Provost Lecture Series 1999: Citizenship Diaspora

Diaspora: dispersal from homeland

The form and meaning of citizenship have been transformed by global markets and [diasporic flows] of skilled and unskilled workers crossing borders. Although citizenship is conventially thought of as membership based on... political rights and participation within a sovereign state, globalization has made economic calculation a major element in the choice of citizenship for diasporic [persons and communities] as well as in the ways nation-states redefine immigration laws.

-Aihwa Ong, Cosmopolitics (1998)

Citizenship is a process of attaining equality of membership on civil, political, and social fronts.

This can be done individually, but it is collective action that shapes citizenship... Citizenship is not static since citizens' rights and practices are constantly being redefined and contested between dominant and subordinate social and economic groups... To protect or improve its position, a social group needs to be active on all citizenship fronts.

-Bryan R. Roberts, "Immigration, The Contradictions of Citizenship and Transnationalism" (1997)

Diaspora, Chinese Cosmopolitanism, and Postcolonial National Memory

Wednesday, February 24, 1999 at 3:30pm, Alumni Room, Union

Rescuing "cosmopolitanism" itself from its connotations of leisured individuals loyal to no one and willing to sample all cultures at will, Cosmopolitics presents a compelling new way to think about the ethical obligations of intellectuals at a time when their place in teh new world order is profoundly uncertain. Cosmopolitics takes up the question of international human rights. Its conception of internationalism reflects not only global human rights policy but an understanding of transnational cultures. Thus practical policymaking and cultural politics work together.

-Adapted from a review of Cosmopolitics

As a transcultural critic, Pheng Cheah turns a critical lens toward structures of power and the peoples these structures effect. His talk explores such questions as: How do we assess the ethical complexities raised by the recent violence directed against the overseas Chinese communities scattered throughout the globe? How have the diasporic Chinese come to personify exploitative capital, and how has this resulted from both historical and contemporary globalizations and the policies of colonial and postcolonial regimes? What are the more positive representations of Chinese cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asian postcolonial national memory and how are they exemplified by narrative fiction?

Pheng Cheah is Associate Professor at Northwestern University where he teaches critical theory, postcolonial literature, and transnational cultural politics. His edited books include the highly influential Cosmopolitics - Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minnesota 1998) and Thinking Through the Body of the Law (NYU 1996). He has contributed many articles to Social Text, Diacritics, and Public Culture. He holds both a Ph.D. and a J.D., and his work in human rights has grown out of his interest in legal theory.

Regenerating Cultural Presence: Tuning In Through Performance

Thursday, March 18, 1999 at 7:30pm, Grand Ballroom, Union

A lecture-workshop that explores performance as a process or tool that can penetrate silences, access language, and give us the courage to face new ideas.

Dialogue is an act. Being willing to take emotional risks and have dialogue about differences is an essential element of the way my [community based] performances are created. This makes it possible to create a process for working where people feel safe to express their opinions. The process is never easy or perfect; it's actually rather messy.

-Robbie McCauley

Robbie McCauley is an internationally acclaimed performance artist. Her performance career began in the avant-garde theatre of New York in the 60s and 70s where she performed at the Public Theatre and at Cafe La Mama, as well as with the celebrated Negro Ensemble Company. Her performance in ntozake shange's ground-breaking theatre work, "for colored girls who have considered suicide," prompted McCauley to create her own works. McCauley's performances frequently incorporate narratives from her own family history, as is true for "Indian Blood," "My Father and the Wars," and "Sally's Rape," the 1992 OBIE Award winner for Best New American Play.

Since the early 1990s, McCauley also has worked at creating site-specific theatre pieces that require community collaboration. McCauley shapes and directs the performance work of local theatre communities. These pieces include the 1990 "Buffalo Project" (about the 1967 Buffalo, NY riots), the 1992 "Mississippi Project" (about the voting rights struggle), the 1993 "Turf: A Conversational Concert in Black and White" (about Boston's school busing crisis of the 1970s), and a piece about the Black Panthers done in Los Angeles. This way of making theatre has recently led to McCauley's 1995 collaboration with five Czech Romanies ("gypsies") on the "Stories Exchange Project" (about Romany experience during the Holocaust). Most recently she created a piece in Ireland.

Robbie McCauley is currently a Visiting Theatre Artist at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA.

Citizenship and Sentimentality: The Politics of True Feeling

Thursday, April 8, 1999 at 2:30pm, Town Room, Union

In the process of collapsing the political and the personal into a world of public intimacy, a nation made for adult citizens has been replaced by one imagined for fetuses and children.

-Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997)

Professor Berlant's talk articulates new work that grows out of her 1997 book, The Queen of America, where she showed how public representations of citizenship led to an idealization of the child as the potentially perfect citizen whom parents must nurture and protect. Her current work explores how a "sentimental contract" and a discourse of "injured feelings" have emerged, replacing political discussions of justice and equality with definitions of citizenship as a set of certain attitudes towards the family and children. She illuminates how national culture is being produced as a state of feeling, a capacity for suffering and trauma at the citizen's core, rather than as a relation of resources or entitlement.

A Professor of English and the Humanities at the University of Chicago, Lauren Berlant teaches and writes about cultural studies, sexuality theory (feminist and queer), the Novel, popular and mass culture, U.S. Minority Literatures (African-American, women's, immigrant's, etc.), and nation-formation. Her two books - The Anatomy of National Fantasy (1991) and The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997) - have garnered much critical acclaim. She has written many articles for such journals as Social Text and Feminist Studies, and is the co-editor of Critical Inquiry and of Pubic Culture.