Events

Social Text Fall Books

2011-12-02T05:03:55Z

The Collective is proud to announce the following recent publications by Social Text authors:

Fernandes, Sujatha. Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation. New York: Verso, 2011.

Check out our ongoing Close to the Edge Periscope dossier!

Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

Book launch party: December 13th, 5:30-7:00 PM, 20 Cooper Square (NYC), 5th Floor.

Nelson, Alondra. Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Book launch party: December 8th, 7:00 PM, Bluestockings Bookstore (172 Allen Street, NYC).

Reparations and the Human

2011-09-22T20:12:47Z

A Lecture by David L. Eng

September 28, Wednesday 6:30 to 8 pm

This presentation explores the relationship between political and psychic genealogies of reparation. Reparation is a key term in political theory, but it is also a central concept in psychoanalysis (specifically object relations theory), yet the two are rarely discussed in relation to one another. In this talk, I will explore how political and psychic genealogies of reparation might supplement one another in theories of the human and discourses of human rights, while helping us to understand better the social and psychic limits of repairing war, violence, colonialism, and genocide. Specifically, I will trace a global genealogy of reparations from John Locke to Melanie Klein to twentieth-century Asia in order to rethink the concept's transnational significance and the possibility of "racial reparation" in context of the trans-Pacific: the internment of Japanese Americans by the U.S. government during World War II; the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ending that war; and contemporary legal claims by "comfort women," young girls and women from Japan's colonial empire conscripted by the imperial army into sexual slavery.

Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality

 41-51 East 11th Street, 7th Floor Gallery 

between University Place and Broadway

This event is free and open to the public. If you need wheelchair access, please let us know 24 hours in advance: 212-992-9540.

For more information about this event, please call CSGS at 212-992-9540.

Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute, and the Department of East Asian Studies.

David L. Eng, English, Comparative Literature, and Asian American Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Saher Shah: Object Anxiety

2011-09-20T13:31:14Z

Saher Shah, whose art is on the cover of Social Text #108, is having a solo exhibition at Scaramouche gallery in New York between now and October 30, 2011. From the gallery:

Featuring a collection of drawings, prints, photographs, and sculptural works, "Object Anxiety" continues the artist's exploration of architectural modernism, specifically, new Brutalism's engineered social spaces and urban environments.

Click here for more information.

Eric Stanley interview on KPFA radio

2011-07-18T15:36:16Z

Noon Pacific Time, Monday, July 18, 2011

[Editor's note: the interview has taken place and you can listen to the archived MP3 in the player below.]

KPFA radio

Stanley's article "Near Life, Queer Death: Overkill and Ontological Capture"

Please tune in to KPFA radio for an interview with Eric Stanley about his article "Near Life, Queer Death: Overkill and Ontological Capture" from Social Text 107, our current issue. His article is a fascinating interrogation of how queer ontology and violence against queers can be seen as a constitutive part of liberal democracy. He offers the concept overkill to denote the type of violence against queers which goes beyond death.

KPFA radio is a listener-funded progressive talk and music radio station broadcast from Berkeley, California. Stanley will appear on Against the Grain, a program dedicated to in-depth analysis and commentary on issues important to progressive and radical thinking. The program is co-hosted and co-produced by Sasha Lilley and C.S. Soong.

Eric Stanley is a PhD candidate in the History of Consciousness department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is also the editor of Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press, 2011) and the codirector, with Chris Vargas, of the films Homotopia (2006) and Criminal Queers (2011). Critical Resistance and Gay Shame are among the activist collectives with which Eric works.

The above image is explained toward the end of Stanley's article:

"At 12:48 pm on the afternoon of January 8th, 1999, the body of Lauryn Paige was found in this ravine near the entrance of the Tokyo Electron Corporation in Austin, Texas. Barely covered by weeds and roadside trash, her body was laid to unrest in the stagnancy of wastewater and debris. In plain view and hidden from sight, my identification with this photograph binds me like an open-secret with deadly consequences. Thrown in a shallow grave, not worth the cover of earth, the history of Lauryn Paige's unimaginable end captured here indexes the limits of a queer present. A portrait of a near life, out of time, this sarcophagal photograph terrorizes me through its everywhereness. Beyond the pageantry of meaning, this image pictures the untraceability of anti-queer violence. Both everywhere and nowhere, a series of trash bags, a burning blanket, a concrete ditch, perhaps this is the space of queer death.

This ditch ought not be our end. Yet I stay in the place of violence, in the muddy abjection of a drainage ditch, precisely because it commands other worlds. If near life is the kind of "unavoidable model of subjection," then how might we subject to a radical breakdown? If we start here with an understanding that escape is not possible and that against the dreams of liberal democracy there may be no outside to violence, how might we also articulate a kind of near life that feels in the hollow space of ontological capture that life might still be lived, otherwise?"

Launch Party for Social Text 106: "Interspecies"

2011-04-28T14:25:02Z

5:00pm, Friday, April 29, 2011
Performance Studies Studio, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU
721 Broadway, Room 612
New York, NY

Please join us to toast the publication of a special issue of Social Text on Interspecies, edited by Julie Livingston and Jasbir K. Puar!

Industries of production and scientific research rely on the use of nonhuman animals and plants, remaking environments, populations, and even genetic information to suit human designs. This issue of Social Text considers the radical implications of questioning the exceptional status of humans among the planet's species. Responding to growing interest in animal studies and posthumanism, the contributors draw on racial, feminist, queer, postcolonial, and disability theories to probe the diversity of human relationships with other forms of biosocial life. Interspecies queries the politics of traditional species taxonomy and examines the ways humans use the material characteristics of other species to pursue their economic, political, and social aims.

This collection goes beyond companionate species to examine less charismatic life forms: viruses, vermin, transgenic pigs, and commodified plants. Bringing together prominent scholars and artists from a range of fields, the issue examines the histories of species collection and display. In the context of current public health challenges, including the swine flu epidemic and the scarcity of donor organs, the contributors explore the limits of transgressing species boundaries that arise when human bodies contain other species, such as viruses or transplanted organs from genetically customized pigs. Interspecies analyzes the use of nonhuman species in the biopolitics of warfare and torture and examines how interspecies relationships shape conditions of colonialism, imprisonment, and violence. The issue also complicates romanticized narratives of human/nonhuman animal dynamics without resorting to oversimplified portrayals of human exploitation of animal and plant life.

Contributors:

Neel Ahuja
Suzanne Anker
Ed Cohen
James Delbourgo
Sarah Franklin
Carla Freccero
Alphonso Lingis
Julie Livingston
Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga
Jasbir Puar
Kingsley Rothwell
Lesley Sharp

Anna McCarthy in conversation with Alexander Provan

2011-04-05T21:21:01Z

The Digital Humanities Working Research Group at NYU invites you to attend:

Scholarly Communications and the Digital Humanities:

A Panel Discussion with Alexander Provan (Triple Canopy) and Dan Cohen, moderated by Anna McCarthy (co-editor, Social Text)

Thursday, April 7th, 2011

6 pm

Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics

20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor Conference Room

Free and open to the public. No RSVP necessary. Photo ID required.

The panel will discuss issues of readership, collaboration and format in the digital environment as they relate to the work of humanists from a broad range of disciplines and perspectives.

Alexander Provan, Editor of Triple Canopy, an online journal and workspace, Contributing Editor of Bidoun, an online magazine of art and culture from the Middle East.

Dan Cohen, Associate Professor of History and Art History, George Mason University, and author of Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web.

Anna McCarthy, Associate Professor of Cinema Studies, NYU Tisch, co-editor of the journal Social Text, and author of Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space, and The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America.

Don't Take the Bait: The Left and Crisis - A Social Text Roundtable

2011-03-17T17:12:10Z

This year's Left Forum, which starts March 18 and runs through March 20 at Pace University, includes a Social Text-sponsored panel:

Don't Take the Bait: The Left and Crisis - A Social Text Roundtable
Saturday, March 19, 5:00 PM to 6:50 PM
Michael Ralph
Micki McGee
Neferti Tadiar
Randy Martin

Panel abstract:
The recent financial crisis would seem to present precisely the opportunity that the left has been waiting for: a moment of reckoning when failure is undeniable and injustice unconcealed. Yet crisis has not proven to be so ready or willing an object to think with. Financiers continue to take crisis as their opportunity, while misery continues to be spread around. How the left might see itself if crisis is taken as its mirror? If economic indicators are proclaimed to have returned to normalcy, does that send the left back to its cave to hibernate until the next calamity strikes? Alternately, how does the left recognize its own critical agency and efficacy if it comes to understand itself through an account that may prove altogether hostile. What traps ensue from a left taking its own opportunity from the conditions of crisis. What would it mean to not take the bait, to find other means of valuing and evaluating the grounds and effects of left politics, occasions and opportunities?

New Middle Eastern Uprisings: Gender, Class and Security Politics in Egypt and Iran

2011-02-09T15:53:04Z

Tuesday, Feb. 22, 12:30 to 2:00pm
Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU
20 Cooper Square, 4th floor

The recent uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt are electrifying the Middle East and the world. At this lunch time panel, Paul Amar will lay out the forces behind the popular democracy movement in Egypt, and Manijeh Nasrabadi will offer some comparisons to the Green Revolution in Iran. Both will address the wider context of popular revolt in the Middle East. Come, bring your lunch, and engage in discussion about these momentous events.

Paul Amar is Associate Professor of Global and International Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is author of The Security Archipelago: 'Human Security States,' Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism (forthcoming from Duke University Press), and the co-editor of Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture and Urban Space in the New, Globalized Middle East (American University in Cairo Press, 2006). He is also the author of widely circulated articles on the current uprising in Egypt, published in Jadaliyya.com and Al Jazeera English. He has recently appeared on Pacifica radio and Democracy Now to explain the political, economic and social forces at work now.
Manijeh Nasrabadi is a writer, activist and PhD student in American Studies at NYU. Her work focuses on Iranian American cultural production, trans-national solidarity, feminism and internationalism. She is co-director of the Association of Iranian American Writers and a member of the NYC-based Raha Iranian Feminist Collective. Her essays and articles have appeared in About Face (Seal Press), Hyphen Magazine, Tehran Bureau, and Callaloo and are forthcoming in Love and Pomegranates (University of Utah Press) and the journal Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, the American Studies Program, the Asian / Pacific / American Institute and the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at NYU, as well as by the journal Social Text.

Brent Edwards on NYC Jazz in the 1970s

2011-01-30T23:56:07Z

Columbia University professor and Social Text member Brent Edwards to speak on Jazz in NYC during the 1970s

In jazz history, the 1970s have habitually been overlooked or dismissed as a period when the music went into severe decline. But in fact there was a remarkable ferment of activity in the decade, especially in New York -- much of it underground, in small clubs, musician-run "lofts," and independent theaters -- and jazz played a central role in the arts scene that developed in NoHo, SoHo, and the East Village. This lecture considers the social and musical space that developed around the Tin Palace, a nightclub that provided from its perch on the Bowery a crucial hub for cross-fertilization among the arts.

Date: Monday, January 31st from 6-8PM
Place: Columbia University, IRWAG Seminar Room 754 Schermerhorn Extension

Wrestling with the Image

2011-01-19T16:26:29Z

The Art Museum of the Americas (AMA) announces the opening of Wrestling with the Image: Caribbean Interventions, an exhibition of contemporary art from twelve Caribbean countries. Featuring work by artists from the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago, the exhibition is curated by artist and curator Christopher Cozier and art historian Tatiana Flores.

Wrestling with the Image: Caribbean Interventions presents works in a variety of media, including photography, video, painting, graphic arts, sculpture, and installation. The scope of the objects demonstrates how the region's contemporary artists are confronting stereotypes about the Caribbean without denying their own surroundings or rejecting the worlds in which they operate. Through investigations on history, tourism, globalization, popular culture, and gender, these artists urge us to reconsider our own expectations on how a Caribbean image should look.

Labor & Social Transformation at the Brecht Forum

2010-12-14T20:04:46Z

Strategic Visions Series: Labor & Social Transformation

Steve Brier, Bhairavi Desai, Ed Ott, Ai-jen Poo & Others TBA

We are facing multiple crises--financial, social, economic, ecological, cultural...--but progressive forces are very much on the defensive. How do we forge a new politics that puts labor rights and human needs first? Panelists could be asked to draw from their own thinking and experience.

Steve Brier, the co-director of the New Media Lab, currently serves as the Associate Provost for Instructional Technology and External Programs at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is a co-founder of the American Social History Project and co-authored and edited the Project's Who Built America? textbook.

Bhairavi Desai is the Executive Director and a co-founder of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance. She has been organizing in the taxi industry since 1996.

Ed Ott is Distinguished Lecturer in Labor Studies with expertise in labor and politics. He has nearly 40 years of experience in the labor movement, most recently as Executive Director of the New York City Central Labor Council, which represents 1.3 million trade unionists from over 400 affiliated organizations.

Ai-jen Poo is the Lead Organizer for Domestic Workers United, an organization of nannies, housekeepers and elderly caregivers in New York organizing for power, respect, fair labor standards and to help build a movement to end oppression for all. DWU helped to organize the first national meeting of domestic workers organizations at the US Social Forum in 2007, which resulted in the formation of the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

Sliding scale: $6/$10/$15

Free for Brecht Forum Subscribers

» Register Now!

Towards a Politics of Solidarity

2010-12-13T18:56:48Z

The call for proposals for next year's Left Forum is now out. Proposals are due by January 3rd, 2011. From the call: "This year's Left Forum will focus on the age-old theme of solidarity, the moral act of imagination underpinning working class victories everywhere, and it will undertake to examine new forms of far-reaching solidarity that are necessary and possible in a global world." The Forum will take place March 18-20, 2011, at Pace University in New York. Click here for more information.

Image: Gats by Funkandjazz.

Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy

2010-10-08T10:10:33Z

This event has been canceled and will be rescheduled for 2011.

The Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality
at New York University
presents

The Feeling of Kinship:
Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy
A lecture by David L. Eng

October 12, Tuesday
6:30 to 8 pm

This talk is drawn from David L. Eng's recent book The Feeling of Kinship. In that project, Eng investigates the emergence of "queer liberalism," the empowerment of certain gays and lesbians in the United States economically through an increasingly visible and mass-mediated queer consumer lifestyle, and politically through the legal protection of rights to privacy and intimacy. Eng argues that in our "colorblind" age the emergence of queer liberalism is a particular incarnation of liberal freedom and progress, one constituted by both the racialization of intimacy and the forgetting of race. Through a startling reading of Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark legal decision overturning Texas's antisodomy statute, Eng reveals how the ghosts of miscegenation haunt both Lawrence and the advent of queer liberalism.

Eng develops the concept of "queer diasporas" as a critical response to queer liberalism. A methodology drawing attention to new forms of family and kinship, accounts of subjects and subjectivities, and relations of affect and desire, the concept differs from the traditional notions of diaspora, theories of the nation-state, and principles of neoliberal capitalism upon which queer liberalism thrives. Eng analyzes films, documentaries, and literature by Asian and Asian American artists including Wong Kar-wai, Monique Truong, Deann Borshay Liem, and Rea Tajiri, as well as a psychoanalytic case history of a transnational adoptee from Korea. In so doing, he demonstrates how queer Asian migrant labor, transnational adoption from Asia, and the political and psychic legacies of Japanese internment underwrite narratives of racial forgetting and queer freedom in the present. A focus on queer diasporas also highlights the need for a poststructuralist account of family and kinship, one offering psychic alternatives to Oedipal paradigms.

41-51 East 11th Street, 7th Floor Gallery
between University Place and Broadway
(wheelchair access at 85-87 University Place, please call in advance for access)

David L. Eng is Professor in the Department of English, the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, and the Program in Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America and co-editor of Loss: The Politics of Mourning, Q&A: Queer in Asian America, and a special issue of Social Text, "What's Queer About Queer Studies Now?"

Organized by CSGS; co-sponsored by the NYU Asian/Pacific/American Institute and the Department of Performance Studies.

Affective Tendencies: Bodies, Pleasures, Sexualities

2010-10-02T18:41:31Z

ST Collective members David Eng and Jasbir Puar will be among the Keynote Speakers.

Conference to be held in the Women's and Gender Studies Department.

Rutgers University

162 Ryders Lane

New Brunswick, NJ 08901

Visit us at: www.womens-studies.rutgers.edu

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Lauren Berlant

George M. Pullman Professor

Department of English

University of Chicago

Leo Bersani

Professor Emeritus of French

University of California Berkeley

David Eng

Professor of English

University of Pennsylvania

Jasbir Puar

Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Geography

Rutgers University

PANELS:

Race, Nation, Affect and Sexuality

A New Kind of Queerness?

Desiring Geographies

Sex and Violence / The Joys of Sex

Body Technologies

From Bolivia to the Bronx and Beyond

2010-09-09T13:18:27Z

Join ST collective member Ashley Dawson on Saturday, September 18th for a forum on Climate Justice featuring Father Miguel D'Escoto, former President of the U.N. General Assembly, Bolivian Ambassador Pablo Solon, Tanya Fields of Mothers on the Move (Bronx), and Monique Harden of Advocates for Environmental Human Rights (New Orleans).

Location: The Brecht Forum (451 West Street, New York, NY)
Time: 7pm