-sponsored the Department of Communication and Culture's Fall Lecture, which was given by Carol J. Clover, University of California, Berkeley. Clover's paper, "Trials, Movies, and the Paranoid Imagination," drew from her current research on the relation between Anglo-American legal and entertainment systems (film and television). In conjunction with a seminar in black cultural studies, Roopali Mukherjee (Communication & Culture) organized a weekend event showcasing films from the Los Angeles School of Cinema. The event included screenings of Ashes and Embers (Haile Gerima), Bless Their Little Hearts (Billy Woodberry), To Sleep with Anger (Charles Burnett) and Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash). Another film screening co-sponsored by Cultural Studies and organized by the Department of Communication and Culture and the Union Board, featured the film, The Wind Will Carry Us, by the Iranian director, Abbas Kiarostami. The film was introduced by Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago film critic and scholar, who is currently writing a book on Kiarostami. "The History and Development of Salsa Music" was the focus of this year's CUBAFEST, a yearly event organized by the student organization, Latinos Unidos, which also received support from Cultural Studies. |
| Recent
Work (continued)
Angela Pao is conducting research in New York, Washington DC and other cities with major regional theatre companies for her book on non-traditional casting practices in relation to theories of race and ethnicity. An article titled, "Recasting Race: Casting Practices and Racial Formations," which will be part of the book, appeared in the November 2000 issue of Theatre Survey. In addition, she presented a paper on "Producing the Exotic: Cross-cultural Stagings of Turandot and The Peony Pavilion" at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association in December. The paper dealt with the internationalization of the performing arts with a focus on the two operas. Janet Sorensen's new book, The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing, has recently been published by Cambridge University Press (above). Dror Wahrman has two publications forthcoming this year; a volume of essays titled The Age of Cultural Revolutions, which he edited with Colin Jones (Warwick); and an essay titled "The English Problem of Identity in the American Revolution" in a Forum in the American Historical Review on Identities in the Age of Revolutions. Independent Readings
in Cultural Studies
|
“Visual Rhetorics”
Conference at IU
The Department of
Communication and Culture, Indiana University and the Department of Communication
Studies, University of Iowa will co-host a conference on "Visual Rhetorics"
at the Indiana Memorial Union on September 6-8, 2001. The organizers
for the conference are John Lucaites (Communication and Culture) and Barbara
Biesecker (Univ. of Iowa), who also collaborated this past summer on a
“Workshop on Visual Rhetoric” at the University of Iowa’s Obermann Center.
Scholars have been focusing a great deal of attention recently on the symbolic
and performative dimensions of visual and material culture, including everything
from cartography to photography and from architecture and interior design
to public memorials and museums. "Visual rhetorics" is an emergent
term being used to describe such work, and under its rubric attention has
been directed to a wide range of themes and topics, including the relationship
between visual culture and collective memory, social controversy, political
styles and representation, technology, epistemology, and argumentation.
|
| "Beyond the
Belle Epoque" Symposium
The Department of French and Italian, Horizons of Knowledge, the Jewish Studies Program, and the Comparative Literature Department will be holding a symposium titled, “Beyond the Belle Epoque,” to be held on April 10th from 3:30-5:30 p.m. in the Dogwood Room at the Union. The period of the "Belle Epoque" in France, from roughly 1900-1914, is generally viewed with nostalgia as a golden moment of prosperity, harmony and insouciance. This symposium will explore issues that go "beyond" this myth to focus on the gritty behind-the-scenes struggles of various cultures, including those of class, gender, race, and ethnicity. With reference to a range of canonical and non-canonical authors (Colette, Anna de Noailles, Porto-Riche, Dabit and Guilloux) writing around the time of the First World War and in the 'entre-deux-guerres' period, the symposium will explore forms of social hierarchy, containment, and contestation. Working on the interrelated notions of drawing and crossing the line, the four panelists will reflect on ways in which social boundaries are established, policed, manipulated, and transgressed, and will work across the genres of memoir, theatre, novel, and poetry. To Jewish dramatist Porto-Riche's desire for social integration and artistic confirmation in a French context can be added the economic and social marginalization of the performing music-hall artists in Colette, the resistance of male critics to the innovative poetics of Anna de Noailles, and the prison of social class in Dabit and Guilloux. While the specificities of each of these cases need to be respected, notions of orthodoxy and order are inferred and contested in all of them. The panel will additionally reflect on issues of cultural value, the interface between public and private spaces, and the workings of transgression and recuperation. Featured panelists include: Catherine Perry, University of Notre Dame; M. Martin Guiney, Kenyon College, Ohio; Edward J. Hughes, Royal Holloway, University of London; and Margaret E. Gray (French & Italian), Indiana University, Bloomington. For detailed information about the symposium or to receive abstracts of the panelists’ papers, contact Margaret E. Gray via e-mail (megray@indiana.edu). |
