Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre

Tuesday, February 1st, 2005 at 6:30pm, Room 228, BTSU. Reception to follow.

What is a Utopian Performative?

How can it enable us to reclaim the language of humanism, of commonality, and of hope for a collectively better future?

Drawing on the work of J.L. Austin and Victor Turner, this talk explores how live performance produces a place where people share experiences of meaning making and can imagine a better world. The affective and ideological "doings" we see and feel demonstrated in utopian performatives critically rehearse a civic engagement that articulates the positive rather than the insurmountable obstacles to human potential.

Jill Dolan holds the Zachary T. Scott Family Chair in Drama in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin . She is the author of Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance (2001), Presence and Desire: Gender, Sexuality, Performance (1994), and The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1991). Her next book, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre , is forthcoming from Michigan . She is past president of the Women and Theatre Program, and of ATHE, and former executive director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at CUNY.

Freedom of Expression®: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity

Tuesday, February 15 th , 2005, at 6:30 pm, Room 228, BTSU.
Reception to follow.

Who owns freedom of expression?

What has happened in recent years to intellectual property law has had repercussions on our culture and our everyday lives?

The trend toward privatization of everything -- melodies, genes, public space, English language - leads to an inevitable clash of economic values against the value of free speech, creativity, and shared resources. In this talk, McLeod will explain how economic concerns are eroding creativity and free speech, and what can be done about it.

A journalist, activist, artist and Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa, Kembrew McLeod is the author of two books on intellectual property and culture, Owning Culture: Authorship, Ownership & Intellectual Property (2001) and Freedom of Expression®: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity (2005). He has written music criticism for Rolling Stone , The Village Voice , Spin , and Mojo , and is also the co-producer of a 2001 documentary on the music industry, Money for Nothing: Behind the Business of Pop Music .

The Stratifications of Normativity: Race, Governmentality, and Minority Formations

Wednesday, March 23 rd , 2005 at 6:30 pm, 201A&B, BTSU.
Reception to follow.

"The Stratifications of Normativity" takes as its "case study" the creation of historically black colleges and universities as a racialized, gendered, classed, and sexualized endeavor. Its purpose was to produce black subjects who would conform to the moral parameters of American citizenship. The talk explores how the emancipation of black populations within the nineteenth century provides the genealogy for normative stratifications and the emergencies that they produce for minoritized populations into the present.

Roderick A. Ferguson is associate professor of race and critical theory in the Department of American Studies at the University of Minnesota . He is the author of Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (2003). He is the recipient of the Modern Language Association's Crompton-Noll Award (2000) for his essay, "The Parvenue Baldwin and the Other Side of Redemption: Modernity, Race, Sexuality, and the Cold War. His current project analyzes how African American and Caribbean intellectuals negotiated the gendered and sexualized legacies of Enlightenment thought.

Neoliberalism, or the Shifting Ground of Politics and Ethics

Monday, April 11 th , 2005 at 6:30 pm, Room 228 BTSU.
Reception to follow, sponsored by the International Studies Program

Neoliberalism is commonly viewed as an economic doctrine that seeks to limit the scope of government. In anthropology, neoliberalism is conceptualized as a theory of the hegemonic state or as a global culture with adverse effects on the South. This talk presents an alternative view -- neoliberalism with a small n -- that is more appropriate for mid-range theorizing and empirical research. Professor Ong considers neoliberalism as a mobile technology of government that articulates with situated constellations of political and ethical elements.

Aihwa Ong is Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. A prolific scholar, Ong's books include: Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (2005), Buddha is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America (2003), the award-winning Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (1999), Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism (1997 ), and Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia (1995). Her newest book, entitled Re-engineering Citizenship: the Shifting Ground of Politics and Ethics is forthcoming from Duke.