Newsletters Archive Fall 1998
Dialog 3
- Letter from David Nirenberg, director
- Announcements for 1998-99
- 1997-98 Conferences
- 1997-98 Workshops
- Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations (AMC)
- Asian Studies Workshop (ASW)
- Continental Theory Workshop (CTW)
- Feminist Reading Group (FRG)
- Judaic Studies Workshop (JSW)
- Medieval Studies Workshop (MSW)
- Nineteenth Century Enquiry (NICE)
- 1997-98 Study Groups
- Central Europe Study Group (CESG)
- Environmental Studies (ES)
- Late Editions (LE)
- Other CSC Events
Letter from David Nirenberg
This past year witnessed the emergence of some new and exciting opportunities for the Center while also demonstrating the continued vitality of the Center's existing programs. As many of you know, the university's strategic plan, "Implementing Rice: The Next Century," approved by the Board of Governors in 1997, places renewed emphasis upon interdisciplinarity and internationalization. There is an obvious place within such an emphasis for the Center, which throughout its existence has stressed the value of bringing together practitioners from multiple disciplines working on diverse cultures to illuminate common problems. Recognizing this role, President Gillis has authorized an attempt to raise endowment moneys for three new programs at the Center.
The first of these is a program of distinguished visiting professors. We envision that approximately six scholars would come to campus every year for visits varying from two weeks to one semester, and play a substantial role in the ongoing academic and intellectual life of undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty. Five visitors would come for periods ranging from two to five weeks, with a sixth in residence for a full semester. Two- and three-week visitors would engage in a number of activities, giving talks, offering seminars or workshops, and meeting with students and faculty. In addition to such activities, four- and five-week visitors would offer one-credit courses at the undergraduate or graduate level. Symposia or conferences might also be structured around the visit of a particular scholar. This program would give the Rice community a maximum exposure to leading scholars who are expert in subjects and methodologies that are not likely to be represented on Rice's comparatively small faculty. By enabling relatively extended visits by foreign scholars, it would also represent a significant step in internationalizing the intellectual universe of the Rice faculty and student body.
The second program is a postdoctoral fellowship program. The program would consist of two two-year postdoctoral fellowships. The two fellows would be selected during alternating years from a national pool of applicants in all relevant fields. Selection will be made by the Center's advisory panel in consultation with the pertinent departments to which the fellows will be affiliated. Fellows will teach two courses per academic year and will be expected to make significant progress in their research. One of the two courses to be taught will be in the fellow's traditional discipline. The second course will be within Rice's First-Year Seminar Program. Fellows will also will be encouraged to participate in the intellectual life of their departments and in those Center reading groups that are of interest to them. The many disciplinary and interdisciplinary groups of the Center constitute an ideal venue for exploring the wider implications of the dissertation's specialized research.
The third program is a graduate fellowship program. At many institutions, graduate students are among the most committed interlocutors in the humanities, both in seminar and outside of it. Their conversation and their research is a constant source of renewal for the faculty, and they provide undergraduates with some of the freshest and most enthusiastic teaching. Moreover, their research often represents the future of their disciplines. For these reasons, some of the most vibrant centers in the humanities include a graduate component in their programs. The Center's program would provide three Rice graduate students with a $10,000 stipend in their fifth year of study. Along with the postdoctoral fellows and the visiting faculty, these students would be housed in the Center's suite in the new humanities building. As with the postdoctoral fellows, their work would benefit from the conversations pursued within this interdisciplinary setting. The program will also provide a valuable supplement to the graduate funding available at Rice, helping the graduate programs in the humanities maintain their tradition of rapid time to degree.
Taken together, these programs will greatly enhance our ability to expose Rice students and faculty and the broader Houston community to new methodologies, internationally recognized scholarship, and inspired teaching in the humanities and culturally oriented social sciences, without regard to disciplinary or geographical boundaries. These are large goals, and they will not be achieved without a great deal of effort. But I am confident that with the continued support of the administration, the necessary resources can be raised over the next five years.
As the rest of this newsletter makes clear, last year's increased planning and fundraising activities in no way interfered with the ongoing success of the Center's existing programs. The Center continued to support a wide variety of programming, including several film series (the Houston Association of Hispanic Media Professionals' Mexican Film Festival, the Second Houston Pan-Cultural Film Film Festival, the Margaret Meade Traveling Film and Video Festival, and the Contemporary Cinema of India), academic conferences ("Nineteenth-Century Geographies," "Research and the Production of Knowledge in Africa," and "The 1998 Department of English Graduate Student Symposium: Women, Race, and Culture at the Millennium"), and numerous specialized talks. The Center also sponsored or cosponsored a number of general-audience lectures, such as that of Dennis Banks, founder of the American Indian Movement, and of Edward Said, whose presentation on Palestinian history drew over 1,000 people. In total, the Center sponsored or co-sponsored the visits of more than eighty speakers to campus in 1997-98.
The Center's research activities were similarly fruitful. The myriad activities of ongoing research groups are described in this newsletter. The year also saw the publication of the fifth volume in George Marcus' Late Editions series, which has been supported by the CSC and published by the University of Chicago Press since 1992. Entitled Corporate Futures, this timely new volume represents an important step in the analysis of multinational corporations as cultural entities. In addition to the continued fruits of these ongoing projects, the year yielded an unusual number of new proposals for research and study groups. The largest of these, called the Connecting Cultures initiative, was established early in the year with the help of a two-year pilot grant from the Provost's office. The initiative, which grew out of discussions started by Rich Smith and Ben Lee, is designed to identify those regions and problems that present especially promising opportunities for collaborative, interdisciplinary, and comparative work in the humanities, social sciences, and related fields at Rice, and to encourage that work by providing a forum and funding for it. During 1998-99, the initiative will support a number of activities, among them the following: a conference on the roots of contemporary economic planning systems entitled "Non-Socialist Economic Planning in Republican China and Europe, 1935-1950: Ideas and Institutions"; an extended visit by the social philosopher Charles Taylor, cosponsored by the departments of anthropology, philosophy, and religious studies and featuring a public lecture and two seminars on "Multiple Modernities"; a working group on "New Studies in Transnational Circulations and Cultures," which will focus on emergent transnational processes and cultural constructions. In addition to the Connecting Cultures initiative, two even newer workshops and three study groups have been formed: the African Studies Workshop, to promote the scholarly study of Africa and its peoples; the workshop on Concepts and Categorization, concerned with the origins and sources of concepts and categories as a way to understand cognitive processes and products; the Cultural and Social Theory study group, focused on twentieth-century cultural and social theory; the Inquiries study group, devoted to queer theory; and Perspectives on the Eastern Mediterranean study group, interested in the history, economics, politics, and culture of the Middle East.
The number and variety of new groups testify to the exceptional energy and increasing diversity of faculty research interests at Rice. These exciting developments do, however, come at some cost. Our programming budget has not expanded as quickly as the size and interests of the faculty have, and this means that new groups could only be funded by cutting the budgets of existing groups. It is my hope that over the next few budget cycles we can offset these cuts by obtaining additional resources to reflect the growth in size and diversity of our faculty and its research interests. In the meantime, the advisory panel and I are very grateful for your understanding of our growing pains.
I urge all of you to share your thoughts with me about the direction the Center is, or should be, taking, and about ways in which it might better serve your needs. I also very much hope to see you at the Center's many events this coming year, some of which are described in this newsletter. This year promises to be even more exciting than the last.
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CSC Fellows for 1998-99
The practice of soliciting outside reviews of fellowship applications was implemented during 1997-98. Although exceptional circumstances allowed us to offer four fellowships for 1998-99, competition was unusually strong, and a number of important and deserving projects could not be supported. The names of this year's CSC fellows and their project titles appear below. We invite you to attend the lectures that they and last year's fellows, Joe Manca and Jack Zammito, will give either this academic year or early in the next.
Carl Caldwell, Department of History, "Planning Metaphysics: Ernst Bloch's Principle of Hope and the Plan in the German Democratic Republic"
Jane Chance, Department of English, "Medieval Mythography, vol. 2: From the School of Chartres to the Court at Avignon, 1177-1350"
Eugenia Georges, Department of Anthropology, "The Procreative Body in Postwar Greece: Transformations in Popular and Expert Discourses, Practices, and Meanings"
Eric Margolis, Department of Philosophy, "Concepts and Innateness"
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Conferences and Other Special Events 1998-1999
Fall 1998
"
Painting under Pressure," a panel discussion on the perceived limits and boundaries of painting at the end of the 20th century. Organized by John Sparagana (art and art history).
-November 14th, Sewall Hall 301
"Constructing Hildegard: Reception and Identity 1098-1998," The Neil J. O'Brien Triennial Symposium in Medieval Studies, marking the 900th anniversary of the birth of Hildegard of Bingen. Organized by Honey Meconi, Shepherd School of Music.
-November 20th and 21st, Sewall Hall 301
Spring 1999
"
Non-Socialist Economic Planning in Republican China and Europe, 1935-1950: Ideas and Institutions," a miniconference to investigate the roots of contempoary planning systems. Organized by Carl Caldwell (history) and Steven Lewis (political science)
-January 30, 1999
"Cinemas of Asian America: A Transnational Festival," an examination, through Asian-American films, of the flow of cultural forms between different geographical and cultural milieux. Organized by Hamid Naficy (art and art history) and George Marcus (anthropology)
-January 29-31, 1999
"Gift and Sacrifice," a conference to explore how gift and sacrifice express and engender rituals but also infiltrate contemporary practices of economy, psychology, and ethics. Organized by Edith Wyschogrod (religious studies) and Jean Joseph Goux (French studies).
-date to be announced
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Rockwell Fund Helps Endow CSC Postdocs
The Rockwell Fund, Inc. recently awarded the Center for the Study of Cultures an initial grant of $100,000 toward endowment for the center's proposed postdoctoral program. The Rockwell Fund trustees will make their best effort to fund an additional $400,000 over the next four years for the program. Based in Houston, the Rockwell Fund has long been a generous supporter of Rice. The foundation's first gift, in 1936, endowed the annual Rockwell Lectures in religion. The current grant to the CSC is among the largest the Rockwell Fund has made, and represents an important step toward the postdoctoral fellowship endowment goal of $2,000,000. Please join us in thanking the Rockwell Fund and its trustees for their tremendous vote of confidence in the center's activities.
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1997-98 Conference CSC Main Event for 1997-98: Nineteenth-Century Geographies Conference
At the "Nineteenth-Century Geographies" conference, held at Rice on March 19-22, and co-sponsored by Trinity College, scholars from around the country and from abroad met to talk about how their work was or could become more attentive to issues of place. Subtitled "Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Conceptions of Space" and organized by Helena Michie (English, Rice) and Ronald Thomas (English, Trinity College), the conference featured talks and discussions about then-dominant British and American traditions of mapping, exploration, and boundary definition. "Geography" as a topic was not limited to the official and national spaces created by maps and by natural boundaries; the papers also explored other cultural uses and metaphors of space from domestic architecture to the regulation of city streets, to the mapping of the notion of space upon the human body.
The conference featured a mixed-media format, with two keynote speakers, six panels of three or four papers each, and three concurrent seminars, led by scholars from three disciplines whose own work-in-progress investigates the function of place. Each keynote address and seminar included at least one respondent, as did one of the panels. The idea of the mixed format was to provide as many ways as possible into this interdisciplinary topic, and to combine the benefits of a format based on participants' careful preparatory reading of seminar papers with the more performative elements of a conference based on talks. The latter format made the conference more accessible to members of the Rice community and the public who wanted to drop in for a few talks, while the former encouraged sustained discussion among conference registrants.
Participating scholars represented the fields of geography, history, art history, anthropology, theater and performance, history of science, and literary studies. The two keynote speakers were Philippa Levine, (history, USC) and Joseph Litvak (English, Bowdoin). Levine's address, "Erotic Geographies: Sex and the Managing of Colonial Space," traced British attitudes towards brothels in nineteenth-century India and Ceylon. She looked at colonial records to uncover what she called a rhetoric of invisibility, tracing the paradoxical demands that brothels be inconspicuous and that they be clearly differentiated from other spaces occupied by women. Levine was particularly interested in how, in these documents, the brothel was simultaneously identified with and in opposition to the house, and how British ideas of domestic architecture and household hygiene were deployed in the management of brothels.
Litvak's keynote address, "Jews in Space: Trollope and the Geography of Assimilation," also began with a discursive paradox, defined in this case by two nineteenth-century antisemitic fears: that the Jew would invade gentile space by disguising his/her Jewishness, and that the Jew once (almost) assimilated, would become an object of desire. Litvak elaborated the second fear, as he did the first, in terms of space; his close reading of Anthony Trollope's The Prime Minister revealed a profound (and to Litvak's mind) representative anxiety that the Jew could be incorporated, digested, "stuck in the throat" of the gentile who metaphorically consumed him or her through food, sexual penetration, and/or marriage. The "greasiness" or "slipperiness" of the Jew turned him/her into a consumable that threatened to penetrate and literally render hoarse or silent the world of gentile politicians and rhetoricians that people The Prime Minister.
The three seminars focused, as noted above, on the work of the seminar leaders. Joseph Roach's (theater/English, Yale), entitled "Landscape of Hunger, Theatres of Shame: Mapping the Irish Famine," looked at the dissemination of images of the Irish famine in America, and at how a U.S. culture of sentiment turned the famine into an iconography based on nostalgia and centered on beautiful female Irish singers whose voices, ballads, and biographies became American commodities. The Derek Gregory (geography, UBC) seminar, "Scripting Egypt, 1820-1920: Orientalism and the Cultures of Travel," initiated a discussion about the epistemological and ethical problems of using Western travel narratives to understand the colonial encounter in Egypt. Seminar participants debated the limitations of the genre and its ability to represent native resistance or alternative spatial practices. In the third seminar, "Sexual Reorientations: Victorian Honeymoons and the 'Sights' of Europe," Helena Michie (English, Rice) presented part of her ongoing project on Victorian honeymoons. Conversation in the seminar focused on the erotics of place and on the place of travel in what Michie has termed the multiple legal, social, and sexual "reorientations" required of the honeymoon for both women and men, but especially for women.
The six panels dealt with different aspects of the relation of space, map, and body. For example, "Time Zones" was made up of four papers on how place gets expressed as time, geography as history. Ussama Makdisi (history, Rice) looked at how one particular contested place -- in this case the Ruins of Baalbek -- was used to support specific and specifically motivated histories. David Lipscomb (English, Columbia) looked at how early-nineteenth-century maps of Britain and the United States encoded historical change, translating into a visual idiom both hierarchies and overlapping histories. Betty Joseph (English, Rice) discussed what she called "chronotropes" or figurations of the interior and the coast of India in terms of narratives of development and historical change. Finally, Jon Hegglund, (English, Santa Barbara) looked at how some mid-twentieth-century films represented the nineteenth-century imperial project through the visual idiom of the map, and at how actors' bodies were represented in relation to maps and mapping.
Another panel, "Commodities and Exchanges," explored the role of geographic origin as it was embodied in particular objects. Diane Dillon (art history, Northwestern) discussed the use of landscape motifs at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, looking in particular at the phenomenon of the Fair map as souvenir. Julie Fromer (English, Wisconsin) traced the persistent Victorian effacement of Chinese origins of tea that would lead to the beverage's representation as "A typically English Brew." Krista Lysack (English, Queens University, Canada) looked at changing relations of women to the international marketplace in her discussion of the creation of Liberty's of London and Christina Rossetti's fearful and exuberant shopping poem, "Goblin Market."
The panels were remarkable for the coherence provided both by the papers and by the synthesizing questions and comments provided by a very energetic audience. Even the social events -- receptions, lunches, dinners -- presented opportunities for vigorous intellectual exchange among the participants. The conference organizers, Ronald Thomas (English, Trinity) and Helena Michie, plan on editing a volume of essays on nineteenth-century geographies that will draw on some of the strongest conference presentations. Given the range of outstanding papers presented in March, the collection promises to make an original and important contribution to an emerging field.
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1997-98 Conferences: Research and the Production of Knowledge in Africa
Held at Rice University on November 6 - 9 and cosponsored by Texas Southern University, this conference was a multidisciplinary and cross-cultural affair. Twenty-three presenters, who came from Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, Canada, and the United States represented the disciplines of history, literature, education, anthropology, religious studies, geography, entomology, agroforestry, political science, and information technology. Overviews of current research in the humanities and in the natural and physical sciences were provided by conference organizer Atieno Odhiambo (Rice) and T. R. Odhiambo (Randforum). Though both highlighted the ways that research and the production of knowledge have been shaped by African participation, they also observed that much of the control over research agendas, resource allocations, and development discourses remains in the hands of those outside of Africa because research priorities are set by donor countries and institutes. This locus of control was further examined by a panel on science and development, which featured the keynote speaker, Fred Owino (African Academy of Sciences). Owino focused on the field of agroforestry, examining the tensions between "expert " knowledge from the west and the endogenous knowledge of African peasants. Expertise that has been developed on crop and tree varieties outside of Africa but is subsequently imposed on local systems often results in failure. The challenge is to integrate the various forms of local knowledge into agroforestry development efforts, and to involve local agencies in deploying information technology for development.
To empower local communities to make their own decisions while tapping into a diverse set of information sources, Kofi Anani (Guelph) argued for adapting internet and satellite technology to serve local networks. Similarly, Claudette Ligons (Texas Southern), recommended using internet technology in Tanzanian classrooms, eliciting a spirited discussion about the practicality of such technology in local conditions. It was noted that the problem in Africa is not so much the lack of technology but the lack of inclusive decision-making and accountability.
Endogenous knowledge and its grounding in local cultures present methodological and epistemological challenges to scholars trained in traditional disciplines, which tend to define mainstream trends to the exclusion of others. A set of papers focussing on identity, memory, and place highlighted the lacuna created by these practices. Karen Kossie (Texas Southern) discussed the omission of African-American Pentecostal charismatics from most academic literature on race, liberalism, and freedom, attributing this exclusion to an academic interest in rationality over religiosity. Ed Cox (Rice) examined how the exiled King Jaja of Opobo occupied a large space in the historical imagination of the Africans in the Caribbean, which is something that eludes research based on archival materials. Les Switzer (University of Houston) demonstrated how the African subaltern press, during apartheid in South Africa, produced its own knowledge about the social and political system, including African resistance and alternatives for the future. Yet the voices of these journalists have been absent from mainstream narratives. Gregory Maddox (Texas Southern) explored the cognitive universe of a Tanzanian intellectual and how his notions of mapmaking and map reading turned the received rules upside down. Tamara Giles-Vernick (Virginia) discussed some of the ways that many Central African non-narrative histories tease the western-trained, academic historian to consider non-narrative methodologies. Abdullahi Ibrahim (Missouri) interrogated the northern Sudanese identity and offered a definition of mongrel hybridity as being black in skin but white, i.e., "orientalist" in culture, thus challenging the notion of northern Sudan as Arab. The category of the person within the context of modernity was the subject of a paper on fertility and infertility by Sheryl McCurdy (Pennsylvania State), and of Dorothy Hodgson (Rutgers), who discussed Maasai maleness and the challenge of modernity. Michael Schatzberg (Wisconsin-Madison) critiqued the universalizing, hegemonic, and normative claims of western social sciences in explaining social phenomena. Schatzberg discussed how his own academic training led him to ignore a key component of social life in former Zaire, namely the pervasive role of sorcery in politics.
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1997-98 Workshops
Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations (AMC)
Coordinators: Michael Maas (history, and director, Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations Program) and Harvey Yunis (Hispanic and classical studies)
The AMC workshop held a number of seminars, lectures, and discussions, all based on the theme "Classical Legacies in the Humanities," established by a symposium of the same name in February, 1997. Michael Maas began the year's activities with a joint AMC/CSC Fellowship lecture on "Urbanism, Identity, and Law at the End of Classical Antiquity." Maas argued that in the Roman empire, local identities were defined by Roman law through association with a city and that as the classical distinctions between city and countryside dissolved in late antiquity, new identities developed based on religion, language, and new imperial structures. (For a fuller account of Maas's lecture, see "Topics in History" under "Other Lectures.") Another AMC participant, Harvey Yunis, lectured on "Politics as Literature: Demosthenes and the Burden of theAthenian Past." Yunis examined the basic artistic and historical questions raised by Demosthenes' great speech "On the crown." Yunis explained how and to what end Demosthenes shaped Athenian public consciousness with regard to the Athenian defeat at Chaeronea at the hands of Philip II of Macedon and to ongoing Athenian subjection to Macedon. He argued that Demosthenes borrows from Greek epic and tragic poetry a paradigm of moral reasoning in which decisions are justified by their adherence to an ideal way of life (such as Hector's going out to face Achilles). By portraying the decision to face Philip as an act of fidelity to Athenian tradition at a moment of crisis, Demosthenes allows the Athenians to preserve their reputation while coming to terms with the reality of Macedonian supremacy. Simultaneously, Demosthenes preserves his political career.
A guest lecture and a seminar also occurred during fall. Anthony Grafton (history, Princeton) presented "De Pictura: Leon BattistaAlberti and the Criticism of Painting," an exploration of the origins of art criticism in 15th century Renaissance Florence. A seminar titled "Hellenism in Victorian England" engaged twenty participants in discussing an essay by Matthew Arnold and excerpts from Richard Jenkyns' TheVictorians and Ancient Greece, with Alan Grob (English, Rice) making a notable defense of Arnold.
The spring semester featured four visiting lecturers. Raphael Freundlich (professor emeritus, University of Tel Aviv) presented a lecture called "Josephus' Biblical Narrative as a Source for Understanding the Man and His Work". Freundlich showed how Hellenistic ideas of historiography and culture influenced the work of Flavius Josephus, a first-century AD Jewish historian of Jewish history who wrote for a Roman audience. Benjamin Isaac (classics, Tel Aviv, and Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies) spoke on "Jews, Pagans, and Christians in Palestine: Mixed or Separate Communities?" Informed by archaeological information and new interpretations of Eusebius' "Onomasticom," Isaac suggested that the different peoples of Palestine in the Roman period lived in mixed communities. Daniel Baraz (Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, UCLA) gave a lecture titled "Martyrdom and Cruelty: A Necessary Pair?" Taking a synoptic view of medieval history in the Latin West and the Greek East, Baraz argued that cruelty was not an important issue of discussion after antiquity and before the renaissance. Baraz drew on Stoicism, accounts of martyrdom, and Christian theories of the body. Finally, Carl Richard (history, University of Southwest Louisiana) presented "The Founding Fathers and the Classics." Based on his award-winning book of the same title, Richard's lecture provided an interpretation of the significant role classical education played in the early republic.
For academic year 1998-99, Matthias Henze (religious studies, Rice) and Michael Maas are organizing a symposium tentatively called "New Approaches to Biblical Interpretation in the Ancient World." In addition, AMC will continue its reading and discussions on related subjects throughout the year.
Asian Studies Workshop (ASW)
Coordinator: Richard J. Smith (history, and director, Asian Studies Program)
As in the past, the members of the ASW met a number of times, both formally and informally, to discuss matters of mutual interest. These discussions were catalyzed by five public lectures: "The Transcultural Background of the Great T'ang Poet Li Po (701-762)" by Zhou Xinchu (Chinese literature, Nanjing University); "The Forgotten Massacre of World War II: The Rape of Nanking" by Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II"; "Translating the Medieval Chinese Literature" by David R. Knechtges (East Asian languages, University of Washington); "Critical Issues in Korean Literary History" by Peter H. Lee (Korean and comparative literature, UCLA); and "Channeling Goddesses, Searching for Incarnations, and Debatable Dates in 14th Century Tibet" by David Germano (religious studies, University of Virginia).
A salient feature of all five lectures is that they drew audiences and raised questions that went well beyond the area expertise of the speakers, their designated topics, and sometimes even their disciplines. The talk by Knechgtes, for example, appealed not only to Rice's specialists in Chinese history, language, and literature (and their students) but also to Anne Klein and her students, involved in the translation and interpretation of Tibetan texts. Similarly, Lee's talk extended quite naturally into the realms of Japanese and Chinese language and literature, appealing to faculty and students interested in these areas and to those concerned primarily with Korea. Germano's lecture found a receptive audience not only among various Asian area specialists but also among faculty and students interested in comparative religion. And although Iris Chang's presentation, which attracted an audience of more than 200, drew primarily ethnic Chinese, many Europeanists and Americanists also attended. The same was true of Professor Zhou's presentation.
Two of the ASW lecturers, Knechtges and Zhou, are directly involved in a new Asian Studies initiative at Rice titled "Translating Li Bo," a four-year project for which the organizers, Nanxiu Qian (linguistics, Rice) and Rich Smith, hope to receive up to $800,000 in outside funding. The work of Li Bo (also known as Li Po, 701-762), probably the most widely read Chinese poet in the world, has been rendered piecemeal into dozens of languages, and his life and writings have inspired countless books, essays, poems, and paintings. Yet no comprehensive, annotated English translation of his work exists. To overcome this lack, "Translating Li Bo" will provide a venue for an international team of scholars to compile an annotated English translation of Li Po's complete works. The team will be linked by a state-of-the-art electronic network, and will post the entire corpus of Li Po's writings on the project website. Tentative translations and annotations will be posted next, and comments solicited from other scholars throughout the world, some of which will be incorporated into the final translation and notes.
The published translation of Li Po's works will include not only the original Chinese text but also extensive English annotations on issues of language, poetics, history, culture, and scholarly debate. For this effort, the project team will draw upon current scholarship from the Chinese Mainland, Taiwan, Japan, and the West and also upon traditional commentaries. In addition to the translation of the poetry, the team will also produce two collections of essays, one in Chinese and the other in English, tentatively titled The Chinese Poet Li Po (701-762): Cultural Inventor and Cultural Invention.
Continental Theory Workshop (CTW)
Coordinator: Jack Zammito (history)
For the fall, the group resumed its practice of readings and discussions on a specific theme, with rhetoric and hermeneutics the new theme. For the spring, the group hosted a miniconference that featured Frank Ankersmit, a prominent postmodernist theorist of history.
In its theme-centered readings, the group's practice is first to consider recent theoretical initiatives and then go back to the original sources of the key ideas in the recent text. The fall's first meeting was devoted to Paul de Man's influential essay, "Rhetoric of Temporality" and a recent review essay on work in hermeneutics from Diacritics to situate the "postmodern" approaches to rhetoric and hermeneutics. The group then went back to the Plato's Phaedrus, complemented by the poststructuralist commentary by Jacques Derrida, Plato's Pharmacy. Continuing with the classics, CTW members next read selections from Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics, and in its final meeting discussed selections from Gianbattista Vico's New Science and commentaries by Hayden White and others.
The April visit of Frank Ankersmit marked a continuation of conversations begun when Ankersmit participated in the 1996 conference "History and the Limits of Interpretation," organized by former CSC director Tom Haskell (history, Rice) and funded by the Mellon Foundation. At that conference, Ankersmit's work was the focus of analysis in papers by Jack Zammito and Steven Crowell (philosophy, Rice). The April miniconference included a workshop for discussing Ankersmit's essays on Erich Auerbach and Edmund Burke, and three subsequent meetings devoted to papers by Ankersmit, Crowell, and Zammito.
For 1998-99, the CTW hopes to host a visit by Satya Mohanty, one of the most original critics of postmodern theory, and to continue its theme-centered readings and discussions.
Feminist Reading Group (FRG)
Coordinator: James Faubion (anthropology)
The group's main interests were queer theory and cultural studies, considered in relation to feminism. Most meetings were organized around these two topics.
FRG was fortunate in being able to recruit two high-profile speakers who were on campus for the President's and Scientia lecture series: Bina Agarwal and Helen Longino. Agarwal (Institute of Economic Growth, University of Delhi) gave a presentation titled "Gender, Property, and Land Rights in South Asia," which led to a discussion about feminist theory's inroads into mainstream economic theory and models. Longino (philosophy and women's studies, University of Minnesota) held an informal roundtable discussion about "feminist epistemology."
In keeping with FRG's longstanding interest in interdisciplinarity, Elizabeth Long (sociology, Rice) led a discussion about the relationship between cultural studies and new sociological work on discourse and society. To prepare for the meeting, members read Donna Haraway's "Teddy Bear Patriarchy," a cultural critique of the Museum of Natural History in New York, and Michael Schudson's response to the essay. Questions during the discussion ranged from the extent to which sociological theories had engaged with the work of cultural theorists to whether or not cultural theorists succeed or fail in dismantling disciplinary orthodoxies. At another meeting, the transnational focus of cultural studies was the topic, and Kris Peterson (graduate student, anthropology) led a discussion of Inderpal Grewal's essay "Travelling Barbie."
The queer studies discussions included a session about a recent Lingua Franca article on the "sex panic" controversy. In a follow-up discussion, Colleen Lamos introduced the essays in Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism by Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn. Related discussions occurred during the visit of Steve Seidman (sociology, SUNY-Albany), cosponsored with the sociology department. Seidman's current work is based partly on interviews with self-identified gay men and women, and explores new perspectives on the concept of "the closet." Another queer theory presentation was by Jan Van Luxemburg (literature, University of Amsterdam), who spoke on "(Homo)sexuality in the Novels of Patricia Highsmith." From a narratological perspective, Van Luxemburg examined Highsmith's last novel as a metafictional statement about her earlier works and about her notorious refusal to come out as a lesbian.
Other FRG lecturers were Jill Nagle and Jane Dailey. Nagle, an activist and writer living in San Francisco, lectured on "Whores and Other Feminists." Nagle has published numerous essays and reviews on queer, feminist, and Jewish issues, and has also edited a collection of essays that interrogates the often uncomfortable relationship between feminism and the sex industry. Nagle's lecture led to a spirited discussion about the relationship between feminism and commodified sexuality, including the potential subversiveness of prostitution and the challenges to mainstream feminist notions of sex work as a form of sexist oppression. Dailey (history, Rice) presented a paper called "The Limits of Liberalism in the Post-Emancipation South: Race, Sex, Schools, and Citizenship." The paper generated a discussion on issues such as the play of gender in racial politics, the sexual politics of anti-miscegenation laws, and the economic logic of racialized sexuality.
For 1998-99, "Democratic community" will be the thematic focus.
Judaic Studies Workshop (JSW)
Coordinators: Paula Sanders (history), Matthias Henze and Diana Lobel (religious studies)
The Judaic Studies Workshop had two primary activities in 1997-98: a reading group and a lecture series. The reading group focused on rabbinic texts: mishnaic texts on Rosh Hashanah and midrashic texts on questions of rabbinic authority.
Four scholars appeared in the lecture series. Abraham David (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) lectured on the Geniza, a collection of Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, and Arabic documents in the Ben Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo, Egypt. Entitled "Egyptian Jews in Sixteenth Century Trade: A Chapter in Social and Economic Integration," David's lecture and seminar focused on a corpus of sixteenth-century Hebrew documents that provide the major evidence for the integration of Jews into the international trading network of the sixteenth century. Jews were involved at all levels of trading and, as the documents demonstrate, dealt in a wide variety of commodities
Susan Einbinder (Hebrew Union College) presented "The Magic Book that failed: Paris, 1290," which detailed her attempt to identify a "magic book" requested by a thirteenth-century Jewish martyr just before he was burned, in the hope that it would protect him from the fire. Einbinder built upon the incident to explore the role of magical and sacred books in Hebrew martyrology, and to ask how the martyrs' desire to die while clinging to Torah was interpreted by the Christian onlookers.
Rachel Elior (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) spoke on "Past and Future Yearnings: Jewish Mysticism and the Messianic Idea." Elior argued that Jewish mysticism was born at the time of the destruction of the First Temple and that the chariot of Ezekiel, a central symbol in all later Jewish mysticism, is, in fact, a projection of the Temple ark in the Holy of Holies onto the heavenly spheres. She gave an overview of Jewish history, pointing to periods of persecution during which Jews were deprived of opportunities for religious expression. Hence, they sought alternative modes of religious expression by projecting their yearnings into the mystical past and the messianic future.
Judith Newman (Union Theological Seminary, New York) presented "Gracious and Compassionate: The Character of God in Second Temple Literature." Tracing the early history of interpretation of God as "merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness" (Exodus 34), Newman discussed the appearance of this epithet in texts from the late Second Temple period (e.g., Jonah, Pseudo-Philo) and examined the way this epithet was interpreted and used liturgically.
For 1998-99, the JSW plans a reading group and a series of lectures centered on two topics: (1) rabbinic textual interpretation and (2) Platonic and Aristotelian themes in Jewish thought. Matthias Henze will coordinate the activities of the workshop.
Medieval Studies Workshop (MSW)
Coordinator: Linda Neagley, (art and art history)
The MSW sponsored three lectures with other departments and programs in the humanities. With the Department of Art and Art History, the workshop hosted Sara Lipton (history, College of William and Mary), who spoke on "The Temple is My Body: Gender, Carnality, and Synagoga in the Bible Moralisée." Also with Art and Art History, the MSW sponsored Jeffrey Hamburger (history of art, University of Toronto, and the Medieval Institute of Toronto). Hamburger spoke on "Seeing and Believing: the Suspicion of Sight and the Authenticity of Vision in Late Medieval Art and Devotion." This lecture grew out of the publication of his most recent book, Nuns as Artists, and explored the role of images in both popular and conventual women's spirituality. The lecture focused on a new reading of a painting by Jan van Eyck, The Van der Pael Madonna, and was offered in conjunction with an upper level and graduate seminar on van Eyck and problems of interpretation.
The final lecture was by James Clifton (Director, Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation) and coincided with "The Body of Christ in the Art of Europe and New Spain 1150-1800," an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, that Clifton curated and for which he authored a catalog. Clifton's lecture was titled "'Sprinkled with His Blood': Catholics, Protestants, and the Bleeding Christ in the Age of Reformation." Focusing on little-known German prints, Clifton illustrated some of the ways that Protestant reformers in sixteenth-century Germany rethought Christian iconography.
During 1998-99, a major event will be the second Neil J. O'Brien Symposium. To be held in November, the interdisciplinary symposium is being organized by Honey Meconi (Shepherd School of Music) and will focus on aspects of the historical reception of Hildegard of Bingen. Speakers include Barbara Newman (Northwestern) as the keynote speaker, Richard Emmerson (Western Washington), Monica Green (Duke), Ray Clemens (Newberry Library), Bruce Holsinger (University of Colorado), Madeline Caviness (Tufts), Jeffrey Schnapp (Stanford), and Elizabeth Dreyer (independent scholar). Sinfonye will perform a concert of Hildegard's music.
Nineteenth-Century Enquiry (NICE)
Coordinator: Alan Grob (English)
From its inception, NICE has had significant involvement by faculty from English, history, art history, French, German, and philosophy. This year, with much of its efforts going to the Nineteenth-Century Geographies conference, the group began with discussions related to the conference. One was a discussion of Cities of the Dead by Joseph Roach, a principal participant in the geographies conference. In this book, Roach attempts to break free of conventional geographic thinking and offers instead of the usual geographic divisions a notion of the "Circum-Atlantic" that ranges from Africa to the Gulf of Mexico and comprises not only the traditional European and American cultures but also African-American and Native American. The group discussion focused particularly on the parts of Roach's book that deal with the New Orleans Mardi Gras as a site of cultural exchange. Another discussion meeting concerned the work-in-progress of Helena Michie (English), who is studying the honeymoon during the Victorian period.
NICE hosted two guest speakers, both art historians. Each gave a public lecture on Friday and met with workshop members on Saturday morning for a discussion of reading proposed by the visitor in advance. Darcy Grigsby (UC-Berkeley), a scholar of early nineteenth-century French art, presented a Friday lecture titled "Robinson Crusoe's Stump and Géricault's Raft of the Medusa." The Saturday morning session was devoted to a discussion of her "Mamelukes in Paris," which was recently published in Representations.
The other guest speaker was Michael Fried (art history, Johns Hopkins), whose lecture stemmed from his his current work on the German painter Menzel and was titled "Menzel's Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin." The Saturday morning discussion centered on two chapters from Courbet's Realism, a work in which Fried makes rich use of his thesis that absorption and theatricality are the basic organizing principles for much French painting during the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. Attendees in addition to Rice faculty came from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and from the University of Houston.
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1997-98 Study Groups
Central Europe Study Group (CESG)
Coordinator: Ewa Thompson (German and Slavic studies)
During the five years of its existence, the CESG has sponsored lectures and meetings designed to increase an awareness among Houston's academic community of the distinct cultural formation called Central Europe. Over the last two years in particular, the CESG lectures and meetings have stressed the postcolonial aspects of Central Europe and the necessity for the Central Europeans to define themselves rather than accept the definitions others may have of them. During 1997-98, CESG widened the scope and number of the lectures it presented, and drew larger audiences than ever before. The CESG also established an online journal, The Sarmatian Review, which published several of the lectures presented during the year.
Two lectures concerned Central Europe and NATO, one by Witold Lukaszewski (Sam Houston State) and James Thompson (statistics, Rice). They argued that admitting the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary to NATO would effect a conventional forces transfer of 30 percent in NATO's favor, thus minimizing the temptation of future Russian attempt at western expansion. Alex Kurczaba (Slavic and Baltic studies, University of Illinois-Chicago) gave the second lecture on the topic, and made a case for including the history and culture of the three postcolonial states in courses dealing with Western Europe.
Lucja S. Cannon (Georgetown) also appeared as a lecturer in the year's series. She argued that privatization in Poland and Russia took two different routes, and she added to the evidence that societal structures in Central Europe (as opposed to Russia) facilitated a return to capitalism. Another lecturer was Paul Gottfried (Elisabethtown College), who showed that the level of prejudice against non-Germanic peoples of Central Europe, Poles in particular, remains high in American society.
These lectures occasioned the reading or rereading of several relevant publications: Gottfried's two articles on "Polophobia" in Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture; James Thompson's "Modular Wargaming" in Empirical Model Building; and, as a reference for Kurczaba's lecture, Michael Lind's The Next American Nation.
Several additional lectures dealt with the arts. Joseph Kotarba (University of Houston) presented his research on popular music in Poland, revealing that cultural preferences of Polish youth are similar to those of American youth in regard to music and other forms of popular entertainment. Danuta Batorski (University of Houston) gave a slide presentation and a lecture on Zofia Stryjenska (1896-1974), a painter and proto-feminist. Krzysztof Koehler (Jagiellonian University, and a Kosciuszko Foundation Fellow at Rice) argued that Polish cultural habits supercede Poland's linguistic affinities, and that the seventeenth-century cultural model known as 'Sarmatism' remains a much-understudied element of Central Europe's multi-ethnic heritage. Koehler's documentary, "Sarmatia, or Poland" was well received by a mixed audience of students and faculty.
The Sarmatian Review Online published three issues during 1997-98. The September issue features the first English translation of the Russian dissident Valeriia Novodvorskaia's famous article against Russian imperialism, which initially appeared in Novoe Vremiia (September 1996). The January 1998 issue features the first English translation of an interview with Isaac Bashevis Singer and the first English translation of a short story by German author Luise Kaschnitz. The leading article in April 1998 is an interview with Auschwitz survivor Jan Komski, and followed an exhibit of Komski's art mounted by the Houston Holocaust Museum from February through March. The journal will continue to present peer-reviewed articles and primary documentation on Central Europe in an effort to produce a body of documentation previously nonexistent in English-language sources.
Environmental Studies (ES)
Coordinator: Walter Isle (English)
A core group met weekly to discuss a series of readings, some of which were selected in connection with visiting speakers. Selections included David Orr's Earth in Mind and Environmental Literacy, essays by Peter Matthiessen, Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies, and a collection of poems about the natural world by such writers as Pattiann Rogers, Wendell Berry, and Theodore Roethke.
Visiting speakers appeared as presenters in a lecture series called "Interdisciplinary Efforts in Environmental Education and Research," which was cosponsored by Provost David Auston. David Orr (Director, Environmental Studies Program, Oberlin) opened the series with a talk entitled "Ecological Design and Liberal Arts Education." Orr, the author of Ecological Literacy, described an educational project now underway at Oberlin. The project will culminate in an environmental studies center, a building intended to be a highly visible model of ecological design that will also serve, as did the planning project, as a pedagogical and research tool in environmental studies.
The author Peter Matthiessen also lectured in the series, with cosponsorship from the Houston Audubon Society in addition to the Provost. Titled, "The Last of the Tiger,' Matthiessen's talk focused mainly on his expeditions in search of Siberian tigers, an increasingly rare and seldom seen species. Matthiessen also spoke about threats to wildlife because of habitat loss, and about the conflict between the wildlife preservationists and native peoples in certain parts of the world.
"Environmental Studies in the Watershed" was the title of the presentation by Peter Moyle (biology, UC-Davis) and David Robertson (English, UC-Davis). Moyle and Robertson described two components of environmental education on their campus. One, called "Education by Watershed,"" is bioregionally oriented and involves graduate and undergraduate research and field work in addition to community involvement. The other program is an undergraduate major called "Nature and Culture." Following their formal presentation, Moyle and Robertson discussed the interdisciplinary cooperation entailed in these two programs.
The final event in the series, "A Reading: Work in Progress on Cranes and Volcanoes," featured the writers SueEllen Campbell and John Calderazzo (both in English, Colorado State). Calderazzo read from a book-in-progress tentatively titled Where Earth Begins: Volcanoes and Our Inner Lives. The excerpt recreates the lives of several people in the hours before Mount Pelee eruped on Martinique in 1904. Campbell read from her essay "The Voice of the Crane," which is based on a visit to Bandelier National Monument, New Mexico, and examines the development of the atomic bomb at nearby Los Alamos National Laboratory within the context of the vanished culture of the Anasazi and the natural environment represented by migrating sandhill cranes. Campbell also read from her book Bringing the Mountain Home.
The activities of the Environmental Studies reading group coincided with and were complemented by a number of university initiatives in which all members of the group are actively involved. President Gillis met on two occasions with a group of administrators and faculty, including most of the reading group, to discuss environmental studies as one of four principal areas of current development for education and research at Rice. Three majors in this area now exist: environmental engineering, environmental science, and environmental policy studies. To coordinate these developments, the Provost has named an Environmental Programs Steering Committees, including several ES participants. An affiliation involving Rice with Columbia University and Biosphere 2 has also been established, whereby Biosphere 2 will serve as a campus for some of Rice's environmental studies programs, as it does for Columbia's. Making this affiliation involved several members of the ES reading group who, as a team, taught environmental studies courses in both the fall and spring, and took the spring class to Biosphere 2 in March.
During 1998-99, the group will continue its reading and discussions and will also host another lecture series. In addition, the group will cosponsor a visit in early October of the "Forgotten Language Tour" organized by the Orion Society. The tour features such nationally and internationally known environmental writers as the lepidopterist Robert Michael Pyle and ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan, who will read from their work and participate in seminars.
Late Editions (LE)
Edited by George Marcus (anthropology)
In May, the last meetings were held in connection with Late Editions: Cultural Studies for the End of the Century, a series of annuals supported by the CSC and published since 1992 by the University of Chicago. LE eight, the volume in preparation, will appear in 2000, concluding the series with its temporal focus on this fin-de-siècle.
The theme for the final volume was "0" itself, in its various meanings as the origin point of value, of representation, of beginnings and ends. The stimulus for the meeting was the work of Brian Rotman and recent work in science studies concerning various concepts of zero in computation, in digitalization, in physics, environmentalism, and other fields. As with past meetings, this year's discussions of precirculated drafts of essays provided a way of discovering connections among the contributions the major arguments of the volume. For the contributors, the meetings served as a seminar, and for others as a conference.
Most of the papers dealt with technoscience, and took a dialogic form as the signature format of the series. Joe Dumit and Warren Sack (both of MIT) discussed the nature of zero in studies of artificial intelligence. Mike Fortun (Hamilton College) presented material on zero values in physics. Ron Burnett (president of the Emily Carr Foundation) discussed zero in terms of end-of-life issues and the challenges these issues pose to medical practice. Randy Hanson and Kathryn Milun (both of Rice) presented essays about the problem of nuclear-waste disposal. The work of Richard Doyle (Penn State) focused on cryonics and coma states in humans. Gudrun Klein (independent scholar) discussed zero and the contemporary nature of money. Michael Fischer (MIT) served as a general discussant. Along with chapters based on this year's papers, LE eight will also include retrospective pieces that articulate connections among all eight volumes of the series.
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1998-99 Lectures and Other Events:
Topics in Arts and Letters
"Seeing the Signified: Art, Memory, and Representation in France after World War I" by Daniel Sherman (French studies/history, and CSC Fellow 1996-97)
Drawing from his book project "The Construction of Memory in Interwar France," Sherman considered the aesthetics of French commemoration of World War I. Focusing on the ubiquitous local monuments to the war dead, Sherman examined the intersection of their construction as commemorative signifiers and their status (or lack of it) as aesthetic objects. The producers of war memorials ranged from academically trained sculptors working on commission or through juried competitions to local stonemasons, with large commercial firms hovering somewhere in between. Paris art critics disparaged the vast majority of monument projects they saw, largely because of their formal resemblance to motifs from the popular art of the war years, such as posters, cartoons, and magazine illustrations. But this same resemblance allowed commercial suppliers to associate their products with the stock images of the war that the literature of remembrance conflated with "memory" itself. The provincial towns and villages that purchased such statues, notably of the poilu or common soldier, could in turn use them as the basis for a commemorative discourse that attempted to reconstruct French society along conservative lines. Monuments in a realist mode had the advantage over more allegorical types, which not coincidentally often involved female figures, because they seemed to bypass the interpretation inherent in all forms of representation. Yet in attaching contingent and heavily gendered meanings to their monuments, local communities also insisted on their status as works of art, for in their view only "art" was capable of carrying out the delicate work, at once intimate and impersonal, of merging individual memories into a form of representation coded as collective memory.
The 1998 Department of English Graduate Student Symposium: Women, Race, and Culture at the Millennium, organized by Yvonne Bruce and Michelle Taylor (graduate students, English)
With support from the Center for the Study of Cultures, this annual event featured a keynote address by Farah Jasmine Griffin of the University of Pennsylvania entitled "Lady of the Day: Billie Holiday's Challenge to Black Studies and the Politics of Respectability." Griffin examined Billie Holiday as a cultural anomaly. While Hollywood perpetuated such conventional roles for black women as wise matriarch, contented domestic, or dangerous sexual other, Holiday refused to conform. Instead, she created her own complex, iconic status and helped to establish a "politics of respectability" among the nascent black American middle class. In addition to Griffin, the symposium also featured several poets, including Susan Wood (English, Rice), Laurie Clements, Niobe Ngozi, and Robin Reagler.
Jorge Fons and "Red Sunrise," Second Houston Pan-Cultural Film Festival, organized by Hamid Naficy (art and art history)
On February 12, 1998, the Media Center opened the Second Houston Pan-Cultural Film Festival with a special reception and film presentation that featured the personal appearance of Jorge Fons, the renowned Mexican director. The evening began with a reception in the lobby of the Media Center, which was followed by a screening of Fons' Red Sunrise and a post-screening discussion with the director. The film dramatizes the Tlatelolco Massacre of 1968, which occurred during a peaceful demonstration by thousands of students against what they considered to be the Mexican government's gratuitous waste of public money on the Olympics Games. More than two hundred people attended, and many participated in a bilingual discussion with Fons for over and hour after the film.
Margaret Mead Traveling Film & Video Festival, organized by Hamid Naficy (art and art history)
The screenings of the Margaret Mead Traveling Film & Video Festival, cosponsored by the Center for the Study of Cultures and the Department of Art and Art History's Media Center, occurred on three consecutive Friday nights at the Media Center. Integrated with Hamid Naficy's seminar on Documentary and Ethnographic Films, films were grouped for showing according to unifying themes.
The first night's program focused on issues of grassroots media. Four films explored the ways in which community-based action and audiovisual documentation of such efforts can bring about improvement in various sectors of society. In You Are on Indian Land (Mort Ransen, 1969), indigenous inhabitants of Cornwall Island in Canada block traffic on a bridge to protest the annexation of their territory. Although it is not clear at the end if the demonstrators' demand to control their own land will be granted, they know at least that they have expressed their plight to the rest of the world through the film. Everyone's Channel (David Shulman, 1990) traces the establishment of public television in the United States from the 1960s to the present. Through interviews and excerpts from broadcast programs, the documentary explores freedom of speech in the electronic age. The film Unequal Education: Failing Our Children (David Murdock/Educational Video Center, 1992) compares the middle school experiences of two seventh graders in order to expose current inequities in educational opportunities. Finally, the "Freeing the Media" Gathering (Kerry Appel, 1997) is a video message which Commandante Marcos, leader of the Zapatista movement in Mexico, sent to the Media and Democracy Congress in the United States. The Commandante, masked as usual, argues eloquently that the best tool to fight the hegemony of a mass media and the forces of neoliberalism and colonialism is an independent media.
The two films from the program on March 27 continued the theme of community organization, but they also included the element of re-enactment for dramatic purposes. In Tchuma-Tchato (Licinio Azevedo, 1997), a Mozambique park ranger tries to help people develop sustainable agricultural practices so they will not have to poach wildlife to survive. Interspersed throughout the documentary footage of his conservation activities are surreal nighttime scenes depicting people who speak poetically and act out the spirits of the animals. When Women Unite: The Story of an Uprising (Shabnam Virmani, 1996) uses both historical footage and recreations to depict a women's uprising in India against the corrupting influence of arrack liquor on their husbands. The dramatic re-enactments, by turns serious and humorous, in addition to documentary footage, interviews, and shots of newspaper headlines, emphasize both the movement's political achievements and its positive effects on the personal lives of the women.
The three films in the April 3rd program dealt with women's experiences in birth, love, and revolution. In We Know These Things: Birth in a Newar Village (Barbara Johnson, 1980-96) a woman in Nepal gives birth as her female relatives and a midwife attend to her needs and tell stories about other births. The film simply and gracefully shows the process as it unfolds, and voice-over narration provides a useful explanation of the rituals designed to appease the spirits so that the birth will go well. A Time To Woo (Patti Langton, 1994) shows the journey of two Berber women in Morocco to the bride fair in search of a husband. The younger one is going for the first time, whereas the older one has had bad luck for several years and may be going to the fair for the last time. The Other Half of Allah's Heaven (Djamila Sahraoui, 1995) documents the position of women in Algeria during the war for independence and its aftermath. Interviews with women who fought in the revolution and those who criticize modern gender inequalities reveal how the position of women deteriorated in the years following the war. During the war, women and men shared "the same grief and dreams of liberty for everyone," but after the war, emerging Islamist movements diminished women's liberty and professional opportunities.
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1998-99 Lectures and Other Events:
Topics in History
"The American Indian Movement since 1968" by Dennis Banks (American Indian Movement), organized by Lisa Slappey (graduate student, English) and Brian Huberman (art and art history)
Banks began by smoking the room with sage and offering a prayer to the four directions, and then described the socio-political milieu of 1968, when, prompted by police brutality and other forms of institutional racism in Minneapolis, he helped found the American Indian Movement (AIM). Banks explained how his personal experiences in Indian boarding school, the military, and prison contributed to his political activism. AIM is the largest and most active indigenous rights organization in the United States engaged in protecting the legal rights and promoting the traditional cultures of native peoples. AIM's organization of such events as the Trail of Broken Treaties and the occupation of Wounded Knee brought national attention to the plight of Native Americans. It has also brought FBI persecution of AIM leaders, including Leonard Peltier, who has been imprisoned since 1976. Until recently, Banks served as the head of the "Bring Peltier Home" Campaign for executive clemency. Banks ended his speech by imploring the audience to see America to learn about the land, its people, and their cultures. More than 150 people from both Rice and the local Native American community attended this event at the Media Center. Following the lecture, Banks greeted audience members and answered questions for over an hour. The event was jointly sponsored by a number of offices and departments in addition to the CSC: President Malcolm Gillis, linguistics, art and art history, Will Rice College, and Multicultural Affairs.
"The Limits of Liberalism in the Post-Emancipation South: Race, Sex, Schools, and Citizenship" by Jane Dailey (history; and CSC Fellow, 1996-97)
Dailey, currently writing a book on biracial political cooperation in post-Civil War Virginia, drew on insights gleaned from feminist critiques of liberalism and the separate spheres ideology to address the most basic political question facing white southerners after emancipation: how to incorporate African American men into the polity without excessively eroding the privileges of whiteness. From the moment of emancipation, white Americans conflated the sexual and political power of African American men, insisting that black suffrage would lead to sexual liaisons between white women and black men. Dailey outlined how the Readjuster Party of Virginia, the most successful biracial political alliance of the New South, used liberal political theory to circumvent, for a time, the equation of black sexual and political right. Soon, however, African American Readjusters and white Democrats, arguing from opposite sides of the political spectrum but both informed by a liberalism that tied civil rights to manhood, began to resist that there was no way to limit black sexual power once black men possessed political rights. While the state's laws prohibiting interracial marriage were an important site for dispute over the relationship between masculine sexual and political rights, it was in the public schools, as in the 1950s, that the debate about the nature of black political and sexual rights reached its peak.
"Urbanism, Identity, and Law at the End of Classical Antiquity" by Michael Maas (history, and CSC Fellow, 1996-97)
Maas focused on the changing terms of inclusion within the polyethnic Roman imperial community in late antiquity, an epoch of transition tfrom the classical to the medieval worlds (ca. AD 250-750). This period witnessed the dissolution of the Roman empire in western Europe and the parallel emergence of Byzantium in the East. As Christianity came to dominate social and political expression and as the emperor took an ever more central position in the theocratic state, the sources of authority to represent
alien peoples altered. A vigorous new ethnography closely linked to the workings of the state and Christianity developed. How the state confronted its internal populations was of central importance in the shaping of this ethnography, and cities played a determining role in the formation of identities. In late antiquity, as legal notions of citizenship changed, so did the role of cities as markers of identity. The traditional roles of cities and citizenship that were the legacy of the classical city-state were displaced by new religious and governmental responsiblilties, producing and legitimizing a new set of relations between rulers and ruled. These connections were still mediated by the city but in new ways that set the stage for medieval formulations of urbanism, ethnicity, and identity.
"The Nation-State and the Critique of Modernity" by Gyan Prakash (history, Princeton), organized by Ussama Makdisi (history)
Jointly sponsored by the Center for the Study of Cultures and the Department of History, Prakash lectured on Nehru and Gandhi's philosophies and criticisms of British colonial modernity. Taking issue with Benedict Anderson's thesis in Imagined Communities &emdash; that third world nationalism is essentially modular and an extension of European nationalism &emdash; Prakash outlined the specificites of Indian decolonization. He suggested that Gandhi's spiritualism and Nehru's commitment to scientific modernism cannot be understood as borrowings from Europe. Rather, he stressed the indigenous roots of Indian nationalism and illustrated how Gandhi and Nehru reworked traditional Indian philosophical categories to delegitimize British colonialism.
"The Tragedy of Palestine" by Edward Said (comparative literature, Columbia), organized by Ussama Makdisi (history)Said's appearance in the President's Lecture Series was jointly sponsored by the Arab-American Education Foundation, the Department of History, and the Center for the Study of Cultures. Paula Sanders (history, Rice) introduced Said to an audience of more than a thousand people who packed the Grand Hall. Recounting the history of Zionism and its claims to historic Palestine, Said argued that Zionist leaders, from the outset of the movement in the late nineteenth century, were well aware that Jewish national aspirations were at odds with the wishes of the native Palestinian Arab inhabitants. Said stressed that the conflict was not simply one between two nationalist movements, but between colonizers and colonized. He insisted that while India and most other colonial situations have been resolved, the question of Palestine &emdash; and of the Palestinian people's right to self-determination &emdash; have yet to be adequately dealt with. Said compared India's experience with decolonization in 1947 with the Palestinians' experience with Zionist colonization which produced the state of Israel in 1948. He insisted that Israel's creation was marked and mirrored by the destruction and dispersion of the Palestinian community. He repeatedly noted the irony of the Jewish experience of suffering in Western history and the Palestinian suffering at the hands of Israel. Said also criticized the Arab states and the Palestinian Authority. He pointed out that the Oslo accords were doomed from the outset because they did not recognize the national rights of the Palestinian people and because they ignored the existence of millions of Palestinians in exile. In the question and answer period Said elaborated on his vision for the future. He stressed that neither Palestinians nor Israelis had a military option against one another. He drew on his own personal experience to argue that only through engaging with progressive elements within Israeli society could true peace be achieved.
"Ethnographic Examples, Ethnographic Classics: Some Thoughts on the New Cultural Studies and an Old Queer Science" and "History, Pre-History, and the Making of 'Western Civ" by Dan Segal (anthropology and world studies, Pitzer College), organized by Carl Caldwell (history)
In two different contexts, Segal challenged the often unspoken norms of professions and provided the irritation that could lead to real change. Furthermore, in two different contexts, Segal described the difficult but necessary relationship between teaching and scholarship that is so often proclaimed but so seldom examined.
Opposing recent cultural-studies trends in anthropology, Segal, in his first lecture, defended a concept of the discipline deemed "conservative" by many for relying on traditional studies of "othered" cultures. He advocated a return to the teaching of the classics by arguing that, in fact, traditional studies often perform the critical function of defamiliarizing students' conceptions of their own culture. Cultural studies, in contrast, tends to replicate one's own cultural assumptions even as it seems to grant value to "otherness" within. In the discussion that followed, a number of issues were raised concerning the normative and political function of different anthropological approaches and the value of returning to the ethnographic classics at all in an age of globalization.
Segal's second talk combined an intellectual history of the formation of "Western Civ" as a course of study with a critique of the social-evolutionary assumptions of the standard course. Segal argued that the founding assumption of the "Western Civ" model, which was developed during the period between the two world wars, posited a general path of human development from the prehistorical "savage" to the historical western man. This assumption permitted historians of the West to write certain groups out of "history" while constructing a narrative of the march of progress that culminated in the "West." While "Western Civ" was formulated as a political project to respond to the perceived threat from fascism and communism in the late 1930s, Segal noted, it gradually became a fixed model for teaching students about the world. Decolonization and criticism of Eurocentrism and male-centered history since the 1960s, he argued, has not fundamentally changed the model of the course: the only change has been the insertion of a new chapter on India, for example, or the mention of a few women. Inclusion has not resulted in rethinking of the project itself. The lecture concluded with a brief discussion of contemporary textbooks on Western Civ and World History, in which Segal showed how social-evolutionary assumptions persist. For example, a recent book by authors reputed to be "critical" voices of the profession includes a modern photo of a woman in Africa to represent the "prehistorical" peoples of the world. Such textbooks reach thousands of undergraduates each year, Segal observed, making the potential impact of the social-evolutionary assumptions (and, implicitly, their racist undertones) enormous.
The discussion that followed the lecture revolved around issues of how to connect scholarship and teaching. The production of Western Civ and World Civ textbooks is big business, involving investments of millions of dollars and an ossified conception of how the course should be taught. Furthermore, there is little incentive for professors of history to revise their approaches to such textbooks, since their departments give little or no recognition to any scholarly value in such projects, and since the "correct" production of Western Civ texts is the prerequisite for receiving payments from the firms that produce them. Several historians in the audience reacted with comments that nothing could be done; others sought to reconstruct a social-evolutionary perspective of history that would be more inclusive.
"Philipp Melanhthon Melanchton: Wittenbeg Reformer with Luther" by Gunther Wartenberg (Profecktor für Lehre und Studium, Universität Leipzig)
A three-day symposium celebrating the 500th anniversary of the birth of Philipp Melanchton, a leading figure of the Reformation, was jointly sponsored by the CSC, the departments of history and of religious studies, the Goethe Institute, University of Houston-Clear Lake, and the University of St. Thomas. Carol Quillen (history, Rice) welcomed participants to Rice, and Gunther Wartenberg (Prorektor für Lehre und Studium, Universität Leipzig) gave the opening lecture, named the Manschreck lecture in honor of Clyde Manschreck of Rice, who was one of the great Melanchthon scholars. The title of Wartenberg's talk was "Philipp Melanhthon Melanchton: Wittenberg Reformer with Luther," and his address attracted an audience of 90-100. Wartenberg succeeded in placing Melanchton squarely at the heart of the Reformation, where as a systematic theologian he was perhaps the superior of Luther. This talk set the context for the lectures that followed for two days, concluding with a panel discussion by several visiting lecturers: Stefan Rhein (Curator, Melanchthonhaus, Bretten, Germany), Eric W.Gritsch (Lutheran Theological Seminary, Gettysburg), Ralph Keen (Iowa), Michael B.Aune (Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary), and Jonathan Zophy (UH-Clear Lake). Attendance ranged from 60 to125, and included faculty and students from Rice, neighboring academic institutions and churches, and laypersons.
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Transnational China Projects Dinner
The Center for the Study of Cultures and the Transnational China Project at the Baker Institute cosponsored an informal dinner on November 14 as part of the ongoing Connecting Cultures initiative at Rice. The dinner was an opportunity for Rice faculty to discover more about each other's cultural research interests and also to meet and welcome scholars visiting the CSC and the Baker Institute.
This event coincided with the Transnational China Project's workshop on transcultural studies and website development. Visiting participants included Yvonne Chang (UT-Austin), Cho-Yun Hsu (University of Pittsburgh and the Chiang Ching-Kuo Fondation), Leo Lee (Harvard), Ping-Hui Liao (National Tsinghua University, Taiwan), Lydia Liu (UC-Berkeley), Shu-Mei Shih (UCLA), James Thomas (Harvard) and Jing Wang (Duke). These scholars are working with Rice faculty Richard Smith (history, Rice), Benjamin Lee (anthropology, Rice), and Steven Lewis (political science, Rice) to develop international, cooperative websites for research on cultural changes in China.ct Dinner
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