May 2013 Events Spotlight

Wednesday, May 1
5:00PM
300 Wheeler Hall
UC Berkeley

Novelistic Legacies: Literary Criticism in the Age of Cinema

Panelist/Discussants: Mark Goble, Associate Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley; Kent Puckett, Associate Professor of English; Namwali Serpell, Assistant Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley

Moderator: Jeffrey Knapp, Chancellor's Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley

Sponsors: Department of English, The Consortium on the Novel, Townsend Center for the Humanities

The Consortium on the Novel presents a colloquium featuring Mark Goble on DeLillo and slow motion, Kent Puckett on the actor Robert Newton, and Namwali Serpell on Hitchcock’s Psycho, with Professor Jeffrey Knapp moderating.

Recent scholarly work on the novel has productively interrogated and complicated traditional accounts of fictional characters, narrative space, literary formalism, and aesthetic production in the eighteenth-century through contemporary novel. With the increasing prominence of visual studies and digital humanities and the rise of film and media departments in universities across the country, however, cinema itself has stepped out from beneath the shadow of its novelistic counterparts not only to make a compelling case for its dominance as the current mode of high narrativity, but also to reflect, refract, or even revise foundational theories of the novel. 
The papers in this interdisciplinary colloquium will touch on aspects of 'the movies' as wide-ranging as actor typecasting, the uses of slow motion in text, and cinematic representations of ordinary everyday objects in order to discuss the mutually constitutive relationship between novel and film, offering perspectives on the motion picture's illuminating contributions to our ever-evolving critical-theoretical language. 



Reception to follow in 330 Wheeler (English Department Lounge).

Event Contact: wendy.xin@berkeley.edu

Wednesday, May 1
5:30PM
126 Dwinelle Annex
(wooden bldg behind Dwinelle Hall)
UC Berkeley

The Tropic Spell of Asian Performance

Speaker/Performer: Eng-Beng Lim, Brown University

Sponsors: Department of English; Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies

What might a transnational study of Asian performance shaped by the homoerotics of orientalism look like if brown boys and rice queens were its central tropes? In this talk, Eng-Beng Lim brings out the queer relationship of the white man and the native boy in 20th and 21st century colonial and cultural encounters. Drawing from his forthcoming book, Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias (NYU Press, 2013) Lim will touch on the controversies of following this dyad as an episteme of Asian performance in Bali, Singapore and Asian America.

Event Contact: nellis@berkeley.edu

Francophone Studies Working Group: The Calculus of Disaster: Citizenship and Economics following the 1891 Hurricane

Sponsor: Townsend Center for the Humanities

"The Calculus of Disaster: Citizenship and Economics following the 1891 Hurricane"

Chris Church, Ph.D. Candidate in the History Department

Reading: Will be available two weeks before the meeting.

Lunch provided. Send your RSVP to Caitlin (cscholl@berkeley.edu) by Monday, April 22.

Event Contact: cscholl@berkeley.edu

Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42

Speaker: William Dalrymple, Author

Sponsors: Center for South Asia Studies, Center of British Studies, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Department of South & Southeast Asian Studies, Near Eastern Studies, Institute of International Studies, Department of History

From William Dalrymple—award-winning historian, journalist and travel writer—a masterly retelling of what was perhaps the West’s greatest imperial disaster in the East, and an important parable of neocolonial ambition, folly and hubris that has striking relevance to our own time.



About the Book
With access to newly discovered primary sources from archives in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia and India—including a series of previously untranslated Afghan epic poems and biographies—the author gives us the most immediate and comprehensive account yet of the spectacular first battle for Afghanistan: the British invasion of the remote kingdom in 1839. Led by lancers in scarlet cloaks and plumed helmets, and facing little resistance, nearly 20,000 British and East India Company troops poured through the mountain passes from India into Afghanistan in order to reestablish Shah Shuja ul-Mulk on the throne, and as their puppet. But after little more than two years, the Afghans rose in answer to the call for jihad and the country exploded into rebellion. This First Anglo-Afghan War ended with an entire army of what was then the most powerful military nation in the world ambushed and destroyed in snowbound mountain passes by simply equipped Afghan tribesmen. Only one British man made it through.

But Dalrymple takes us beyond the bare outline of this infamous battle, and with penetrating, balanced insight illuminates the uncanny similarities between the West’s first disastrous entanglement with Afghanistan and the situation today. He delineates the straightforward facts: Shah Shuja and President Hamid Karzai share the same tribal heritage; the Shah’s principal opponents were the Ghilzai tribe, who today make up the bulk of the Taliban’s foot soldiers; the same cities garrisoned by the British are today garrisoned by foreign troops, attacked from the same rings of hills and high passes from which the British faced attack. Dalryrmple also makes clear the byzantine complexity of Afghanistan’s age-old tribal rivalries, the stranglehold they have on the politics of the nation and the ways in which they ensnared both the British in the nineteenth century and NATO forces in the twenty-first.

Informed by the author’s decades-long firsthand knowledge of Afghanistan, and superbly shaped by his hallmark gifts as a narrative historian and his singular eye for the evocation of place and culture, The Return of a King is both the definitive analysis of the First Anglo-Afghan War and a work of stunning topicality. 




About the Author
William Dalrymple is the author of seven acclaimed works of history and travel, including City of Djinns, which won the Young British Writer of the Year Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Book award; the bestselling From the Holy Mountain; White Mughals, which won Britain's most prestigious history prize, the Wolfson; and The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize for History and Biography. He divides his time between New Delhi and London, and is a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Guardian.



Event Contact: 510-642-3608

Fertile Disorder: Spirit Possession and its Provocation of the Modern

Speaker: Kalpana Ram, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Macquarie University

Panelist/Discussant: Stefania Pandolfo, Associate Professor of Anthropology, UC Berkeley

Sponsors: Center for South Asia Studies, Department of Anthropology

A discussion by Anthropologist, Kalpana Ram on her latest publication, Fertile Disorder: Spirit Possession and its Provocation of the Modern

-- Event will include a CSAS launch of Prof. Ram's new book by CSAS Chair, Lawrence Cohen.  Expert in the field of spirit possession, UC Berkeley Anthropologist, Stefania Pandolfo will serve as a discussant. 

Limited copies of the book will be available for sale. 

If you are interested in attending and participating in this discussion, please contact Behnaz Raufi to receive a copy of a chapter from this book.



About the Book
In her innovative new book, Kalpana Ram reflects on the way spirit possession unsettles some of the foundational assumptions of modernity. What is a human subject under the varied conditions commonly associated with possession? What kind of subjectivity must already be in place to allow such a transformation to occur? How does it alter our understanding of memory and emotion if these assail us in the form of ghosts rather than as attributes of subjective experience? What does it mean to worship deities who are afflictive and capricious, yet bear an intimate relationship to justice? What is a "human" body if it can be taken over by a whole array of entities? What is agency if people can be "claimed" in this manner? What is gender if, while possessed, a woman is a woman no longer?

Drawing on spirit possession among women and the rich traditions of subaltern religion in Tamil Nadu, South India, Ram concludes that the basis for constructing an alternative understanding of human agency need not rest on the usual requirements of a fully present consciousness or on the exercise of choice and planning. Instead of relegating possession, ghosts, and demons to the domain of the exotic, Ram uses spirit possession to illuminate ordinary experiences and relationships. In doing so, she uncovers fundamental instabilities that continue to haunt modern formulations of gender, human agency, and political emancipation. Fertile Disorder interrogates the modern assumptions about gender, agency, and subjectivity that underlie the social improvement projects circulating in Tamil Nadu, assumptions that directly shape people’s lives. The book pays particular attention to projects of family planning, development, reform, and emancipation.

Combining ethnography with philosophical argument, Ram fashions alternatives to standard post-modernist and post-structuralist formulations. Grounded in decades of fieldwork, ambitious and wide ranging, her work is conceived as a journey that makes incursions into the unfamiliar, then returns us to the familiar. She argues that magic is not a monopoly of any one culture, historical period, or social formation but inhabits modernity—not only in the places, such as cinema and sound recording, where it is commonly looked for, but in "habit" and in aspects of everyday life that have been largely overlooked and shunned.



About the Author: 
Kalpana Ram is associate professor of anthropology in the Department of Anthropology, Macquarie University, Sydney, where she lectures on anthropology, phenomenology, gender, and India. She is also director of the university’s India Research Centre. 



Event Contact: 510-642-3608

Lunch Poems: Student Reading

Sponsor: Library

One of the year’s most lively events, the student reading includes winners of the following prizes: Academy of American Poets, Cook, Rosenberg, and Yang, as well as students nominated by Berkeley’s creative writing faculty, Lunch Poems volunteers, and representatives from student publications.

Event Contact: poems@library.berkeley.edu

Embodied Epistemologies: Performing Spirituality, Queering Latinidad

Sponsor: Center for Race and Gender

Prof. Piedro Javier di Pietro, Ethnic Studies
Elisa Diana Huerta, UC Santa Cruz; UC Berkeley Multicultural Community Center

Event Contact: centerrg@berkeley.edu, 510-643-8488

The Object-Fetish: From Memory to Alterity

Speaker/Performer: Massimo Fusillo, University of Aquila

Sponsors: Department of Italian Studies, The Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory

The paper works at the intersection of two concepts, objects and fetishes, focusing on objects invested by psychological, erotic, emotional, symbolic values, that transform them into fetishes; and aims at showing that there is a profound parallelism between fetishism and artistic creativity: both infinitize details, mirroring macrocosm in microcosm. By this way the negative connotation still linked to the concept of fetish is totally questioned and subverted.

Starting from the main theoretical approaches to fetishism (anthropology, Marxism, psychoanalysis, cultural studies), and from the mythopoetic force of objects, the paper defines two different patterns of object-fetishes: a classical one, linked to the memorial function and to the elaboration of mourning, and a modernist one, focused of the fascination of pure matter; both have broad reverberations that are exemplified in literature and visual media, from Goethe’s Elective Affinities to Marco Ferreri’s Dillinger è morto, from Virginia Woolf’Solid Objects to Christian Boltanski’s installations. 



Massimo Fusillo (Naples 1959) is Professor of Literary Criticism and Comparative Literature at the University of L’Aquila (Italy), where he is Coordinator of the PhD Program on Literary Genres; he is also President of the Italian Association of Theory and Comparative History of Literature. His major fields of research are: Theory of the Novel, Thematic Criticism. Modern Reception of ancient literature, Literature and Visual Culture, Queer Studies. His major publications are: Il romanzo greco: polifonia ed eros, Marsilio 1989; as Naissance du roman, Seuil, 1991; La Grecia secondo Pasolini. Mito e cinema, Nuova Italia, 1996; 2° revised edition Carocci, 2007; Il dio ibrido. Dioniso e le Baccanti nel Novecento, Il Mulino, 2006; L’altro e lo stesso. Teoria e storia del doppio, Nuova Italia, 1998; new edition Mucchi, 2012; Estetica della letteratura, Il Mulino, 2009; Span. transl. Antonio Machado, 2012; Feticci. Letteratura cinema arti visive, Il Mulino, 2012, forthcoming in a French version by Champion.

Event Contact: issa@berkeley.edu

Friday, May 3
10:00AM
6331 Dwinelle Hall
UC Berkeley

Massimo Fusillo: A Seminar with Graduate Students

Speaker/Performer: Massimo Fusillo, University of Aquila

Sponsor: Department of Italian Studies

Massimo Fusillo (Naples 1959) is Professor of Literary Criticism and Comparative Literature at the University of L’Aquila (Italy), where he is Coordinator of the PhD Program on Literary Genres; he is also President of the Italian Association of Theory and Comparative History of Literature. His major fields of research are: Theory of the Novel, Thematic Criticism. Modern Reception of ancient literature, Literature and Visual Culture, Queer Studies. His major publications are: Il romanzo greco: polifonia ed eros, Marsilio 1989; as Naissance du roman, Seuil, 1991; La Grecia secondo Pasolini. Mito e cinema, Nuova Italia, 1996; 2° revised edition Carocci, 2007; Il dio ibrido. Dioniso e le Baccanti nel Novecento, Il Mulino, 2006; L’altro e lo stesso. Teoria e storia del doppio, Nuova Italia, 1998; new edition Mucchi, 2012; Estetica della letteratura, Il Mulino, 2009; Span. transl. Antonio Machado, 2012; Feticci. Letteratura cinema arti visive, Il Mulino, 2012, forthcoming in a French version by Champion.

Event Contact: issa@berkeley.edu

Tuesday, May 7
12:00PM
270 Stephens Hall
UC Berkeley

History and Historians in Russia: How Do We Face Politicization of the Past?

Speaker: Ivan Kurilla, Professor of History and International Relations, Volgograd State University, Russia

Sponsor: Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ISEEES)

During the previous decade history become an important tool of identity-building on the Post-Soviet space. Russian historians, in particular, faced numerous attempts by the authorities to set "right" historical interpretations of the past, by removing and erecting monuments, correcting and eliminating history textbooks, and even creating the "Presidential Commission of the Russian Federation to Counter Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia's Interests." Quite a few high-ranked officials in Russia are eager to participate in setting "correct" historical narratives. The professional community of historians in Russia, while unhappy with such trends, is fragmented and relatively weak. However, in the aftermath of the awakening of civil society during mass protests against election fraud in 2011-2012, historians have begun a drive for the purification of their field. Among the first steps made by professional historians in Russia were an investigation of falsified dissertations by some politicians and also harsh criticism of the presidential proposal to write a new, "unified" history textbook for Russian schools.

Event Contact: 510-642-3230

Changing Conceptions of Female Beauty in Chinese History

Speaker: Prof. Bin Chang, CCS Visiting Scholar, Professor of Literature at Hebei University, PR of China

Sponsor: Center for Chinese Studies (CCS)

Throughout history, Chinese societies have exhibited unique conceptions of the ideal female. 2,500 years ago, the ideal woman would appear tall, strong, fertile, and able to engage in hard labor. Contrastingly, a true beauty during the Qin and Han dynasties was extremely slim and lightsome; legend held that the finest woman of the era could dance on the palm of one’s hand. A beautiful Tang Dynasty woman was plump, fleshy, and perhaps downright fat. Women engaged in foot-binding beginning in the Song dynasty and the practice escalated during the Ming and Qing dynasties. From Song to Qing, for a woman to be regarded as truly beautiful she must exhibit the smallest feet. The Three-inch “Golden Lotus” foot (三寸金莲) is a product of painful binding, folding and breaking of a young female’s foot. By the first half of the 20th century the “cheongsam woman,” with her sensuous dress and Western-inspired curly hair, fair skin and slim frame, became a new standard of modern feminine beauty. Mao’s reign (1950s-1970s) brought about a ‘political ideology’ of beauty: The ideal Chinese woman was shown in dull-colored work clothes and pictured as strong and hearty, with a thick waist and powerful arms and legs, and a round, solid face. By the 1980s, prominent Chinese beauties were portrayed in colored dresses and possessing flush, round faces—suggesting a transitional phase between the Maoist era and today’s openly consumerist culture. Since the 1990s the standard for female beauty has transitioned yet again; Chinese women desire to be slim and tall, with full breasts, and faces accented by sharp, pointed chins. This presentation will demonstrate the changes of standards of beauty with archived photographs.

Event Contact: ccs-vs@berkeley.edu, 510-643-6322

For more information, please visit the conference website.

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