Provost Lecture Series 2004: American Landscapes: Power, Spectacle and the Public Sphere

Eric Lott

The First Boomer: Bill Clinton, George W., and Fictions of State

Thursday, February 5, 2004 at 6:00pm, Room 201, BTSU. Reception to follow.

How are contemporary fictions of state anchored in presidential persona?

Professor Lott focuses on political representations of the presidency in Joe Klein's Primary Colors (1996), Joe Eszterhas's American Rhapsody (2000), and Mark Crispin Miller's The Bush Dyslexicon (2001). He explores relationships amongst babyboom-generation liberal intellectuals, Clintonian neoliberalism, and questions of race, identity, and cultural politics.

Eric Lott is Professor at the University of Virginia, specializing in cultural theory, race, politics, and American studies. He is the author of Love and Theft: Blackface Mistrelsy and the American Working Class (1995), winner of the Avery Craven Book Prize, the Myers Center for Human Rights Book Award, and the MLA Best First Book Prize. His forthcoming books include Darkness USA: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism, and Boomer Liberalism: Intellectuals in the Age of Clinton.

Shannon Jackson

Racial Performativity and Anti-Racist Performance

Tuesday, February 24, 2004 at 7:15pm, Room 202B, BTSU. Reception to follow.

How can performance help create an anti-racist public sphere?

Professor Jackson explores the dynamics of cross racial misunderstanding through the work of performance artist/philosopher Adrian Piper and playwright/performer Ann Deavere Smith. How, she asks, can performative models show us a way to make defensiveness, projections, or misfires contribute to understanding anti-racist exchange?

Shannon Jackson is Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley where she teaches performance studies, American studies, sex/gender studies, and rhetoric. Her books include Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, and Hull House Domesticity (2000), and Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity (2004).

Professing Performance in the Research University

Thursday, February 26, 2004 at 11:00am, Room 207, BTSU.

How can the history of Performance in the academy help defamiliarize how we understand employment in the arts and humanities more generally?

Judith Halberstam

Dude, Where's My Gender?

Monday, March 1, 2004 at 7:00pm, Room 228, BTSU.

How has "stupidity" become an integral part of the political landscape?

Professor Halberstam takes as her point of departure the adventures of Jesse and Chester in the film "Dude, Where's My Car?" (2000). She investigates a comforting logic of stupidity that locates white male buddies at the center of an anything goes (as long as everything stays the same) kind of world. How does this work and what does it mask?

Judith Halberstam is Professor at the University of California, San Diego, where she teaches media studies, film, queer theory, feminist and gender studies, and postmodernism. Her books include Female Masculinity (1998), Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Men, Women and Masculinity (2001) and the forthcoming In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives.

Tuesday, March 2, 2004 at 7:00pm at the Gish Theatre, Hanna Hall. Reception to follow.

Film viewing and discussion of Judith Halberstam's short film "Long Live the Kings!," shot by Pratibha Parmar, and "TransAmazon" by Joelle Ryan. Informal reception to follow at the Women's Center, 107 Hanna Hall.

Phil Auslander

"I Wanna Be Your Man": Suzie Quatro's Musical Androgyny

Thursday, April 8, 2004 at 7:00pm, Room 206, BTSU. Reception to follow, Room 207, BTSU.

How does rock performance illuminate gender and sexuality in a mediatizd culture?

Professor Auslander explores the physical performance, vocal presence, and musical repertoire of artist Suzie Quatro. Auslander's talk focuses on how the role of a female cock-rocker is a paradoxical one that celebrates fluidity and destabilizes the very gender codings from which it is constructed.

Philip Auslander is Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology and teaches cultural studies, media studies, and performance studies. His books include Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance (1992), Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (1999, winner of the Callaway Prize), From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism (1997), and the forthcoming All the Young Dudes: Performing Glam Rock.

Virtual Conference: March 2004

Cultures of Technology, an ICS research cluster led by Prof. Radhika Gajjala, announces its first annual Virtual Conference. An innovative integration of activities on-line and on-campus, the conference combines virtual position papers with live guests to explore technology and culture, pedagogy, and performance. Keynoters include Marcy Rose Chvasta (U. of S. Florida) on "Screening Bodies: Performance and Technology," Jillana Enteen (Northwestern) on "Queering Digital Space," and Craig Saper (U. of C. Florida), on "Epistemologies of Doing: From Media Studies to Media Making."

For information and updates on the virtual conference, live visits, papers, and streaming videos, check the Cultures of Technology Cluster website: http://www.bgsu.edu/offices/ics/techcluster/ or e-mail Dr. Gajjala at radhik@bgnet.bgsu.edu.

Special thanks go to

The Office of the Provost, the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, the ICS Research clusters "Cultures of Technology" and "ReReading Gender" (both supported by the Graduate College), the Theatre and Film Studies Department, the American Culture Studies Program, Multicultural and Academic Initiatives, and Vision.

All Events are free and open to the public. For more information, please contact the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society.