40th Anniversary Speaker Series
SPEAKERS IN THE SERIES:
Monday, November 14, 2011 @ 4:15 p.m., Terrace Room
Darieck Scott ('99)
Associate Professor of African American Studies
University of California, Berkeley
“Black/Abject: Frantz Fanon and James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man"
In this talk, Scott theorizes the relationship between blackness and abjection. He considers a literary scene of lynching in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man in light of Frantz Fanon’s discussions of how racialization disrupts a black person’s experience of embodiment in both damaging and enabling ways. Suggesting that the novel’s narrator experiences the trauma as a kind of collective racial annihilation, Scott argues that it operates for him as a primal scene in which the sexually violent elements of the relation between whiteness and blackness are revealed. Because he reads the construction of blackness as only humiliation and defeat, the narrator abandons it—and in so doing abandons the opportunity for self-making, and what Fanon would describes as “sociogenic” power.
Click here for an abstract of the talk.
Photos from the talk:
Thursday, February 9, 2012 @ 4:15 p.m., Terrace Room
Assistant Professor of the History of Science and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University
“Sex Itself: Conceptualizing Sex Differences in the Human Genome”
Sarah S. Richardson is a historian and philosopher of science. Her research focuses on race and gender in the biosciences and on the social dimensions of scientific knowledge. She has broad interests and expertise in the history of molecular biology and genetics, philosophy of science, science and technology studies, and feminist science studies Her current research is on the history of human sex chromosome genetics.
Richardson co-edited the book Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age (Rutgers, 2008). She received her doctorate from the Program in Modern Thought and Literature.
Photos from the talk:
Monday, March 5, 2012 @ 4:15 p.m., Terrace Room
Associate Professor in American Culture and Women’s Studies, University of Michigan
"Liberating the Feminist Archive: Mapping the Hidden History of Chicana Feminism"
[co-sponsored by American Studies]
In this talk, Cotera presents “Chicana por me Raza,” a new digital archive documenting the development of Chicana feminist praxis over the long civil rights period. This innovative project combines oral histories and archival documents with new digital modalities to create an open source platform for the preservation and production of radical knowledges.
Maria Cotera is Associate Professor of American Culture and Women’s Studies, and immediate past Director of Latina/o Studies, at the University of Michigan. She is the author or editor of Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita Gonzalez and the Poetics of Culture (2008), Life Along the Border: A Landmark Tejana Thesis by Jovita González (2006), and Caballero: An Historical Novel, by Jovita González and Margaret Eimer (1994).
Photos from a lunch discussion with students before the talk:
Photos from the talk:
Thursday, April 12, 2012 @ 4:15 p.m., Terrace Room
Tania Modleski ('80)
Florence R. Scott Professor of English and Professor of English
University of Southern California
"An Affair to Forget: Melancholia in Bromantic Comedy"
Drawing from a larger project on "male weepies," in this presentation Modleski suggests that the classic romantic comedy can be seen as a melancholy genre insofar as the compulsory heterosexual ending forecloses the desire for same-sex love. She then discusses how some Hollywood bromances are turning melancholia into mourning, repudiating "reproductive futurism" and expressing, albeit humorously, the longing for same-sex desire.
Modleski is the author of Loving With a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (1982/2008), The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (1988/2005), Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a "Post-Feminist" Age (1991), and Old Wives Tales, and Other Women's Stories (1999).
Photos from the talk:
