July 11 – Surveying American Late Modernism: Partisan Review and the Cultural Politics of the Questionnaire 🗓

July 11 – Surveying American Late Modernism: Partisan Review and the Cultural Politics of the Questionnaire 🗓

Lectures, News

Ian Afflerbach (Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta)

July 11, 2017, 2-4 p.m.,  P 208

In 1939, Philip Rahv and William Phillips, editors of Partisan Review, attempted to map “The Situation in American Writing” by sending a questionnaire to some of the nation’s most accomplished authors and critics: from Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, and John Dos Passos, to Lionel Trilling, Allen Tate, and R. P. Blackmur. By unpacking the eclectic archive of published (and unpublished) responses to this survey, my essay shows how the Partisan Review’s 1939 questionnaire illustrates the de ning concerns of an American late modernism emerging in the United States during the interwar period. I begin by relating how the questionnaire rose to prominence alongside modernism, through developments in mass print culture. I show how Partisan Review’s questionnaire performs a mode of cultural politics that I call “democratic dissensus,” a process of ironic negation, dispute, and re ection that was central to the magazine’s cultural project from the 1930s through the 1950s. Drawing upon periodical studies, material culture studies, and the emerging eld of late modernist studies, I position the democratic dispute engineered by Partisan Review as a signal moment not only in the magazine’s history, but in periodizing narratives about American modernism.

 

Ian Afflerbach will begin as Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of North Georgia in Fall 2017.

 

June 26 – The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint Domingue and British Jamaica, 1748-1788

June 26 – The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint Domingue and British Jamaica, 1748-1788

Lectures, News

Trevor Burnard (The University of Melbourne, Australia)

June 26, 2017, 6 p.m., FakultÀtssaal (Philosophicum)

Jamaica and Saint Domingue were two wildly successful but socially monstrous slave societies. In the years between 1748 and 1788 these societies—based upon a plantation complex in which African labourers were brought to the Caribbean to produce luxury commodities originally developed in Asia for a European market—reached an apogee of sorts in the Greater Antilles. Jamaica and Saint Domingue came close to perfecting a form of economic organisation that operated on a global scale that provided the owners of capital (human and otherwise) with vast amounts of money and considerable geopolitical clout. These were regions that exempli ed the complex forces of early modern imperialism, forces that helped make colonialism a truly global phenomenon.

This talk explores these two socities at the height of their powers. It looks at how their plantation systems developed and at the social and cultural forms that the plantation complex in its most developed and modern form spawned. In particular, it looks at how these societies created new forms of belonging based on race and on shared values in their elites of “whiteness.” White colonial residents of Jamaica and Saint Domingue established individualistic behaviours that might be considered egalitarian if these societies had not been so dependent upon enslaved labourers for their wealth.

Trevor Burnard is Head of School and Professor of History at the School of Historical & Philosophical Studies (SHAPS) at The University of Melbourne, Australia.

June 26 – Planters and Slaves in the Greater Antilles

June 26 – Planters and Slaves in the Greater Antilles

Lectures, News

Trevor Burnard (The University of Melbourne, Australia)

June 26, 2017, 2-4 p.m., P 13 (Philosophicum)

Professor Burnard will talk about slavery and abolition in general terms (examining the key words of interest) and then look at two case studies—the rst being why plantations in the West Indies were so slow in developing and what were their characteristics once developed, and then a case study of women in nineteenth century Berbice (now Guyana) and how they coped with slavery.

Trevor Burnard is Head of School and Professor of History at the School of Historical & Philosophical Studies (SHAPS) at The University of Melbourne, Australia.

June 16 – Life Support: Race, Technology and the Gendered Biocapital of Outsourced Labor

June 16 – Life Support: Race, Technology and the Gendered Biocapital of Outsourced Labor

Lectures, News

Kalindi Vora (University of California, San Diego)

June 16, 2017, 10 a.m.-12 noon, FakultÀtssaal (Philosophicum)

This talk thinks through how biological bodies have become a new kind of global biocapital, extending historical legacies of colonial labor practices. It examines how forms of technologized labor serve to support life in the United States at the expense of the lives of people in India. Focusing on several case studies of outsourced work, it exposes the ways in which seemingly inalienable aspects of human life such as care, love, and trust—as well as biological bodies and organs—are not only commodi able entities but also components essential to contemporary capitalism. It asks, How do forms of transnational gendered reproductive labors of care, nurture, and even biological reproductivity (such as in transnational surrogacy and reproductive services) provide an opportunity to look at historical legacies of gender and labor that have been theorized through the lens of US Ethnic Studies, while calling for a new and relational understanding of the political potential in how subjects disrupt their geographies and the roles assigned to them through their labor?

 

Kalindi Vora is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and a liate faculty of the Science Studies and Critical Gender Studies Programs at UC San Diego.