Time: Every other Wednesday, 12 pm
Place: East-West Center, Burns 2118
Dates:
January 23rd: Jon Goldberg-Hiller,
Political Science
UH Manoa
The Limits to Union: Same-Sex Marriage and the Culture of
Civil Rights
Abstract
From the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education that held
racially separate schools to be inherently unequal, to the 1999
decision by Vermont that civil unions provided a separate and
equal institution to marriage for same-sex couples, the cultural
understandings of civil rights have marked a curious odyssey. In
this talk I present some aspects of the struggles over same-sex
marriage in Hawai‘i during the 1990s in order to draw out
and explain the dynamic cultural meanings of civil rights and the
politics that surrounds them. My explanation of this dynamism
draws on culturally flexible notions of social and political
space as well as political sovereignty, ideas that can be traced
in public language, political advertisements, and legal
argumentation.
February 13th: Vilsoni Hereniko,
Pacific Island Studies
UH Manoa
Talk Story: Fact, Fiction, and Faction
Abstract
“Talk Story” is about the creative act of storytelling
and the re-presentation of real-life experience in writing, as
well as on stage and film. Using examples from my own work as a
playwright, director, and filmmaker, I will discuss the act of
re-presentation that challenges any claims of a separation
between autobiography (factual), drama (fictional), documentary
(factual), and feature film (fictional). If we are to experience
authentic emotion in a re-presentation, facts have to be
re-ordered, altered, even distorted, resulting in cultural
productions that are never pure fact or fiction, but always a
fusion of both. How then should these works be critiqued or
evaluated?
* February 19th: Stanley Aronowitz,
Education,
City University of New York
Higher Education Under Siege
* Special evening presentation
Tuesday, February 19, 2002, 7:30 p.m.
Campus Center Ballroom
March 6th: John Rieder, English,
UH Manoa
Science Fiction and Colonialism
Abstract
The emergence of science fiction as a distinct literary genre has
usually been linked to industrialism and the increased importance
of science in modern society. This talk will explore the
hypothesis that exploration, colonization, and imperial
domination of the non-Western world by Europe and America is even
more crucial to the development of the genre. The presentation
will focus on the plot of invasion from H. G. Wells to Octavia
Butler.
March 20th: Diana Eades, Second
Language Studies,
UH Manoa
Taken for a ride: understanding misunderstanding in the legal
system
Abstract
This paper focuses on the role of the misunderstanding of
Aboriginal English ways of speaking in the disadvantage and
discrimination suffered by Australian indigenous people in the
legal system. Earlier studies on this theme, using an
interactional sociolinguistics approach, have focused on the
importance of differences in ways of speaking, and the need to
promote awareness of these differences among legal professionals.
This paper takes a more critical position, looking at the ways in
which an understanding of these differences can be used to
facilitate the misunderstanding of Aboriginal witnesses,
in the pursuit of winning adversarial strategies. In examining
the cross-examination of three Aboriginal young people in the
Pinkenba case, this paper analyses the 'power in the discourse'
in terms of the 'power behind the discourse' in Fairclough's
[1989] terms. The analysis exposes details of how language is
used in the courtroom as a successful weapon in a major
situational, institutional and societal power struggle between
the state and Aboriginal Australians.
April 3rd: S.
Charusheela, Women’s Studies
UH Manoa
Marxism, Feminism and Modernism: The Question of Class and
Culture
Abstract
What is the relationship between class and culture
in shaping women’s oppression in the non-West? Most analysts
using a Marxist perspective answer this by focusing on
women’s location within a nexus of global capital. Their
analyses thus proceed by taking the logic of capitalist
accumulation as their starting point. Based on this,
Marxist-feminists have spent much time adapting and
re-constituting classical Marxism’s analysis of capitalism
from a feminist lens to provide their answer to this question.
However, as many postcolonial critics have noted, though these
efforts to reconstitute Marx’s analyses of capitalist
exploitation from a feminist lens are useful, they are unable to
provide an adequate analysis of non-Western women’s
subordination under the contemporary global economic
re-organization of production and distribution, especially in
terms of how they treat ‘culture’ or
‘tradition.’ Unfortunately, the response to this has
often been to bypass class as an economic category by replacing
it with a (Western) notion of class as a cultural identity. Here,
I examine some of the tangled inheritances of modernism that
plague efforts to reconstitute Marxist feminist analyses of
women’s exploitation by bringing together the insights of
both Marxist and postcolonial/cultural studies traditions. By
tracing four key embedded assumptions (transition, structural
reproduction, subjectivity, and the nature of marginality) about
the nature of economy in such analyses, the paper discusses how
we can provide the initial basis for a postcolonial revisioning
of Marxist-feminist analyses of the relationship between culture
and economy.
April 17th: Judith Raiskin, Women's
Studies University of Oregon
Telling Tales Out of School: Literary Resistances to
Colonial Education
Abstract
Colonial education systems have had a profound effect on
colonized people the world over. This talk will address the
resistance of novelists from the Caribbean and the Pacific
Islands to the Euro-American epistemologies taught them and the
colonial education systems that have violently erased indigenous
knowledge. Contemporary women writers in particular have
criticized the racism and sexism embedded in colonial education
systems and have written in both comic and tragic terms about
creating new systems that challenge colonial and indigenous
systems of knowledge that restrict their full participation as
cultural critics, intellectuals, and leaders. Authors such as
Michelle Cliff, Jamaica Kincaid, Dionne Brand, Sia Figiel,
Patricia Grace, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka describe alternative places
of learning that prepare girls and women to ask and answer the
questions that have been left out of classrooms that were
designed to create colonial subjects, not citizens or leaders.
May 1st: Steve Derne, Sociology,
SUNY-Geneseo
Cultural Globalization and the Reconstitution of Local Gender
Arrangements in India and Fiji
Abstract
This paper explores how globalization shapes the construction of
masculinity among nationalist Indian men, filmgoing men in India
and disasporic Indian men in Fiji. These men are often attracted
to transnational media depictions of male violence as a basis of
male identity. But transnational media celebrations of
cosmopolitan lifestyles also give rise to anxieties about
national identity. Men often handle these anxieties by rooting
their own national identity in women's acceptance of food habits,
clothing, and gender subordination that men regard as
traditional.