Spring Graduate Colloquium—Human Rights
Friday, May 18, 2007, 11:00AM-1:00PM, South Hall 2617, UCSB

The American Cultures & Global Contexts Center's quarterly colloquia provide a space for students and faculty to hear cutting edge work from advanced graduate students on the center's annual theme.

Our 2006-2007 annual theme is Human Rights.

Winter Graduate Colloquium—Human Rights
Wednesday, February 28, 2007, 1:00-3:00PM, South Hall 2635, UCSB

The American Cultures & Global Contexts Center's quarterly colloquia provide a space for students and faculty to hear cutting edge work from advanced graduate students on the center's annual theme.

Our 2006-2007 annual theme is Human Rights.

Film Series: West Side Story (1961)
Thursday, June 8, 2006, 5-7:30 PM, South Hall 2617 (across from the Sankey Room)

Please join us for our final screening and discussion of the year: Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise's musical film West Side Story, named the best picture of 1961 and winner of 10 Academy Awards.

West Side Story is a musical adaptation of Romeo and Juliet set in New York City, where rival street gangs (the Anglo-American Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks) battle for territory and respect. Is the love affair between former Jets leader Tony, and Maria, sister to Sharks' leader Bernardo, doomed to failure?

According to cultural critic and filmmaker Frances Negrón-Muntaner, "West Side Story has simultaneously become a Puerto Rican movie and foundation for a critical discourse of representation, and has bound Puerto Ricans to a "classic" American cultural product. In other words, regardless of whether as a spectator you are oblivious to West Side Story's racism, queerness, or the genericness of "Latin" culture embedded in its music and choreography, Puerto Ricans (as a sign) are forever part of the history of Broadway and American motion pictures--the repositories of American national fantasies."

Discussion moderated by Steve Shane (English). Light refreshment will be served. Click here for more information about the film.

READING/RECEPTION: Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Sister Swing
Wednesday, May 31, 2006, 4:00 pm, MultiCultural Center Lounge

Acclaimed poet, novelist and UCSB professor of English, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim presents excerpts of her newly published novel Sister Swing in a moving reading. This sensitively written story about Asian women finding their place in modern society, told in the voices of the three Wing sisters, chronicles their migration from Malaysia to the United States. Among other works, Lim is the author of Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian American Memoir of Homelands and Monsoon History.

Karen Yamashita, author of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest
"... [set] against [a] wild cultural backdrop... the story unfolds to reveal the strong and intimate ties and responsibilities of sisterhood."

Shawn Wong, author of American Knees
"... a richly textured understanding of a family rooted in a rigid patriarchy ... and their new identity molded in [1980s'] America."

Richard Lim, The Straits Times
"As in her first novel Joss and Gold, Shirley... has infused the work with her poetic sensibility. A compelling read."

For more information or assistance in accommodating people of varying abilities, contact the MultiCultural Center at (805) 893-8411.

Film Series: Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle (2004)
Thursday, May 25, 2006, 5-7:30 PM, South Hall 2617 (across from the Sankey Room)

Please join us for a screening and discussion of Danny Leiner’s 2004 film Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle. Two twenty-something stoner roommates -- one a Korean American investment banker, the other an Indian American medical school candidate -- go through a life changing journey, as they spend a night roaming the state of New Jersey in search of White Castle hamburgers.

"Without lifting a finger to make its point, Harold & Kumar . . . may have said more about race in America today than any other movie of [2004]," writes Salon.com critic Stephanie Zacharek. "There's something freeing in the way Harold & Kumar treats its characters' ethnic backgrounds not as a novelty, as a stumbling block or even as an advantage, but as a simple fact."

Discussion moderated by Caroline Hong (English) and Aimee Woznick (English). Light refreshment will be served. Click here for more information about the film.

TALK: John Jota Leaños, "Imperial Silence: Ideological Disruptions and Social Art Documentary in a Time of Infinite War"
Wednesday, May 17, 2006, 12:00 – 1:30 pm (Reception to follow), English Conference Room, 2635 South Hall

A Presentation by Professor John Jota Leaños
Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies
Arizona State University

John Jota Leaños is a social art practitioner who utilizes varied media to engage in the symbolic arenas of popular culture. He has completed a range of new media, public art, installation, and performance work focusing on the convergence of memory, social space and decolonization. He will be discussing decolonial art activism and emerging forms of documentary art making. Leaños' latest animation, Los ABCs ¡Qué Vivan los Muertos! had its theatrical debut at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. His work has been has also been exhibited at the 2002 Whitney Biennial, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Leaños is currently Artist/Scholar-in-residence at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Center for Chicano Studies.

TALK: Jaideep Singh, "Caught in the Crosshairs: Muslims Amidst Contemporary International White and Christian Supremacy"
Wednesday, May 17, 2006, 12:00 – 1:30 pm, HSSB 5024

The Department of Asian American Studies Spring 2006 Colloquium presents Jaideep Singh whose project seeks to interrogate the recent international controversy emanating from the publication, in numerous Western media sources,of maliciously malevolent cartoons of the Muslim prophet Mohammad, through the intersecting lenses of international white and Christian supremacy.

Beginning with a contextualization of the increasingly pervasive modern incarnations of white and Christian supremacy in the United States, the paper will move this frame of analysis to the international context. In particular, it will focus on illuminating salient issues elided and submerged by the Western media and politicians in representing Muslim reaction to the cartoons. For instance, the paper deconstructs the facile and deceptive manner in which such opinion-makers have attempted to limit public discourse on the issue to the ultimately peripheral issue of freedom of speech, while ignoring the rampant Islamophobia and racism undergirding so many of the public conflicts in contemporary Europe.

Jaideep Singh is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the co-founder and managing director of the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund (SALDEF), a Sikh American mediawatch and civil rights advocacy organization.

Light refreshments will be available. If you need assistance due to a disability, please call (805) 893-8039.

Keynote Speaker: Shelley Streeby (Associate Professor of Literature, UC San Diego), "The Sensational West: Cultural Memories of the US-Mexico War and the Civil War during the Mexican Revolution"
Saturday, May 13, 2006, 1:00-2:20 pm, 2006, Centennial House

Shelley Streeby, keynote speaker for the ACGCC Graduate Conference, was awarded the American Studies Association's 2003 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize for American Sensations: Class, Empire and the Production of Popular Culture (UC Press, 2002). The Lora Romero Prize, presented annually, recognizes an author’s first published work in American Studies that highlights the intersections of race with class, gender, sexuality, and/or nation.

An innovative cultural history, American Sensations investigates an intriguing and often lurid assortment of sensational literature that was extremely popular in the United States in the 18th century. Through dime novels, cheap story paper literature, and journalism for working-class Americans, Streeby uncovers themes and images that reveal the profound influence that the U.S.-Mexican War and other nineteenth-century imperial ventures throughout the Americas had on U.S. politics and culture.

Click here for more details.

Conference: Racing Across Borders: National and Transnational Narratives
Saturday, May 13, 2006, 9 AM-5:30 PM, Centennial House

The third annual ACGCC Graduate Conference will explore issues revolving around race and racial formation and how these processes function differently as they move across a variety of borders such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, discipline and nation. We will take up the question of how multiple racial formations arise and are represented within particular cultural contexts as well as what happens to these formations and representations when they come into contact with racial structures from other cultural contexts. Presentations will investigate what happens to the concepts and constructions of race as they move across various contact zones, borders, and intersections, and how the increasing speed of this mobility challenges national and global assumptions about race.

This one-day conference will focus on national and transnational narratives of race and racial formation. We hope to provoke discussions of both contemporary and historical narratives that emerge from the broadest definition of culture, encompassing literature, the visual arts, religion, politics, the media, class, music, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, law, commerce, and so on. In particular, one of the bigger questions we seek to open up, is what happens to race when we bring together Global studies and American studies? Is race elided or does it undergo a transformation? How do we discuss ethnic/race studies when they are globalized? Click here for a detailed schedule of events.

Film Series: Blazing Saddles (1974)
Thursday, May 11, 2006, 5-7:30 PM, South Hall 2617 (across from the Sankey Room)

A sendup of Hollywood and whitewashed American history, Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles "is an over-the-top parody of the Western film genre, in addition to being an intelligent satire about racism," according to Wikipedia. When the sheriff of a small frontier town is killed, convict Bart is appointed the first black sheriff of the all-white Rock Ridge by the evil Hedley Lamarr in a plot to chase the townspeople from their homes. Salon.com critic Max Garrone writes that the film "skewers race in the West, Hollywood westerns, manifest destiny and everything else under John Ford's sun." Blazing Saddles also represents comic Richard Pryor's only writing credit on a feature film.

Discussion moderated by Mac Oliver (English). Light refreshment will be served. Click here for more information about the film.

Film/Discussion: Mitsuye and Nellie: Asian American Poets (1981)
Tuesday, May 9, 2006, 3:00-3:50 PM, HSSB 1214

Japanese American poet Mitsuye Yamada will lead a discussion of the absorbing documentary that examines the lives of Asian Americans through the inspirational poetry of Yamada and Nellie Wong (pictured right). Interviews, rare archival footage, intimate family scenes and a lively dialogue between these fascinating women underscore the different histories of Chinese and Japanese Americans but also shared experiences of biculturalism and generational difference. Ideal for literature and poetry classes, women's studies and Asian American groups.

For more information about this film, click here.

Reading/Lecture: Mitsuye Yamada, Japanese American Poet
Tuesday, May 9, 2006, 11 AM, Girvetz 104

Mitsuye Yamada is a poet, educator, and founder of Multicultural Women Writers of Orange County. She was born on July 5, 1923 in Fukuoka, Japan. Yamada spent most of her childhood and youth in Seattle, Washington, until she and her family were incarcerated at the relocation camp in Idaho in 1942. Her ordeal during World War II and observations of her mother's way of life bring anti-racist and feminist attitudes to her works.

Yamada's first publication was Camp Notes and Other Poems (1976). The book is a chronological documentary, beginning with "Evacuation" from Seattle, moving in the camp through "Desert Storm," and concluding with poems recounting the move to Cincinnati. "Cincinnati" illustrates the visible racial violence and "The Question of Loyalty" shows the invisible humiliation of the Japanese during World War II.

Her latest volume, Desert Run: Poems and Stories (1988), returns to the unforgettable experience at the internment camp. Also, Yamada is searching for her cultural heritage in her poems by visiting and communicating with her relatives in Japan.For more information on Mitsuye Yamada, click here.

Film Series: Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)
Thursday, April 27, 2006, 5-7:30 PM, South Hall 2617 (across from the Sankey Room)

"The feminist and lesbian film critic B. Ruby Rich, writing at length
on 'Pussycat' in... Village Voice, said she dismissed 'Pussycat' 20
years ago as just a skin flick. Seeing it again during its revival at
New York's Film Forum [in 1995], she had a different reaction,
viewing it now as female fantasy, its images of 'empowerment'
fascinating to her. Meyer, from the beginning of his career and
almost without exception, has filmed only situations in which women
wreak their will upon men" (rogerebert.suntimes.com).

Discussion moderated by Adriane Friedl (English). Light refreshment will be served. Click here for more information about the film.

Film Series: Bride and Prejudice (2004)
Thursday, April 13, 2006, 5-7:30 PM, South Hall 2617 (across from the Sankey Room)

A Bollywood version of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, this film is "a free-spirited adaptation...in which Mr. Darcy and the unmarried sisters and their family are plugged into a modern plot that spans London, New York, Bombay and Goa," according to critic Roger Ebert. Critic Subhash K. Jha writes, "By relocating Jane Austen's trans-Atlantic romance to an Indo-British context, [director Gurinder] Chadha brings in the whole post-colonial modern Indian dilemma of globalization and cultural homogenization."

Discussion moderated by Laura Miller (English). Light refreshment will be served. Click here for more information about the film.

TALK: Leslie Ito, "Visual Communications: Connecting Communities Through the Media Arts"
Wednesday, April 12, 2006, 12:00 – 1:30 pm, HSSB 5024

The Department of Asian American Studies Spring 2006 Colloquium presents Leslie Ito who will discuss VC’s new directions and its future visions. She will also share videos from VC's Armed with a Camera Fellowship Program for Emerging Media Artists, the Digital Histories Program for Adult Learners and clips of VC's most recent production, Grassroots Rising.

Leslie Ito is Executive Director of Visual Communications (VC), a 35-year old (and the nation’s first) Asian Pacific American media arts center located in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo. Its mission is to promote intercultural understanding through the creation, presentation, preservation, and support of media works by and about Asian Pacific Islanders. VC was created with the understanding that media and the arts are important vehicles to organize and empower communities, build connections between generations, challenge perspectives and create an environment for critical thinking necessary to build a more just and humane society.

Light refreshments will be available. If you need assistance due to a disability, please call (805) 893-8039.

Film Series/CISM: Shadows (1959)
Wednesday, March 8, 2006, 5-7 PM, South Hall 2716

"Arguably the founding work of the American independent cinema, John Cassavetes's 1959 Shadows is the prototype for Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets, Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise, Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It, and all their progeny," writes Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman. Cassavetes' jazz-scored improvisational film explores interracial friendships and relationships in Beat-Era (1950's) New York City. "Using the members of a drama workshop he directed, Cassavetes shot 30 hours of footage based on their improvisations. The Charles Mingus score later added makes the jazz analogue explicit. Indeed, as the movie's principals are black, white, and mulatto, race is crucial to the movie," according to Hoberman.

Please join us for a screening of what has been called a "low-budget, post-neorealist, pre-cinema-verité Something New," co-sponsored by the ACGCC and Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Music (CISM). Discussion moderated by Rob Wallace (English) and Ralph Lowi (Ethnomusicology). Light refreshment will be served. Click here for more information about the film.

Special Symposium on Asian American Literary Studies
(featuring Maxine Hong Kingston)
Thursday, Feb. 23, 2006, 1:00-6:00 PM, McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

Please visit the symposium website for a more detailed schedule.

Featuring an interview with novelist Maxine Hong Kington, this special half-day symposium will also include two panel discussions on critical issues in Asian American literary and cultural studies. The symposium will conclude with a reception to celebrate the release of a new collection of essays, Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits, edited by UCSB English Professor Shirley Geok-Lin Lim with English doctoral candidates John Blair Gamber, Stephen Hong Sohn and Gina Valentino. For more information on the book, click here.

"Sweet Soul Music:" A Lecture/Performance by Ron Paris
Wednesday, February 15, 2006, 4:00 PM, McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB

"Sweet Soul Music," presented in honor of Black History Month, conveys the early history of R&B and the contribution of soul music to social justice through word, image, and song. Ron Paris is a soul singer, entertainer, and activist. He has sung with The Platters, has opened for the Jackson Five and Red Foxx, and has performed as The Ron Paris Show in clubs and casinos in Las Vegas from 1971 until 1997. Since moving to Santa Barbara, Ron has been presenting his lecture-performance, "Sweet Soul Music," to youth and university audiences.

For more information, please contact Julie Carlson at jcarlson@english.ucsb.edu.

Film Series: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999)
Thursday, February 9, 2006, 6:30 PM, South Hall 2635, UCSB

One critic has labeled this film "an existential fable" while another has called it a "meditation on cross-cultural exchange." Come and make up your own mind at the ACGCC's screening of Jim Jarmusch's 1999 film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. According to film critic Stephanie Zacharek, "Forest Whitaker plays a reclusive and mysterious inner-city hit man who lives and breathes by the code of ancient Japanese warriors" (Salon.com). According to Zacharek, the film "has an almost dreamy, rather than gritty, urban look," and it is edited "beautifully against RZA's resonant hip-hop soundtrack."

Discussion moderated by James Hodge (English) and Geoffrey McNeil (English). Light refreshment will be served. Click here for more information about the film.

Freedom Is Not Enough:
The Secret of the Sixties that Transformed America
Nancy MacLean, Professor of History and African American Studies, Northwestern University
Thursday, Jan. 26, 2006, 4:00 PM, Multicultural Center, UCSB

The story of the struggles of the sixties is usually told with a focus on symbolic confrontations like the lunch counter sit-ins or the demonstration at the 1969 Miss American pageant. In shifting attention to the fights for jobs and justice waged by the black freedom movement, the feminist movement, and the Mexican American civil rights movement, MacLean uncovers the secret of how these movements managed to alter gender, race, and the workings of power in the U.S. as much as they did. Yet she also reveals how in the 1970s a conservative movement opposed to this transformation mastered a new form of political jujitsu, as it used the power of the language of civil rights and "color blindness" to roll back the gains made by men of color and all women. In a talk based on her new book, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace, MacLean will offer a fresh interpretation of the last half century of U.S. history.

Presented with the Center for Work, Labor, and Democracy. Co-sponsors: Women's Center, Multi-Cultural Center, Women's Studies, New Racial Studies

Winter Colloquium—Ethnicity, Transnationality and Radical Politics
Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2006, 2:00-4:30 PM, South Hall 2635, UCSB

The colloquium provides a space for students and faculty to hear cutting edge work from advanced graduate students on the center's theme of "Race Studies: National and Transnational Debates."

Click here to download a poster with colloquium details.

Film Series: Bamboozled (2000)
Thursday, Jan. 12, 2006, 6:30 PM, South Hall 2635, UCSB

You are cordially invited to a screening of Spike Lee's controversial film Bamboozled (2000). In the words of Salon film critic Andrew O'Hehir, the film tells "[t]he story of Delacroix, an uptight buppie with a Harvard coffee mug and a dubious Francophone accent who creates a nightmarish blackface minstrel show for his fictional TV network." According to O'Hehir, "[o]n one hand, it's a furious protest against the persistent media stereotyping of blacks (or "Negroes," as the persnickety Delacroix always says) that has existed throughout American history. But Lee also suggests that blacks have become conscious and unconscious collaborators in the perpetuation of these stereotypes and must bear some responsibility for it."

Discussion moderated by Elizabeth Freudenthal (English) and Ralph Lowi (Ethnomusicology). Light refreshment will be served. Click here for more information about the film.

Faculty Seminar Series: Carl Gutiérrez-Jones, Professor of English
Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2005, 3:00-5:00 PM, South Hall 2635, UCSB

Professor Gutiérrez-Jones, director of the ACGCC, will present a paper entitled "Paranoid Designs: Toni Cade Bambara's Those Bones Are Not My Child and 'The Squalor of the Truth.'" Refreshments will be provided.

Fall Colloquium—Race Studies: National and Transnational Debates
Monday, Nov. 28, 2005, 2:00-3:45 PM, South Hall 2635, UCSB

The colloquium provides a space for students and faculty to hear cutting edge work from advanced graduate students on the center's theme of "Race Studies: National and Transnational Debates." Presenters include English doctoral candidates Jacob Berman, John Gamber and Laura Szanto.

Film Series: GATTACA (1997)
Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005, 5:30 PM, Transciptions Studio, UCSB

The ACGCC and Transcriptions Studio are co-sponsoring this screening of Andrew Niccol's 1997 film GATTACA. According to an article by David A. Kirby, this film, "[a]lthough GATTACA relies on the recognizable tropes of racial discrimination to support its claims about genetic discrimination, it ignores contemporary issues of race and genetics in America. In actuality, Gattaca functions as a 'passing' film that utilizes terminology, images, and situations familiar in discussions of racial discrimination." Discussion moderated by Kimberly Knight and Yanoula Athanassakis. Light refreshment will be served. Click here for more information about the film.

Faculty Seminar Series: Candace Waid, Associate Professor of English
Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2005, 3:00-5:00 PM, South Hall 2635, UCSB

Professor Waid's talk is entitled "Bonfire of the Masculinities: Whistler, Wharton, Jewel & Joe Christmas." This lecture is drawn from her book-in-progress, Maternal Muse, Signifying: William Faulkner's Parables of Art. Refreshments will be provided.

Film Series: The Business of Fancy Dancing (2002)
Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2005, 5:30 PM, South Hall 2635, UCSB

You are cordially invited to a screening of Sherman Alexie's 2002 film The Business of Fancy Dancing. In the film, Seymour Polatkin is a successful, gay Indian poet from Spokane who confronts his past when he returns to his childhood home on the reservation to attend the funeral of a dear friend. It is based upon Sherman Alexie's book of poetry of the same name. Discussion moderated by John Gamber. Light refreshment will be served. Click here for more information about the film.

Trick-or-Treat in the Centers
Monday, Oct. 31, 2005, 12:00-1:00 PM, English Department, UCSB

Ever wonder exactly what goes on in Transcriptions? Confused about what ACGCC actually stands for? Is the Early Modern Center a foreign land to you? Come visit the centers on Halloween to learn more about our resources and upcoming events! Visitors will be rewarded with treats! Get out of "your" center and visit the others. Costumes are optional.

Happy Hour & Book Release Celebration
Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2005, 5:00 PM, Woodstock's Pizza

The American Cultures & Global Contexts Center warmly invites you to a happy hour at Woodstock's Pizza to celebrate the center's publication of our first book--War Narratives and American Culture, edited by Giles Gunn and Carl Gutiérrez-Jones--and to mark the beginning of a new academic year. Click here for more information about the book.

Film Series: Crash (2004)
Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2005, 5:30 PM, South Hall 2635, UCSB

You are cordially invited to a screening of Paul Haggis' 2004 film Crash, the first film in the 2005-2006 American Cultures & Global Contexts Center. According to Roger Ebert, this film, set in Los Angeles, "tells interlocking stories of whites, blacks, Latinos, Koreans, Iranians, cops and criminals, the rich and the poor, the powerful and powerless, all defined in one way or another by racism." Discussion moderated by Eric Martinsen. Light refreshment will be served. Click here for more information about the film.

American Identities & Global Crises: An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference
Saturday, May 14, 2005, 9 AM to 5:30 PM, Centennial House, UCSB

The 2005 American Cultures and Global Contexts Graduate Conference, an interdisciplinary forum at UCSB, will explore the ways that identities in the U.S. and the Americas shape and are shaped by global crises, whether they are historical or contemporary.  This year we are pleased to host distinguished keynote speaker George Lipsitz (see below). This one-day conference will explore the construction of various identities in the Americas, including those associated with, but not limited to, gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, politics, religion, and profession. In particular, we seek to consider these identities in the context of various kinds of global crisis, including the exceptionally charged global environment of recent years. Click here for more information.

George Lipsitz
"The Metaphor of Two Worlds: Abolition Democracy and Global Justice"
Saturday, May 14, 2005, 1 PM, Centennial House, UCSB

George Lipsitz is professor and chair of the Department of American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of American Studies in a Moment of Danger, a provocative book about the changes in culture, social movements, and the state prompted by the increasing power of transnational capital.

Click here to download Lipsitz's recent article "Abolition Democracy and Global Justice" from Comparative American Studies.

19th Century American Culture and Globalization: A Special Symposium
Friday, April 29, 2005, 3-5 PM, English Dept. Seminar Room, South Hall 2635

The Americas are and have always been "global." This symposium situates the contexts of globalization and the Americas from three different perspectives, presented by UCSB scholars from a variety of backgrounds.

Laurie Shannon
"Actaeon's Coat"
Friday, April 22, 2005, 2 PM, English Dept. Seminar Room, South Hall 2635

Laurie Shannon is Associate Professor of English at Duke University, where she specializes in English Renaissance thought and writing. She is the author of Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shaespearean Contexts, and is a graduate of Harvard Law School who uses her legal training as one of her tools in the analysis of Elizabethean life. Her talk will address the philosophical place of animals as the underwriters of "Man" in the early modern milieu, when Elizabetheans made surprisingly ambiguous attempts to distinquish humans from animals.

A Bilingual Celebration of Poetry Month (local poets reading in
Spanish and English)
Friday, April 22, 2005, 12-1 PM, Front Entrance, Santa Barbara Museum of Art

Readers: Maria Herrera Sobek, Adrianne Davis, Osiris, John Romo, Melinda
Palacio, Kelly Peinado.

Coordinated by Zia Isola, UCSB Department of English, and Patsy Hicks, Santa
Barbara Art Museum. Sponsored by the Santa Barbara Poet Laureate Project and SBMA

Janice Radway
ACGCC SEMINAR and LUNCH
Friday, April 22, 2005, 11:45 AM-1:30 PM, English Dept. Seminar Room, South Hall 2635

Come for lunch provided by the ACGCC and lively discussion. This open seminar will be of particular interest to
anyone interested in American Studies.

Janice Radway
"What's the Matter with Reception Studies: On the Origins, Persistence, and Limitations of a Paradigm"
Thursday, April 21, 2005, 1 pm, McCune Conference Room, UCSB

Janice Radway is Professor and Chair of the Literature Program at Duke University and past president of the American Studies Association. She is the author of Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature, a landmark work of cultural studies and of the study of women's uses of popular culture. She is also the author of A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle Class Desire, a major reconsideration of the relations between practices of reading and the publishing industry in the formation of the American middle class. She is currently completing a history of the book in the United States in the twentieth century. Her talk will discuss the current status of one of the most important methods of studying the effects of popular culture, one that lies at the intersection of literary studies, American studies, race studies, gender studies, and sociology

Stayin' Alive: The Revival and Near Death of the American Working Class in the 1970s
Jefferson Cowie
February 6, 2004, 12-1, 4044 HSSB

Jefferson Cowie teaches labor history at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University. He is the author of the prize-winning Capital Moves: RCA's Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (New Press) and is now working on a book, Last Days of the Working Class: A Social History of Politics and Pop in the 1970s (New Press).

Cowie's talk is sponsored by the Labor Focus Research Group and the Department of History Colloquium Committee.

John Dower
"Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9/11"
February 5, 2004, 4pm, UCSB Campbell Hall
"Visualizing Cultures: East Meets West, West Meets East"
February 6, 2004, 1pm, UCSB McCune Reading Room (HSSB 6020)

Pulitzer-Prize-winner and Elting E. Morrison Professor of History at MIT, Dower is a specialist in modern Japan and U.S.-Japan relations. His most recent book, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in nonfiction, the Bancroft Prize in American history, the John K. Fairbank Prize in Asian history and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in history, among other accolades. His use of visual and popular cultural materials for scholarly research is groundbreaking, and he is collaborating with MIT Linguistics and Philosophy Professor Shigeru Miyagawa on "Visualizing Cultures," a project compiling and exploring the visual representations of Japan and the United States' first encounters in 1854. Dower's main lecture Thursday afternoon will explore whether there are parallels between world re-making in the Pacific after World War II and world re-making in the Middle East after 9/11. In an additional presentation Friday, Dower will discuss his visual representations of the encounter between East and West, Japan and the United States, when Commodore Perry's "black ships" entered Tokyo harbor in 1854. Dower's Thursday lecture is co-sponsored by UCSB Arts & Lectures.

Documentaries, Docudrama and World Governance Film Series:
Victoria Riskin and David Rintels
February 9, 2004, 7-9pm UCSB McCune Reading Room (HSSB 6020)

Writer's Guild of America, West President Victoria Riskin and her husband, writer-producer David Rintels, have both created docudramas and films about moments of world-making. Rintels' work includes Nuremburg (2000) about the famous Nazi trials; Day One (1989) about the Manhattan Project; and Washington: Behind Closed Doors, (1977) about the Nixon Administration. He and Riskin collaborated in writing and producing World War Two: When Lions Roared (1994), as well as co-producing Riskin's scripts for My Antonia (1995), The Last Best Year (1995), and The Member of the Wedding (1997). Riskin is a longtime leader in Human Rights Watch, currently co-chair of its Southern California committee and on the advisory board of its Asia division; in addition, she co-founded the Tibetan Aid Project. Using film clips from their politically-oriented docudramas, Riskin and Rintels will discuss the difficulties of writing, producing and financing serious films in today's industry.

UC-Systemwide Faculty Roundtable
Tuesday, November 4, 3:30 - 5:30 PM
McCune Room, HSSB 6020, UCSB

This rountable is the inaugural event of a year-long project supported by the "Critical Issues in America" series and co-sponsored by the Department of English's American Cultures and Global Contexts Center and the Global and International Studies Program. Distinguished faculty members from six different campuses will each address a specific question bearing on the role that culture plays, or has played, in the global debate about America's right to reshape a new world order. Taking up both the historical and theoretical dimensions of these questions, participants will be encouraged after each presentation to interact with each other before moving on to the next presentation, and time will also be reserved at the end of the presentations for further interactions with the audience. By means of this format, our hope is to create as participatory an intellectual event as possible, one calculated to open up some of the larger issues that will come into play during programs scheduled for the remainder of the year. Those programs will include a lecture series, a large conference, a film series, and a variety of tie-ins with courses scheduled throughout the year.

Participants: Shelly Streeby (UCSD), Vincent Pecora UCLA), Emory Elliott (UCR), Eve Darian-Smith (UCSB), George Lipsitz (UCSC).

Co-sponsors: The American Cultures and Global Contexts Center, UCSB's Deaprtment of English; the Global and International Studies Program with support from the "Critical Issues in America" series.

An Evening with the Author: Michele Serros
Tuesday, November 4, 5:00 PM
Multicultural Center Theater, UCSB

Born in Oxnard, Michele Serros was still a student at Santa Monica College when her first book of poetry and short stories, Chicana Falsa, was published. When her original publisher went out of business, Serros sold copies of her book from her garage - now her books are required reading in high schools and universities across the U.S. In this evening, Serros will share pieces from both of her books Chicana Falsa and How to Be a Chicana Role Model. Co-sponsored by the Stranger No More Series.

This event is presented in conjunction with a discussion of Serros' novel Chicana Falsa and Other Stories of Death, Identity and Oxnard, Tuesday, October 28, 6:30 PM, 2003, in the MCC Lounge.
From the white boy who transforms himself into a full-fledged Chicano, to the self-assured woman who effortlessly terrorizes her Anglo boss, to the junior-high friend who accused her of being a "chicana falsa," the people and places that Michele Serros brings to vivid life in this collection of poems and stories call to mind a rare wit and biting humor. Selected for discussion is the short story, "Attention Shoppers" and the poem, "White Owned." Pick up your copy of the essay at the MCC. This café hour discussion will be led by Writing Program lecturer, Marc Coronado.

Becoming Native: The Ecology of State Literature Anthologies
Friday, November 7, 4:00 PM
South Hall 2635, UCSB

Cheryll Glotgelty specializes in Western American literature, environmental literature, ecocriticism, and women's literature. The Sanford Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at University of Nevada, Reno (2000-2002), Professor Glotfelty is the co-editor (with Harold Fromm) of The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. An introduction to the field as well as a source book, this reader has been heralded for the productive way it defines ecological literary discourse, sketches the development of this discourse over the past quarter-century, and provides appealing and lucidly written examples of the range of ecological approaches to literature.

Sponsored by the Department of English. For information, please call 893-3479.

The English Department’s, American Cultures and Global Contexts Center and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center will cosponsor “Histories, Poetics, and Politics of Homeland Security,” a forum on recent developments in civil rights legislation. The forum will be open to students and faculty, and will be make a special effort to bring members of our community to participate in the dialogue

Appearing as panelists at the forum will be: John Woolley; Acting Dean, Division of Social Sciences and Professor of Political Science; J. E. Talbott, Professor of History; and Mitsuye Yamada, Nisei poet and activist. Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Professor of English and noted author, will moderate.

This event, which will take place February 7th at 4:00 in the McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB, is being held in conjunction with “Big Head,” an art performance by Denise Uyehara on February 7th at 8 p.m. at the Multicultural Center Theater.

Panel:	John Woolley, Acting Dean, Division of Social Sciences and Professor of Political Science Selected Recent Publications: "The California Watershed Movement: 'Place' and the Role of Science" (with Michael V. McGinnis), Natural Resources Journal, (Winter 2002). "Democracy and National Economic Performance: The Preference for Stability" (with Dennis Quinn), American Journal of Political Science 44 (July 2001), pp. 634-657. "The Conflicting Discourses of Restoration" (with Michael V. McGinnis), Society and Natural Resources 13 (June 2000), pp. 339-357. "Using Media-Based Data in Studies of Politics," American Journal of Political Science 44 (January 2000), pp. 156-173. "Exorcising Inflation-mindedness: Ideas, Interests and the Politics of Inflation in the 1970s," Journal of Policy History 10 (1998).
	J. E. Talbott, Professor of History Major Publications: The Pen and Ink Sailor: Charles Middleton and the King's Navy, 1778-1813 (London, 1998) The War without a Name: France in Algeria, 1954-1962 (New York, 1980) The Politics of Educational Reform in France (Princeton, 1969)
	Mitsuye Yamada, Nisei poet and activist Camp Notes and Other Poems, 2nd ed. (1992) Desert Run: Poems and Stories (1988) Camp Notes and Other Poems (1976)
	Paul Spickard, Professor of History Major Publications: A Global History of Christians: How Everyday Believers Experienced Their World, with Kevin M. Cragg (2001) We Are A People: Narrative and Multiplicity in the Construction of Ethnic Identity edited with Jeffrey Burroughs (2000) World History by the World's Historians edited with James V. Spickard and Kevin M. Cragg (1997) Japanese Americans: The Formation and Transformations of an Ethnic Group (1996) Pacific Island Peoples in Hawai'i (1994) Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in 20th-Century America (l989)
Moderator:	Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Professor of English and author Major Publications Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian American Memoir of Homelands (1996) (Chinese translation, 2001) Joss and Gold (Feminist Press and Times Books International, 2001) Writing South/East Asia in English (1994) English-language Writing from the Philippines and Singapore (1993) What the Fortune Teller Didn't Say (1998) Two Dreams: New and Selected Stories (1997) Monsoon History (1994) Modern Secrets: New and Selected Poems (1989) Life's Mysteries (1985) No Man's Grove and Other Poems (1985) Another Country (1982) Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems (1980)

Co-Sponsors: Department of English, American Cultures; Interdisciplinary Humanities Center