Worlding: World Literature, Field Imaginaries, Future Practices

Saturday, April 21, 9:00 am-6:00 pm
College 8/ Room 240

This one-day conference features work in progress by scholars associated with the journal boundary2, and by a group of local scholars with kindred projects. Talks will be fifteen minutes each, with ample time for discussion. Lunch will be served for presenters and attendees.

In its push to articulate a critical vision of postmodernity and globalization, boundary 2, an international journal of literature and culture, has played a cital role throughout the 1990s in the U.S. in shifting the tired field imaginaries of areas, nations, and disciplines, American Studies, Asia Pacific Studies, Latin American Studies: all have seen their frameworks, power domains, and terms challenged by the special issues and collective practices of boundary 2.

The trans-disciplinary pedagogy of World Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz has worked, in related ways, to envision exactly what such a global/local, transnational, and borderlands project could be. Globalization and the vision of the globe do not belong to any neo-liberal or end of history triumphalism; the world of world literature is "worlded" from disparate and multiple angles of vision, frameworks, and practices as yet emerging.

We gather here to interrogate and push forward the frames of pedagogy and research, via this open public dialogue of "work in progress." We welcome you at the boundary of transnational field imaginaries and future practices, where you cannot just come as you have been or are.

-Rob Wilson, Professor of Literature at U.C. Santa Cruz, and Advisory Editor of boundary 2.

9:30-11:15
Louis Chude-Sokei (Literature, UCSC), Black Machine Poetics: Race and Cyborg Discourse.
Sharon Kinoshita (Literature, UCSC), De-provincializing the Middle Ages
Ronald Judy (English, University of Pittsburgh), Ibn Khaldun & the Concept of Time
Juan Poblete (Literature, UCSC), Area and Ethnic Studies, The Chicana/o-Latina/o-Latin American Scenario

11:15-1:00
Eric Clarke (English, University of Pittsburgh), Character
Terry Cochran (Comparative Literature, University of Montreal), The Knowing of Thought Experiments
Carla Freccero (Literature, UCSC), Queer Spectrality
Kirsten Gruesz (Literature, UCSC), Utopia Latina

1:00-2:00- Lunch Break

2:00-3:45
Jonathan Arac (English, University of Pittsburgh), Does Globalization Change the Relation Between Theory And Criticism?
Susan Gillman (Literature, UCSC), W.E.B. Dubois and Occult History
Donald Pease (English, Dartmouth College), The Politics of Postnational American Studies
Colleen Lye (English, U.C. Berkeley), Aliens and Dissenters

4:00-5:45
Lourdes Martinez-Echazabal (Literature, UCSC), The 1960s Revisited: Art, Race and Politics in Cuba
Aamir Mufti (Comparative Literature, U.C. Los Angeles), Language in Crisis in Colonial India.
Radha Radhakrishnan ( English, University of Massachussetts, Amherst ), When is "The Political"?
Lindsay Waters (Editor, Harvard University Press), The Sovereignty of Art

5:45pm Wlad Godzich (Dean of Humanities, UC Santa Cruz), Concluding Remarks.

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Last modified: March 21, 2001 by Megan O'Patry.
Please send your comments to the Center for Cultural Studies, cult@cats.ucsc.edu.