Quarterly Themes
2005-2006 Themes:
FALL 2005 theme--Identity and Ethnicity: What is Chinese about Chinese Art?
led by Jean Lane Humanities Professor: Sarah Fraser (Art History)
This quarter the lecture series and humanities seminar will address the fundamental problem of identity and ethnicity in Chinese art during three critical moments in Chinese history when the status of the dominant culture was in flux. Until quite recently the category of Chinese art was stable; under the banner of Chinese, we accepted the arts of Tibetan regions, southwest mountain communities on the Thai border, and northwest Central Asian Turkic traditions in an unquestioned narrative of 'Han' Chinese. In order to reassess the concepts of 'minorities,' 'foreign influences,' and the constructed categories of race and ethnicity in the long tradition of Chinese art, this course will examine three dynamic periods: Silk Road Buddhist sites during the 4th-7th centuries; the multicultural period of the Manchu emperor Qianlong during the 18th century; and a variety of cultural centers in the 20th century, including the treaty port of Shanghai, Tibet and Western China, and excavations at Anyang where the search for the origins of modern China began with archaeological digs in 1927.
WINTER 2006 theme--African Americans and the Law: History, Literature, Practice
led by Jean Lane Humanities Professor Dylan Penningroth (History)
African Americans in the United States have a complex and varied relationship with the law. Beginning in the 1640s, American legal institutions played a central role in institutionalizing white supremacy, and the law has been at the center of struggles to define people of African descent, what it meant to be Negro. At the same time, African Americans have created their own views on the American legal system, views that have at various times and contexts worked within but often diverged from, poked fun at, or challenged the legitimacy of the law. Thus, although the individual and collective experience of many African Americans with the law has often been negative and antagonistic, many have also attempted to court, appropriate, and use the law for themselves. Critical race legal scholarship has highlighted the complex interconnections among the legal experiences of disparate racialized groups, as well as drawing out the extent to which race, class, gender, and sexuality have interacted within American law. Recent historical scholarship has recovered and analyzed the ways in which African American lawyers and legal strategists set out to re-make the law during the Civil Rights Movements of the 20th century. This lecture series and humanirties seminar explores the changing significance of law in African American life since the end of slavery. It considers African Americans views of, participation in, and challenges to American law. It is organized in three parts: cultural representation, history, and practice. How do African American artists and writers represent the relationship between blacks and the law? What is the history of black lives in the law? How do legal practitioners think about blacks and the law today? By bringing together these various strands of representation, we will attempt to create interdisciplinary perspectives on an important subject.
SPRING 2006 theme--The Afterlife of Marxism
led by Jean Lane Humanities Professor Alessia Ricciardi (French and Italian)
This spring quarter we will explore a selection of contemporary philosophical, political, and cultural works in which the ideals of Marxism may be said to survive, albeit in a paradoxical or partial manner. The end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall have coincided with the rebirth of philosophically and politically original reinterpretations of Marxism in Europe, particularly in France and Italy. These reinterpretations challenge the idea that the destiny and the ideals of Marxism have been irremediably compromised by the failures of historical revolutions. Recent reflections on Marxism follow several directions and represent disparate theoretical strategies. We will investigate the various re-workings of Marxisms ethical, theological, and messianic aspects in the writings of Derrida, Nancy, Badiou, Agamben, and Negri and in films by De Sica, Pasolini, and Bertolucci. To what extent can Christianity help to renew and reinforce the universalist claims of Marxism (in particular, with reference to the strategic figures of Saint Paul and Saint Francis)? How do these philosophical interpretations of theological doctrines shape the contemporary Marxist imagination? What role does technology play in contemporary interpretations of Marxism? What are the consequences of the dissolution of Marxisms eschatological dimension achieved through the idea of political immanence in Negris theory? What does it mean to move beyond Marx while attempting to revitalize the social aspirations and dreams of contemporary society? These are some of the questions that will guide our investigation of the post-Marxist imagination's struggle to remain relevant and to counteract the risk of being perceived as a merely trans-political, ornamental category.
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2006-2007 themes:
Fall 2006 theme-led by Jean Lane Humanities Professor Gary Fine (Sociology)-THE POLITICS OF REPUTATION: Battles Over Political, Literary, and Artistic Identities
Reputation is one of the ways that we organize our world. The assigning of status or prestige in integral to the determination of quality and morality. In this seminar I hope to examine the ways in which reputation is created, battled over, and becomes solidified. In this, I make use of material within several disciplines, most notably sociology, history, and literary studies. The fundamental issue centers around the proper interpretation of the work or acts of the reputed figure, or whether (or how) such an interpretation is possible. To what extent does a text, an aesthetic object, or a set of actions matter in the creation of a reputation? Is reputation simply a function of the social, aesthetic, or political needs of audiences or of claimants? Is all reputation political? In the seminar I propose to devote several weeks to the broad theoretical issues of canon creation, reputational entrepreneurship, and audience response, and then spend a series of weeks in which individual case studies are examined.
Winter Quarter and Spring Quarter 2007: BEING ANIMAL, BEING HUMAN
Animals have been treated as of only peripheral importance in the humanities, but a growing body of scholarship points to their significance in philosophy, literature, art, history, anthropology, and the law. Within Western philosophical and literary traditions, what it is to be human has long been defined through recourse to the animal. The bestial is defined as the antithesis of the human-except when it is taken as the expression of our most fundamental nature. We may be dogged, foxy, leonine or bird-brained, soar like eagles or spread like vermin. Nor do animals matter only as symbols of ourselves; they also have a more pragmatic significance, as something that we use. Laboring animals-the carriage horse, the pack mule, the oxen at the plough-are no longer as present in the social environment as they once were, but companion animals are very much with us, and animal bodies and their products-as meat and as leather, as subjects of laboratory experiments, and perhaps soon as organs for transplant-continue to make critical contributions to human wellbeing. Animals signify in another domain as well: because using animals means managing and controlling them-their lives and their deaths-they surface in debates over ethics, morality, and the law. If we measure ourselves against animals to find out what it means to be human, we also measure our humanity by how we treat the non-humans among us.
In the last twenty years, the field of "animal studies" has exploded across the humanities and social sciences. This two-quarter sequence of lectures, courses, and workshops will present the major trends and scholars within this emerging field and propose new directions within it.
Winter 2007-led by Jean Lane Humanities Professor Susan Pearson (History)-Thinking with Animals
This quarter will consider the boundary between the human and the animal as it functions within the human imagination. At the heart of Western culture, as philosopher Giorgio Agamben has recently written, is an "anthropological machine," a set of philosophical assumptions that serve to produce "man" by delineating the animal as that which man overcomes through spirit, evolution, reason, language, will. Far from a bit player in Western ontology and metaphysics, "animal" is foundational; it is the suppressed center of both the category "human" and of the humanist disciplines. This quarter introduces the field of animal studies as it exists today: most scholars, whether they come from philosophy, literature, history, or law, have found animals significant primarily because they are, as Levi-Strauss famously remarked, "good to think with." We will take up the use of animals as symbols, and of the animal/human divide as a philosophically rich question.
Spring 2007-led by Jean Lane Professor Mary Weismantel (Anthropology)-Living with Animals
This quarter moves from the existing literature on animals as symbols, to the emerging topic of animals within the social world. Despite the centrality of animals-as laborers, companions, and raw materials - to human social life, the field of animal studies has for the most part not been about animals at all: it remains primarily an interrogation into the meanings of being human. New historical and anthropological research is beginning to conceptualize the lived reality of animals themselves and their presence in the social world, and thus in social history. During this quarter, we ask how including animals as social actors changes conventional narratives of history, notions of agency, and definitions of the "social". Exploring Western and non-Western social contexts ranging from hunting to animal husbandry to factory farming, we will consider how changes in the relationship between animals and humans-the reconfiguration of the human/animal interface -- have produced profound alterations in our lived social reality, as well as in our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
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