SPRING 2015
Friday, June 5th at 11am in Bunche 11377
Postcolonial Theory and Literary Studies Group meeting–Workshop Treasa De Loughry’s “Invisible Realities, Visible Fictions: Globalization & Postcoloniality in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh“
The Postcolonial Theory and Literary Studies Group (PTLSG) will workshop a chapter from Treasa De Loughry’s dissertation, “Imagining the World: Realism and Crisis in the Global Novel.” The chapter we will workshop is titled “Invisible Realities, Visible Fictions: Globalization & Postcoloniality in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh.”
Tuesday, May 5 at noon in Humanities 250
Environmental Humanities Reading Group & Postcolonial Theory and Literary Studies Group–Discussion of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “Climate of History” and “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change”
Environmental Humanities Reading Group and PTLSG will join to discuss Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “Climate of History” and “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change,” as well as essays responding to his work prior to his participation in the Sawyer Seminar.
Friday, April 24 at 11:30 a.m. in Humanities 250
Postcolonial Theory and Literary Studies Group
Gather to workshop a chapter from Comparative Literature graduate student Dana Linda’s dissertation, tentatively titled “Postcolonial Urbanism: Gender and the Global Cartographies of Caribbean Literary Cities.” The chapter we will workshop is titled “Carnival Crossroads: Performance Genealogies and Urban Junctions of Body and Place.”
Tuesday, March 31, 2015, 4:00pm-6:00pm in UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library Presentation Room 11348
*Book Talk with David Hanlon*
Tosiwo Nakayama served as the first president of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), a self-governing entity in the Pacific referred to by some as the “remnants” of United States strategic interests in the western Pacific. Kyushu and Manhattan marked the lateral borders of the world of islands in which he lived, worked, and traveled. Born in 1931 to a Japanese father and a local woman from the Namonuito Atoll complex that lies some 170 kilometers northwest of the main Chuuk Lagoon group, Nakayama grew up during Japan’s colonial administration of greater Micronesia, survived the war, and rose to local and later regional political prominence in the United States-administered Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. In this talk, Professor David Hanlon will discuss how Tosiwo Nakayama’s public life offers a site for the critical investigation of decolonization, nation-state construction, and regional crossings. Professor and Director Duncan Ryuken Williams of the Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture, University of Southern California, will serve as the respondent. David Hanlon is past director of the Center for Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa. His previous writings include Upon a Stone Altar: A History of the Island of Pohnpei to 1890 and Remaking Micronesia: Discourses Over Development in a Pacific Territory, 1944-1982. A former editor of The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of Island Affairs and the Pacific Islands Monograph Series, he currently teaches in the university’s Department of History.
WINTER 2015
Thursday, March 19 at 12:00 in Humanities 250
Postcolonial Theory and Literary Studies Group
Gather to workshop a chapter from English graduate student, Joyce Pualani Warren’s dissertation, “Theorizing the Pō: Embodied Cosmogony and Polynesian National Narratives.” The chapter we will workshop is titled “Genealogy in the Racial Production of the State in Victoria Nālani Kneubuhl’s ‘Ho’oulu Lāhui.'”
Monday, February 23 at 4pm in Humanities 193
Irene Tucker (UC Irvine)
A special session with PTLS and GRS (Graduate-Faculty Interest & Reading Groups) on:
The Moment of Racial Sight: A History (readings will be introduction and chapter one)
Friday, February 21 at 12:00 in Humanities 250
Postcolonial Theory and Literary Studies Group
Gather to workshop a chapter from Comparative Literature graduate student Nasia Anam’s dissertation, “Other Cities: Novels of Immigration in London and Paris.” The chapter, which she is refashioning into an article, is “The Council Flat and the Globe: The Immigrant Enclave as a Borderland in Brick Lane.” It is a comparative study of White Teeth by Zadie Smith and Brick Lane by Monica Ali that examines the way these novels stage a transition from the political terms of the postcolonial moment to ones of a globalized era.
WINTER 2014
Thursday, March 13th, 2014, 4:00-5:30pm in 193 Humanities
IMAGINING CARIBBEAN FUTURES: A CONVERSATION WITH Nalo Hopkinson & Oonya Kempadoo
Moderated by Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Jenny Sharpe
Book Signing and Reception to Follow
Cosponsored by the Departments of Gender Studies and English
SPRING 2013
Thursday, June 20th, 2013, 12:00 – 2:00 pm in Humanities 193
UCLA Postcolonial Theory & Literary Studies Colloquium invite you to join us for the last Spring meeting of its Caribbean Studies Reading Group
a discussion of Wilson Harris’s short novel “Heartland” (1964)
“Heartland” and selected essays are available on the PLTC website: https://ccle.ucla.edu/course/view/PLTC
Please RSVP to Lauren at ldembowitz@gmail.com
More on Wilson Harris:
This visionary novel follows the inner journey of Zechariah Stevenson, the son of a wealthy Georgetown businessman, while he works as the watchman at a timber depot deep within the interior. Isolated in the forest and having endured the suspicion of a fraud scandal, the mysterious death of his father, and the disappearance of his mistress, Zechariah begins a journey of self-discovery as he deconstructs previously held certainties about life by losing himself in nature. An immensely sensuous evocation of Guyanese flora and fauna and its potential impact on the imagination, this classic novel, first published in 1964, is a profound plea for an ecological vision of mankind’s relationship to nature.
Special issue of Jrnl Poco Writing on Wilson Harris
Interview w/WH which discusses “Heartland”
Wilson Harris Bibliography site
Thursday, May 23, 2013 at 4.30 PM in 6275 Bunche
A talk by Nathalie Bragadir, doctoral candidate at NYU, entitled:
“Border Passing in Contested Spaces: The 1794 Massacre of Bayajá on Hispaniola” with comment by Robin Derby
Nathalie Bragadir is a PhD candidate in the Spanish & Portuguese department at New York University. Her dissertation concerns Haiti and the Dominican Republic; specifically looking at how identity, subjecthood and nationality on colonial Hispaniola were constructed in the late eighteenth century through the formation of the border dividing the island.
Friday, April 19, 2013 from 12:00-1:30 pm, Humanities 193
“The Future Life of Postcolonial Trauma”
Luncheon and Paper Presentation with Jennifer Yusin, Drexel University
About the paper:
This paper is animated by the postcolonial and the traumatic as mutually amplifying discourses. In particular, it proceeds through a radical rethinking of the dialectic between trauma and history in relation to time and notions of difference. As it stands, the current model of trauma theory is organized according to the temporal structure of belatedness in which the form and content of the present is entirely determined by past violence. I contend that this particular logic of time erringly formulates the present into a fixed and immutable condition unable to move beyond the devastation of the past. I also argue that this temporal schema empties the present of its constitutive relation to the future, which therefore deprives history of its essential transit and homogenizes history and identity (both collective and individual) in the present. Consequently, trauma theory systematically erases cultural difference and historical specificity, and thereby fails to foster transcultural affiliations through an explicit commitment to ethics. To solve this problem, I develop a new theoretical model of trauma organized by a logic of time that posits the present as constituted by a relation to the past and the future. In so doing, I disrupt the pervasive rubric of repetition and develop a better understanding of trauma as that which occasions the inauguration of new historical trajectories and new constellations of national identities that are radically reevaluative of legacies of past violence.
About Jennifer Yusin:
Jennifer Yusin is an assistant professor of Postcolonial literature and theory in the Department of English and Philosophy at Drexel University. Yusin’s research broadly focuses upon psychoanalysis, trauma theory, and ethics in South Asian and postcolonial literature and history. Her current project explores the relationship among trauma, geography, nationalism during the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. Her writings may be found in The Journal of Contemporary Literature, Social Semiotics, and Thesis Eleven, among others.
WINTER 2013
Friday, March 8 and Saturday March 9, Royce 314
Global Ecologies: Nature, Narrative, Neoliberalism. A Conference
Thursday, February 21, 11:30-1:30pm, Place TBA
Caribbean Studies Reading Group
Selections from Vincent Brown Reaper’s Garden
Readings will be available on the postcolonial website: https://ccle.ucla.edu/course/view/PLTC Lunch will be served.
Wednesday February 6, 12-2pm, UCLA Student Activities Center B05
Resisting Racial Hierarchy: Internal Colonialism & the Right to Self-Determination
Natsu Taylor Saito, Georgia State University
Sponsored by the Department of Asian American Studies and PLTS
Friday, January 25th, 1-3 PM, Bunche 11377
PTLS Reading Group
In Winter and Spring 2013 the PTLS colloquium with sponsor a Caribbean Studies Reading Group. Our first event is Friday, January 25th, 1-3pm in Bunche 11377 and will be a discussion of Christopher Iannini Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature (UNC Press, 2012).
Selections will be available on the postcolonial website: https://ccle.ucla.edu/course/view/PLTC
Wednesday, January 16, 2013, 12:00-2:00 PM, Rolfe Hall 1301
Queer Compulsions
Asian American Desire and Deceit in the 1890s
Book Talk with Professor Amy Sueyoshi
Co-sponsored by the Asian American Studies Center, Asian American Studies Department, Gender Studies Department, History Department, Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Campus Resource Center, and Postcolonial Theory and Literary Studies Colloquium
FALL 2012
Friday, October 20, 12:00-2:00pm, Humanities 193
Workshop Luncheon with Gaurav Desai, Tulane University
“Cross-Currents: Postcolonial and Oceanic Studies” Our discussion will draw primarily from two short essays in this special issue of PMLA http://www.mlajournals.org/toc/pmla/125/3 —Desai’s “Oceans Connect: The Indian Ocean and African Identities” and our own Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s “Heavy Waters: Waste and Atlantic Modernity,” though we encourage those attending to read the essays in the issue as well.Respondents: you
Please RSVP to Lauren at ldembowitz@gmail.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it no later than Thursday, 10/18, 2012.
Gaurav Desai is Associate Professor of English and has a joint appointment in the Program of African and African Diaspora Studies at Tulane University. Author of Subject to Colonialism: African Self-fashioning and the Colonial Library (Duke University Press, 2001) and editor of Teaching the African Novel (MLA, 2009) he has guest edited a volume of essays on “Culture and the Law” (South Atlantic Quarterly, 100.4, 2001), on “Actually Existing Colonialisms” (Journal of Contemporary Thought, 24, 2006), on “Asian African Literatures” (Research in African Literatures, 42.3, 2011), and co-edited a volume of essays on “Multi-Ethnic Literatures and the Idea of Social Justice” (MELUS, 28.1, Spring 2003). Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism(Rutgers University Press, 2005) which he co-edited with Supriya Nair has become a standard reference and classroom text since its publication
SPRING 2012
Wednesday, June 13, 4:30-6:30pm, Humanities 193
Please join the PTLS Colloquium to celebrate the end of the academic year and the work of our two most recent English PhDs in postcolonial studies:
Maureen Shay Limbo as Home: Towards a Deterritorialization of Asylum in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea
&
Erin Suzuki Digital Tribes, Digital Natives: Mapping a Sea of Islands in Cyberspace
Friday, April 27, 4-6pm, Humanities 193
“Towards an Understanding of Colonialism and Settler Colonialism as Distinct Formations”
Prof. Lorenzo Veracini, Visiting Scholar, History
Respondent: Prof. Mishuana Goeman, Women’s Studies
Lorenzo Veracini is Queen Elizabeth II Fellow at the Swinburne Institute for Social Research in Melbourne, Australia. His research focuses on the comparative history of colonial systems and settler colonialism. He has authored Israel and Settler Society (2006) and Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (2010). Lorenzo is managing editor of settler colonial studies.
ABSTRACT: A growing body of literature has characterised settler colonial phenomena as ‘distinct’, and called for the establishment of dedicated interpretative tools. ‘Distinct,’ however, begs the question: distinct relative to what? This paper reflects in a necessarily provisional way on this distinctiveness. It heuristically suggests that reference to the diverse operation of viral and bacterial phenomena can help understanding the distinct functioning of colonial and settler colonial systems. While both viruses and bacteria are exogenous elements that often dominate their destination locales, viruses need living cells to operate, while bacteria attach to surfaces and may or may not rely on the organisms they encounter. Similarly, while both colonisers and settler colonisers are exogenous elements that assert their dominance over their destination locales, a colonial system of relationships, unlike a settler colonial one, is premised on the presence and subjugation of exploitable ‘Others’. This paper also suggests that this metaphorical conceptualisation can facilitate reflection on the decolonisation of settler colonial forms.
Co-Sponsored by the UCLA Mellon Cultures in Transnational Perspective Program
Wednesday, April 25, 7pm, De Neve Plaza Room
Please join us for a screening and discussion of Living Along the Fenceline on April 25 at the UCLA Office of Residential Life.
LIVING ALONG THE FENCELINE A film screening about 7 women challenging the notion of peace & security in the hands of the U.S. military. Featuring stories from Puerto Rico, Texas, Hawaii, Guam, Philippines, Okinawa, and S. Korea.
Wed. 4/25 @ 7PM: De Neve Plaza Room (third floor, above the De Neve cafeteria) Film Screening with Guest Speakers Gwyn Kirk and Diana Cabcabin Both Gwyn and Diana were participants in the 8th International Women’s Network Against Militarism meeting that took place in Puerto Rico this February 2012.
For more information:
GCNP contact: ellenraec@yahoo.com
ORL contact: rebeccalee116@ucla.edu
This event is sponsored by the UCLA Office of Residential Life, Graduate Coalition of the Native Pacific, UCLA Chican@ Studies, Asian American Studies Center, Women Studies Department, and Postcolonial Theory & Literary Studies.
Thursday, April 5, 12-2pm, Humanities
The Girl in the Moon Circle
Reading and Performance by acclaimed Samoan artist and poet, Sia Figiel
Join us for an afternoon with Sia Figiel, an award-winning Samoan writer, visual artist and performance poet. She will perform excerpts from her critically acclaimed fiction and poetry, including new works in progress. The first contemporary Samoan woman writer, Figiel’s work explores issues of gender, identity, and community that dominate Samoan society. Written in stunning, poetic language, she will combine post-modernism with oral performance as she chants her characters to life in this hour-long performance.
This event is co-sponsored by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, & the UCLA Asian American Studies Department.
WINTER 2011
Thursday, January 12, 4:30pm, Humanities 193
“Masculinities in Motion: Mobility, The Township and the Spectacular”
Megan Jones
The paper explores the rendering of township masculinity in two recent novels and its constitution through crime, money and heteronormative desire. It discusses the emphasis on spectacle, in novelistic form and content, through which the male is imagined. Both fictions rely on a deployment of the spectacular, expressed through violence or excessive consumption, alongside a vernacular of nonchalance that contests conventional morality. As explored in the writing of theorists such as Foucault and Butler, what emerges is a sexed body produced discursively and performed through social practice. I focus specifically on figurations of the masculine as mobile; the protagonists of these fictions move with ease across local and global landscapes through modes which are always vehicular. The project of my paper is to ask why this is so. How do representations of vehicular mobility map the male body within and beyond the geography of the township and how do they speak to contesting notions of masculinity in contemporary urban South Africa?
Dr. Megan Jones is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Stellenbosch and a research associate with the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, Johannesburg. Her PhD, received from Cambridge University in 2009, considered the literary construction of space and place in Johannesburg.
Saturday, February 25, PieAM, Long Beach
Teaching the Pacific
PTLS, The UCLA Asian American Studies Center (UCLA AASC) and the Pacific Island Ethnic Art Museum (PieAM) will be hosting an open house for students, educators, and community leaders. This event will be launching Amerasia Journal’s special issue entitled “Transoceanic Flows: Pacific Islander Interventions across American Empire” guest edited by UCLA Professor Keith Camacho. The event is entitled “Teaching the Pacific: A New Initiative by PieAm and UCLA AASC” and will spotlight living arts of the Pacific Islands. The event will take place from 11 AM to 5 PM at PieAM in Long Beach.
*Acclaimed Samoan artist and writer Dan Taulapapa McMullin *Recently hired UCLA Maori faculty member Michelle Erai *Manaia W. Petaia, faculty advisor for Pacific Islander Clubs at the Jackie Robinson Academy (K-8) and Cabrillo High School *UCLA graduate students working in Pacific Islander Studies
To RSVP visit www.aasc.ucla.edu/archives/eventrsvp.asp or email aascrsvp@aasc.ucla.edu
Tuesday, March 6, 2:00-4:00pm, Humanities 193
Join us as Prof. Takashi Fujitani introduces Race for Empire, his latest book that offers a major challenge to our understandings of nationalism, racism, colonialism and wartime mobilization during the Second World War. In parallel case studies – of Japanese Americans mobilized to serve in the United States Army and Koreans recruited or drafted into the Japanese military – T. Fujitani examines the U.S. and Japanese empires as they struggled to manage racialized populations while waging total war.
Takashi Fujitani is the Dr. David Chu Professor and Director in Asia Pacific Studies at the University of Toronto.
RSVP online by March 2, 2012 at www.aasc.ucla.edu/archives/eventrsvp.asp or email aascrsvp@aasc.ucla.edu
FALL 2011
Monday, October 31, 4:30-6pm, Humanities 193
Radhika Mohanram
“Gendered Spectre: Trauma, Cultural Memory and the Indian Partition”
Radhika Mohanram teaches postcolonial cultural studies at Cardiff University in the English Department and the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory. She is the author of Imperial White: Race, Diaspora and the British Empire (Minnesota, 2007), Black Body: Women, Colonialism, and Space (Minnesota 1999), and the co-editor of three volumes: Shifting Continents/Colliding Cultures: Diaspora Writing of the Subcontinent (Rodopi 2000), Postcolonial Discourse and Changing Cultural Contexts: Theory and Criticism (Greenwood 1996) and English Postcoloniality: Literatures from Around the World (Greenwood 1995). With Ralph Crane she has edited and introduced a series of Anglo-Indian novels by A.E.W Mason, Margaret Wilson, Maud Diver and Charles E. Pearce for Oxford University Press. She is currently working on two projects on Anglo-India and the Indian partition. Her most recent book is Imperialism as Diaspora (forthcoming, Liverpool UP). She is also working on a pilot community project collecting memories of the 1947 and 1971 South Asian partitions in South Wales.
Friday, November 18, 3-5pm, Humanities 193
“Life and Debt” film discussion
See film before our meeting. Readings on neoliberalism and tourism will be available on the internal website: https://ccle.ucla.edu/course/view/PLTC
From the film: A feature-length documentary on the complexities of economic globalization on the world’s developing countries. The film focuses on the impact of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and current globalization policies on a developing country such as Jamaica. And dissects how the “mechanism of debt” is destroying local agriculture and industry in Third World countries while substituting them with sweat-shops and cheap imports. Voice-over narration is written by Jamaica Kincaid and adapted from her non-fiction book “A Small Place.” Includes interviews with Former Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley, Deputy Director of the International Monetary Fund Stanley Fischer, and short commentary by President of Haiti Jean-Bertand Aristide and Former President of Ghana Jerry Rawlings. Original music by Mutabaruka. A film by Stephanie Black.
Monday, November 21, 11am-1pm, Location TBA
Rob Nixon
A lunch meeting to discuss the chapter “Slow Violence, Neoliberalism, and the Environmental Picaresque” from Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Rob Nixon is the Rachel Carson Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (Oxford University Press); Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond (Routledge); and Dreambirds: The Natural History of a Fantasy (Picador). Dreambirds was selected as a Notable Book of 2000 by the New York Times Book Review and as one of the ten best books of the year by Esquire. It was also serialized as the Book of the Week on BBC radio. His book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor was published in 2011 from Harvard University Press, and he is a frequent contributor to the New York Times. His writing has also appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Village Voice, the Nation, the Guardian, Outside, Chronicle of Higher Education, the Independent, Critical Inquiry, Social Text, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Ariel, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, and elsewhere.
SPRING 2011
Thursday, May 26, 1-3pm, Rolfe 2125
Peter Limbrick, UC Santa Cruz
A reading and discussion of his new book, Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the US, Australia, and New Zealand (Palgrave 2010).
In Making Settler Cinemas, Peter Limbrick argues that the United States, Australia, and New Zealand share histories of colonial encounters that have shaped their cinemas in distinctive ways. Going beyond readings of narrative and representation, this book studies the production, distribution, reception, and reexhibition of cinema across three settler societies under the sway of two empires. Investigating films both canonical and over-looked, Making Settler Cinemas not only shows how cinema has mattered to settler societies but affirms that practices of film history can themselves be instrumental in encountering and reshaping colonial pasts.
Peter Limbrick is Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz, where he teaches international cinemas. His publications have appeared in Screening the Past, Cinema Journal, Journal of Visual Culture, and Camera Obscura.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Women’s Studies
Monday, May 9, 4:30-6pm, Royce 306
Caryl Phillips, Author and Playwright
Reading from his novel In the Falling Snow and his forthcoming essay collection, Colour Me English
Caryl Phillips was born in St.Kitts and came to Britain at the age of four months. He grew up in Leeds, and studied English Literature at Oxford University. He began writing for the theatre and his plays include Strange Fruit (1980), Where There is Darkness (1982) and The Shelter (1983). He won the BBC Giles Cooper Award for Best Radio Play of the year with The Wasted Years (1984). He has written many dramas and documentaries for radio and television, including, in 1996, the three-hour film of his own novel The Final Passage. He wrote the screenplay for the film Playing Away (1986) and his screenplay for the Merchant Ivory adaptation of V.S.Naipaul’s The Mystic Masseur (2001) won the Silver Ombu for best screenplay at the Mar Del Plata film festival in Argentina.
His novels are: The Final Passage (1985), A State of Independence (1986), Higher Ground (1989), Cambridge (1991), Crossing the River (1993), The Nature of Blood (1997), A Distant Shore (2003), Dancing in the Dark (2005) and Foreigners (2007). His non-fiction: The European Tribe (1987), The Atlantic Sound (2000), and A New World Order (2001). He is the editor of two anthologies: Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging (1997) and The Right Set: An Anthology of Writing on Tennis (1999). His work has been translated into over a dozen languages.
His literary awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a British Council Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and Britain’s oldest literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, for Crossing the River which was also shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize. A Distant Shore won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize; Dancing in the Dark won the 2006 PEN/Beyond the Margins Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
He is presently Professor of English at Yale University.
Monday, April 18, 2011, 5:00-6:30pm, Royce Hall 314
Teresia K. Teaiwa, Pacific Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ
What makes women soldiers? Context, context, context: the case of Fiji
‘What makes women soldiers?’ Between 2008 and 2010 I recorded a series of oral histories of women currently serving in the Fiji Military Forces (FMF), and Fiji women who had been demobilized from the British Army (BA). The oral histories cover three generations of Fiji women soldiers: a small cohort who had served in the BA between 1961 and 1964; a larger cohort who had been the first women admitted into the FMF in 1988; and then an even larger cohort of women who have been recruited into both forces since the late 1990s. This paper forms the basis of the introductory chapter to a monograph based on the research, and will examine the colonial, nationalist and post/neo-colonial contexts in which each of the cohorts is respectively located. The paper espouses a feminist analysis of women soldiers that is attentive to historical and cultural specificity, and historically specific cultural specificity, moreover.
The work that I’m discussing here represents a shift in my own approach to studying militarism in the Pacific. Instead of trying to understand the militarization of the region from ‘without’ (as I had done in my PhD research and subsequent publications which involved a cultural studies approach based on reading and contextualizing events and texts), I have tried to understand it from ‘within’ (by conducting interviews with soldiers and officers); instead of trying to understand how militarization works from its center (through men), I have tried to understand it from its margins (through women). My assumption was that since masculinity and militarism are coterminous, and femininity and militarism are oppositional in certain ideological terms, by investigating how women from Fiji have become soldiers, I would learn more about how militarization works. By considering the changing contexts of women’s militarization in Fiji, and by illuminating a case study in which extreme forms of violence do not distract from the analysis with their spectacle, I believe I have.
Professor Teresia K. Teaiwa is a senior lecturer and, from 2000 to 2009, was the founding director of Pacific Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Having trained and taught in the U.S. and the Pacific Islands, Teaiwa’s interdisciplinary work makes important interventions in the fields of Pacific, postcolonial and women’s studies. She is the author of Searching for Nei Nim`anoa, a groundbreaking poetry collection, the spoken word I can see Fiji: sound and performance, and author of numerous articles about Pacific Cultural Studies, gender, and militarization. She is co-editor of New Zealand Identities: departures and destinations (Victoria University Press, 2005) and Turning the tide: Towards a Pacific solution to aid conditionality (Greenpeace Australia Pacific, 2002). Her recent articles include “Globalizing and Gendered Forces: The Contemporary Militarization of Pacific/Oceania” in Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pacific (University of Hawai`i Press) and “On Women and ‘Indians’: The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion in Militarized Fiji” in Rethinking Security: Gender, Race and Militarization (Rutgers University Press, 2008).
Cosponsored by The Burkle Center Faculty Research Working Group Grant, The Humanities Division, The Social Sciences Division, The Department of English, and the Cultures in Transnational Perspective Mellon Postdoctoral Program in the Humanities
WINTER 2011
Thursday, February 10, 3-5pm, Humanities 135
Lata Mani, Author
“Once Upon a Time in the Present”
It would not be considered radical to propose that the world is an interdependent singular whole of which everything is an integral, albeit complexly related, part. Yet the ways of thinking and being we have come to privilege tend to disaggregate self and phenomena from the multiple dimensions with which they are inextricably bound. This talk explores some dimensions of this problem by means of a meditation on language, labour and poststructuralist theory.
About the speaker: Lata Mani is the author of SacredSecular: Contemplative Cultural Critique, Routledge, 2008; The Tantra Chronicles (compiled with Ruth Frankenberg) 2007, Interleaves: Ruminations on Illness and Spiritual Life, 2001 (second edition forthcoming from Yoda Press) and Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India, University of California Press, 1998; Oxford University Press, India, 1999. She has published articles in Modern Indian History, Cultural Studies, Feminist and Post-Colonial Theory. She is also the author of three children’s books.
Co-Sponsored by: the Cultures in Transnational Perspective Mellon Postdoctoral Program in the Humanities and the Center for the Study of Women
Thursday, January 13, 12:30-2pm, Haines 352
Fred Myers, Silver Professor of Anthropology, NYU
“Showing Too Much or Too Little: Predicaments of Painting Indigenous Presence in Central Australia.”
Co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology’s working group on Culture, Power, and Social Change, American Indian Studies Center and World Arts and Cultures
FALL 2010
Thursday, November 18, 5:30-7:30pm, Dodd Hall 170
United Nations Guam Forum
This forum will discuss the testimonies of the Guam Delegation who testified at the United Nations Special Political and Decolonization Committee in October 2010
SPEAKERS INCLUDE: Distinguished Speaker: Edward Browne, Activist and Educator, U.S. Virgin Islands Testimonies by Josette Quinata, Michael Tuncap, and Alfred Flores
Sponsored by the UCLA GRADUATE COALITION OF THE NATIVE PACIFIC, the PACIFIC ISLANDS’ STUDENT ASSOCIATION, the PACIFIC ISLANDER STUDIES INITIATIVE, NAPA & the POSTCOLONIAL THEORY & LITERARY STUDIES.
Wednesday, November 10, 4-6pm, Humanities 193
Film screening and readings from: Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall (eds.)
1) “Afropolis” and 2) Mbembe’s “Aesthetics of Superfluity” Recommended: 3) Sarah Nuttall’s “Literary City” Readings available here (need UCLA ID) : https://ccle.ucla.edu/course/view.php?name=PLTC
“At her feet” (http://www.atherfeettheplay.com/index.html) :
Nadia Davids’ play “At her feet” is an exploration of contemporary Muslim women’s identities within post-9-11 global economies of islamphobia and post-racialism. Through an interrogation that deconstructs the elements of theatre making, Davids explores identities formed at the crucible of religious traditionalisms and African modernisms. Set in both Cape Town, South Africa and somewhere in Jordan, in the months following the 9-11-01 events in New York City, we watch as one performer transforms into multiple, and yet somehow connected, Muslim women. Through the voice of this one performer, speaking through many women characters, the film asks questions of its viewers, such as: What does it mean to be a woman and a Muslim, especially living in a country struggling to define itself within post-Apartheid and post-racist discourses? How do the complicated configurations of religious identity and globalization come to be read both as aesthetic markers within popular culture, but also as marks of violence on women’s bodies? As it asks these questions the film also offers us ways in which to see these women as part of a community not bounded by the rigid strictures of national, religious, or gender identifications.
Wednesday, October 20th, 3:00-4:00pm, Humanities 193
Please join the Postcolonial Theory & Literary Studies for our first meeting of the academic year. This meeting is to discuss future events, possible readings, welcome new members and enjoy a bit of food. All are welcome—please spread the word, especially to our new faculty, graduate students and postdocs.
Friday, October 15th, 12:00-2:00pm, Humanities 193
Casting a Literary Net: New Chamorro Writing
Please join us for a book launch and an afternoon of reading from the Pacific
Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guahan (Guam), is the co-founder of Achiote Press and author of two poetry books: from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press, 2008) and from unincorporated territory [saina] (Omnidawn Publishing, 2010). He received the Poets & Writers California Writer’s Exchange Award in 2010 and co-edited the anthology Chamoru Childhood. He earned an MFA from the University of San Francisco and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Tanya Chargualaf Taimanglo is the author of the children’s book, Sirena: A Mermaid Legend from Guam and Attitude 13: A Daughter of Guam’s Collection of Short Stories (authorhouse.com / 2010). Her father is the late Siñot Tedy Gamboa Chargualaf. Tanya is of Chamorro and Korean descent. Her mother and two brothers still reside on Guam. Tanya graduated in 1992 from George Washington High School and the University of Guam in 1996. She enjoyed her eight-year career on Guam as an English/Creative Writing teacher at John F. Kennedy High School. She collaborated with her brother, Sonny K. Chargualaf on the art for both publications. Tanya has had work featured in Latte Magazine (Chirika’s Pepper Plant), University of Guam’s Storyboard 6 and articles in Guam business magazines. She received the Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers award in 2000 and 2002. Her short story, Yes, I Am., will be included in an anthology featuring Pacific Islander writers in 2011, USO’s on Freeways. Tanya resides in southern California with her husband and their son and daughter. She volunteers with the non-profit organization, CHE’LU, Inc., which strives to promote the Chamorro culture through education.
Alison Taimanglo Cuasay is the native Chamorro author of the children’s book, Tasi & Matina: The Story of the First Clown Fish. She attended the University of Northern Colorado where she earned her BA in Psychology with minors in Multi-Cultural Anthropology and Military Science. Her public presentations include the Conference of the Inter Mountain Coalition of Asian-Pacific American Students at the University of Utah: Recognizing the Distinction Between Pacific Islanders and Asian Americans in the US and The UNC Presidential Research Presentation: The Political Status of Guam. Alison is an eight-year Army Veteran and served in Operation Iraqi Freedom. She is currently attending National University and is projected to earn her BS in Nursing to work as a registered nurse in November 2010.
Sponsored by the Asian American Studies Center, the Postcolonial Theory & Literary Studies, and the Office of Instructional Development
Thursday, October 14, 4-6pm, Rolfe 2125
Niu Pasifik: Urban Art
Presentation by Giles Peterson Independent Curator, Aotearoa/New Zealand Guest Respondent: Patrick “Pato” Hebert Artist and Cultural Worker, Los Angeles
Sponsored by the Department of Women’s Studies and the Postcolonial Theory & Literary Studies
Thursday, September 30th, 4:30pm-6pm, Humanities 193
Peter Hulme, University of Essex, UK
The Message to García: Cuba, Jamaica, and the USA in 1898
Just before the USA declared war on Spain in 1898, the War Department sent a US soldier to Cuba to deliver a message to insurgent general Calixto García. Accomplishing his mission, the soldier became a popular hero. However, recent archival research has revealed a more complex story of military espionage, diplomatic subterfuge, and journalistic malpractice. This talk therefore aims to shed light on the continuing importance of 1898 to understanding US/Caribbean relations in the 21st century and to make visible the largely obscured connections between northern Jamaica and south-eastern Cuba.
Peter Hulme is professor and chair of the Department of Literature at the University of Essex. He is the author of Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (1986, paperback 1992) and Remnants of Conquest: The Island Caribs and Their Visitors, 1877-1998 (2000), and joint editor of Wild Majesty: Encounters with Caribs from Columbus to the Present Day (1992), Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory (1994), Cannibalism and the Colonial World (1998), ‘The Tempest’ and Its Travels (2000), The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (2002), The Tempest, A Norton Critical Edition (2003), and Writing, Travel, and Empire: In the Margins of Anthropology (2006).His current Arts & Humanities Research Council grant project is American Tropics: Towards a Literary Geography.
Brought to you by the Department of English, The LAI Cuba and Caribbean Working Group, and the Postcolonial Theory & Literary Studies
SPRING 2010
Friday, February 26th, 11-1pm, Humanities 250
Critical Indigenous Theory Discussion
Cultural Studies Review, vol. 15 no. 2 September 2009; Critical Indigenous Theory —co-edited with Aileen Moreton Robinson Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ‘Imagining the Good Indigenous Citizen: Race War and the Pathology of Patriarchal White Sovereignty’ Chris Andersen, ‘Critical Indigenous Studies: From Difference to Density’ Brendan Hokowhitu, ‘Indigenous Existentialism and the Body’ Robert Warrior, ‘Native American Scholarship and the Transnational Turn’
Friday, April 9th, 12-2pm, Humanities 250
Critical Indigenous Theory Discussion
Selections from Makere Stewart-Harawira, The New Imperial Order: Indigenous Responses to Globalization (2005)
Thursday, April 22th, 6-8pm, A65 Humanities Building
UCLA’s Graduate Coalition of the Native Pacific presents a film screening:
Noho Hewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawai’i (2009) and discussion with the director, Anne Keala Kelly.
Friday, April 23th, 2010, 9-5:30pm
Conference: Globalized Islands: Contemporary Literature and the Transnational Encounter*
Click here for abstracts and schedule
UCLA Royce Hall 314
Victor Bascara, Asian American Studies, UCLA Keith Camacho, Asian American Studies, UCLA Elizabeth DeLoughrey, English, UCLA Robin Derby, History, UCLA Manthia Diawara, Comparative Literature, NYU Alessandra Di Maio, University of Palermo, Italy Carmen Gomez, Italian Francoise Lionnet, French & Francophone, UCLA Jorge Marturano, Spanish & Portuguese, UCLA Jenny Sharpe, English, UCLA Erin Suzuki, English, UCLA Shu-Mei Shih, Comparative Literature, UCLA Zrinka Stahuljak, French & Francophone, UCLA Joyce Pualani Warren, English, UCLA Beth Wightman, English, CSUN Carmen Gomez, Italian, UCLA
*Sponsored by the International Institute and the Postcolonial Theory & Literary Studies
Tuesday June 15th, 12-2pm, Humanities 250
Discussion
Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007)
FALL 2009
Wednesday, October 7, 4:30-6:30pm, Humanities 193
Barbara Fuchs, UCLA, Departments of English and Spanish & Portuguese, “Influence, Appropriation, Piracy: The Place of Spain in English Literary History” (paper to be distributed)
Friday, November 13th, 11-1pm, Humanities 193
Nabil Matar, University of Minnesota, Dept of English, lunch & further discussion about his talk “Arabs, Turks, and Europeans in the Early Modern Mediterranean” [scheduled for Thursday, November 12 at 3pm in 10383 Bunche Hall]
Wednesday, December 9th, 5-7pm, Humanities 193
Erin Suzuki, UCLA, Department of English, “Genealogy and Geography in Witi Ihimaera’s The Uncle’s Story and Patricia Grace’s Tu.” (Aotearoa/New Zealand) (paper to be distributed)