ICS Lecture Series 2008:
Cloning Terror, Telling Tales, & Surveying the Ruins

Paula Rabinowitz

Epidemics of Collapse: Notes on Documentary and the Post-Industrial Sublime

Wednesday, January 30, 2008 at 6:30pm, 201 Bowen Thompson Student Union (Sky Bank Room)
Reception to follow in lounge outside (200D)

How can documentaries represent the post-industrial without reproducing a nostalgic representation of industry?

How do you negotiate a landscape of collapse?

Professor Rabinowitz explores a transnational poetics of post-industrialism through an analysis of film, photography, and poetry, paying special attention to Thomas Lahusen's Living Among Ruins: Detroit and Komsomolsk, Mark Nowak's Shut Up Shut Down, and Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke. She examins how the iconic figures of the struggling worker and the devastated agricultural locations of the Depression era are rearticulated to make sense of contemporary post-industrialism. Looking at multiple transnational sites including China, Russia, and Detroit, she explores how these images are "remnants" both of abandonment and of progress.

Paula Rabinowitz is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Minnesota, where she holds the Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities. She is author of Black & White & Noir: America's Pulp Modernism, They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary, and Labor and Desire: Women's Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America. Her recent essays on art and culture have appeared in NY Arts, PAJ, Social Text, Legacy, Cineaste, Film International, Women's Studies Quarterly, and T/Here. Her ongoing book projects include "The Demotic Ulysses: How Pulp Fiction Brought Modernism to America" which explores the impact of the paperback revolution on censorship, sexuality, audiences and literary taste, and "The End and the Not" which explores recent attempts to reconstitute documentary forms in the era of post-industrialization. She has been a Fulbright scholar and received a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation.

Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9-11 to Abu Ghraib

Thursday, February 28, 2008 at 7:00pm, 206 Bowen Thompson Student Union (Theatre)
Reception to follow.

How do images of violence in the new millennium reproduce or clone terror ?

How does the metaphor of the "war on terror" converge with the digital and cybernetic?

While wars have always been fought over and conducted by images, the current "war on terror" has raised the imaginary component of warfare to a new level of importance. Professor Mitchell discusses new media technologies that have made the reproduction, circulation, and transformation of war images much faster. He explores the metaphor of a "war on terrer" as an imaginary, fantasmatic notion - a metaphor that has become all too literal, real, and deadly. Professor Mitchell investigates whether the war on terror has had the perverse effect of strengthening and proliferating its enemy or "cloning terror."

W.J.T. Mitchell is Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He is editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Inquiry, a quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. A scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature, Mitchell is a leader in the emerging fields of visual culture and of iconology, the study of images across the media. His numerous awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Morey Prize in art history given by the College Art Association of America. His many publications include What Do Pictures Want?:Essays on Lives and Loves of Images, Picture Theory, and Iconology, as well as The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon. He is working on a book addressing the violence of images in the new millennium, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9-11 to Abu Ghraib.

Performance of Pouring Tea: Black Gay Men of the South Tell Their Tales

Wednesday, March 19, 2008 at 7 pm, 202 Bowen Thompson Student Union (Ballroom)
Reception to follow in lounge outside (200D)

How do Black gay men from the South build community and resist oppression?

How do these narrators use the performance of "southerness" as a cultural identity?

Professor Johnson offers a performance based on oral histories of black gay men who were born, raised, and continue to live in the South. Collected between 2004 and 2006, these narratives document the lives of a diverse group of black gay men from fifteen different states, ages 19 to 94. He explores how these narrators use the performance of "southerness" as a cultural identity to simultaneously conform to southern cultural ideals, but also to mediate, transgress, and sometimes subvert them. They use those very ideals in order to build community and/or interject their own black gay subjectivity into a conservative southern landscape.

E. Patrick Johnson is Chair, Director of Graduate Studies, and Professor in the Department of Performance Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University. A scholar/artist, Johnson has performed nationally and internationally and has published widely in the areas of race, gender, sexuality and performance. His book Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity has won several awards, including the Lilla A. Heston Award, the Errol Hill Book Award, and was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. He has co-edited Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology with Mae G. Henderson. Oral histories provide the foundation to both his performance at BGSU and his forthcoming book, Sweet Tea: An Oral History of the South.