Author Events

 

 

Thursday, 10 May 2011, 6:00 – 7:30 PM

Celine Parreñas Shimizu

in conversation with

Daniel Bernardi

Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies

“An utterly original examination of Asian American masculinity on the silver screen, Straightjacket Sexualities is a critical tour-de-force that reveals cinema to be an ethical event. It offers a theory of responsibility in the face of vulnerability and persecution to encourage the emergence of new and better forms of manhood.”—David L. Eng, University of Pennsylvania

Depictions of Asian American men as effeminate or asexual pervade popular movies. Hollywood has made clear that Asian American men lack the qualities inherent to the heroic heterosexual male. This restricting, circumscribed vision of masculinity—a straitjacketing, according to author Celine Parreñas Shimizu—aggravates Asian American male sexual problems both on and off screen.

Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies looks to cinematic history to reveal the dynamic ways Asian American men, from Bruce Lee to Long Duk Dong, create and claim a variety of masculinities. Representations of love, romance, desire, and lovemaking show how Asian American men fashion manhoods that negotiate the dynamics of self and other, expanding our ideas of sexuality. The unique ways in which Asian American men express intimacy is powerfully represented onscreen, offering distinct portraits of individuals struggling with group identities. Rejecting “macho” men, these movies stake Asian American manhood on the notion of caring for, rather than dominating, others.

Celine Parreñas Shimizu is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, as well as a filmmaker and film scholar. She is the author of The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene (2007), winner of the 2009 Cultural Studies Book Prize from the Association for Asian American Studies.

Daniel Bernardi is the chair of Cinema Studies at San Francisco State University.

 

Thursday, 17 May 2012, 6:00-7:30 PM

Tomas Moniz and Jeremy Adam Smith

Rad Dad: Dispatches from the Frontier of Fatherhood

“Rad Dad gives voice to egalitarian parenting and caregiving by men in a truly radical fashion, with its contributors challenging traditional norms of what it means to be a father and subverting paradigms, while making you laugh in the process. With its thoughtful and engaging stories on topics like birth, stepfathering, gender, politics, pop culture, and the challenges of kids growing older, this collection of essays and interviews is a compelling addition to books on fatherhood.”  —Jennifer Silverman, co-editor, My Baby Rides the Short Bus: The Unabashedly Human Experience of Raising Kids with Disabilities
Today more than ever, fatherhood demands constant improvisation, risk, and struggle. With grace and honesty and strength, Rad Dad’s writers tackle all the issues that other parenting guides are afraid to touch: the brutalities, beauties, and politics of the birth experience, the challenges of parenting on an equal basis with mothers, the tests faced by transgendered and gay fathers, the emotions of sperm donation, and parental confrontations with war, violence, racism, and incarceration. Rad Dad is for every father out in the real world trying to parent in ways that are loving, meaningful, authentic, and ultimately revolutionary.

Jeremy Adam Smith is the founder of the acclaimed blog Daddy Dialectic, author of The Daddy Shift, and coeditor of Are We Born Racist? His essays, short stories, and articles have appeared in The Nation, Mothering, San Francisco Bay Guardian, San Francisco Chronicle, Utne Reader, Wired, and numerous other periodicals and books. He lives in San Francisco.

Tomas Moniz is the founder, editor, and a writer for the award-winning zine Rad Dad. He has helped raise three children and has been making zines since the late nineties. He teaches basic skills classes at Berkeley City College and works with the National Writing Project.

 

Wednesday, 23 May 2012, 5:30-7:00 PM

Tyler Stovall with Karl Britto

Paris and the Spirit of 1919:

Consumer Struggles, Transnationalism and Revolution

 

Paris and the Spirit of 1919 is a major new synthesis of the fundamental changes shaping working-class politics and identity in the interwar years. Tyler Stovall persuasively argues for 1919 as a focal point for key transformations in French society and politics during the twentieth century. By insisting on the political significance of working class consumption, Stovall’s study brings together the histories of labor and consumerism in a highly original way. Written with verve and exceptional clarity, this long-awaited book both foregrounds and revitalizes class as a category of historical analysis. [This book] should be required reading for all labor and social historians as well as scholars of modern Europe. Mary Louise Roberts, University of Wisconsin

This transnational history of Paris in 1919 explores the global implications of the revolutionary crisis of French society at the end of World War I. As the site of the peace conference Paris was a victorious capital and a city at the center of the world, and Tyler Stovall explores these intersections of globalization and local revolution. The book takes as its central point the eruption of political activism in 1919, using the events of that year to illustrate broader tensions in working class, race, and gender politics in Parisian, French, and ultimately global society which fueled debates about colonial subjects and the empire. Viewing consumerism and consumer politics as key both to the revolutionary crisis and to new ideas about working class identity, and arguing against the idea that consumerism depoliticized working people, this history of local labor movements is a study in the making of the modern world.

Tyler Stovall is a professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley.

Karl Britto is a professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

 

Thursday, 24 May 2012, 6:30-7:30 PM

Joan Frank

Make it Stay

Recounting three love stories, Make It Stay explores the vision of an era – and how perception expands, as mortal limits draw near.

“The novel is a pitch-perfect blend of meticulously wrought sentences that support a slowly unraveling narrative of Northern California life. This is by far the best novel I’ve read all year, something the board members and jury of the Pulitzer Prize missed entirely, shortlisting the usual suspects and awarding the Prize for Fiction to no one this year. One can only hope the National Book Award will see beyond the insular confines of Manhattan and give Joan Frank a national literary prize well deserving of her talents.” – Karl Wolff, Chicago Center of Literature and Photography

“Poetic and lively, Joan Frank’s fifth book, Make It Stay, carries the dry wit and emotional weight that are mainstays of the Santa Rosa–based writer…her work is known to be astute, funny and wise, and this latest novel is no exception. Make It Stay takes place in the Northern California town of Mira Flores—which sounds suspiciously like Santa Rosa—and focuses on a writer, Rachel, and her Scottish husband, Neil. As the couple prepare a dinner party for a group of beloved old friends, Neil retells an old story about his best friend Mike and what happened when a secret life was revealed. After catastrophe strikes, the cadre of lovers and friends must figure out how to repair the damage, pick up the pieces and save what they love most.” -North Bay Bohemian

Joan Frank is the author of four prior books of fiction.  She is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee, winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize, Dana Award, Michigan Literary Fiction Award, Iowa Writing Award and Emrys Fiction Award, and recipient of grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation.  She has taught Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, and lives in Northern California.

“Matthew Briones is a creative and courageous thinker who explores uncharted terrain in American studies. This magisterial book confirms his elevated status in our new discourse on race, class, and empire in America.”–Cornel West, Princeton University

 

Friday, 25 May 2012, 4:00-5:30 PM

Matthew Manuel Briones

Jim and Jap Crow: A Cultural History of 1940′s Interracial America

Following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. government rounded up more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans and sent them to internment camps. One of those internees was Charles Kikuchi. In thousands of diary pages, he documented his experiences in the camps, his resettlement in Chicago and drafting into the Army on the eve of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and his postwar life as a social worker in New York City. Kikuchi’s diaries bear witness to a watershed era in American race relations, and expose both the promise and the hypocrisy of American democracy.

Jim and Jap Crow follows Kikuchi’s personal odyssey among fellow Japanese American intellectuals, immigrant activists, Chicago School social scientists, everyday people on Chicago’s South Side, and psychologically scarred veterans in the hospitals of New York. The book chronicles a remarkable moment in America’s history in which interracial alliances challenged the limits of the elusive democratic ideal, and in which the nation was forced to choose between civil liberty and the fearful politics of racial hysteria. It was an era of world war and the atomic bomb, desegregation in the military but Jim and Jap Crow elsewhere in America, and a hopeful progressivism that gave way to Cold War paranoia.

Jim and Jap Crow looks at Kikuchi’s life and diaries as a lens through which to observe the possibilities, failures, and key conversations in a dynamic multiracial America.

Matthew M. Briones is assistant professor of American history and the College at the University of Chicago.

 

Thursday, 31 May 2012, 6:00-7:30 PM

Matt Werner

Oakland in Popular Memory:

Interviews with 12 Cutting-Edge Musicians from Oakland and Beyond


The image of Oakland, California has been tainted in the mainstream media with news reports focusing on violence in Oakland. Matt Werner explores a different narrative in Oakland in Popular Memory, interviewing young artists from Oakland, and established artists who’ve influenced Oakland musicians.

Matt Werner, in the spirit of Studs Terkel, conducted long-form interviews from 2008-2012 which cover the 2008 election of President Obama, the shooting of Oscar Grant, and the Occupy Oakland protests. Werner spoke with these artists at length, discussing topics like race relations in Oakland in the post-Oscar Grant era, postmodern literary theory, and the changing landscape of the music industry during the digital revolution.

Through these interviews, Oakland is seen as an engine of cultural innovation, as a city bustling with lively avant-garde art and music scenes, spanning from indie rock to spoken word to hip-hop. Oakland in Popular Memory captures those artists putting a new “there” in Oakland.

Oakland in Popular Memory: Interviews with 12 cutting-edge musicians from Oakland and beyond is a collection of Matt Werner’s best interviews from his award-winning radio show on Fresh Air: The Alternative, and various other interviews he’s done with leading artists from Oakland, California and artists who’ve influenced musicians from Oakland. These artists include Chinaka Hodge, Dahlak Brathwaite, Dave Smallen, George Watsky, Ise Lyfe, K.Flay, Kid Beyond, MC Lars, Rafael Casal, Saul Williams, Talib Kweli, and Victor Vazquez.

Matthew Werner is the author of Papers for the Suppression of Reality, published by Thought Publishing in 2011. His writing has been published by Oakland Local, McSweeney’s, and theRumpus.net.

 

DATE TBD – POSTPONED FROM 15 MARCH!

Anthony Cascardi

in conversation with

Roland Greene

Cervantes, Literature and the Discourse of Politics

 

Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics takes up a set of deeply-rooted questions regarding literature and politics in relation to one of the pillars the European literature:  Don Quixote.  Bookended by Machiavelli and Hobbes, and centrally engaging Plato’s Republic, Cervantes’ novel is fundamentally involved in assessing the place of literature within the state.  Cervantes explores the limits of the possible languages for speaking about politics, implicitly responding to the frankness of Machiavelli ‘s discourse about rulership in the new state and offering literature as an alternative to Hobbes’ and Bacon’s “science of politics.” At the same time, Cervantes responds to a specific set of historical conditions surrounding the political imagination of the early modern nation and its empire.  These were conditions in which nearly all forms of public speech were constrained, and in which literature provided an opportunity for speaking the truth about politics without speaking about politics directly.

The book provides a thorough reading of Don Quixote as well as a wide-ranging and scholarly treatment of Cervantes’ relationship to his many early modern predecessors, including humanists and rhetoricians.  It deals with the practical roots of political theory in travel writing, and the legacy in Cervantes of classical political questions as engaged by Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero.  The book also makes a broader argument defining the potential role of literature in the discourse of politics.

Anthony J. Cascardi is Dean of Arts and Humanities and Professor of Comparative Literature, Rhetoric, and Spanish at U.C. Berkeley.  Among his other books are Consequences of Enlightenment and The Subject of Modernity.

Roland Greene teaches in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University.  He is the author of Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas (1999), Post-Petrarchism (1991), and the forthcoming Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (University of Chicago Press, 2013).

Past Events

 

Wednesday, 9 May 2012, 5:30 – 7:00 PM

Susan C. Strong

in conversation with

Bridget Connelly

Move Our Message: How to Get America’s Ear

Today our economy, our health, our environment and even our democracy face greater threats than ever before. We need messaging that can reach mainstream American audiences–framing our points about what needs to be done in a smart, accessible way. “1%,” “99 %” and even ”Occupy” changed the game last year, but we have to be able to say a lot more than that as 2012 unfolds. And we must say it in short punchy ways that also stick and transform.

Susan C. Strong, Ph.D., founder and executive director of The Metaphor Project, has been helping progressives and liberal activists mainstream their messages since 1997. A complete bio for her is available at http://www.metaphorproject.org.

Bridget Connelly, UC Berkeley Emerita Professor of Rhetoric, is the author of Forgetting Ireland and Arab Folk Epic and Identity.

 

 

 

Tuesday, 8 May 2012, 6:00 – 7:30 PM

Javier Huerta

American Copia

In this innovative work that uses grocery stores as a guiding motif, he deftly combines English and Spanish to explore his identity as an immigrant, naturalized citizen, son, brother, lover, graduate student. Visits to grocery stores in the U.S. and northern Mexico lead to questions about himself. “I often wonder if I would have grown up thin had my family stayed and bought groceries in Mexico. The day we crossed the river my seven-year-old body had not an ounce of fat on it,” he remembers.

But he looks beyond his own personal circumstances as he explores the abundance of experience found in going to the grocery store.  Through poetry written in Spanish, a short play, non-fiction passages and even text messages, Huerta delves into subjects such as consumerism and health foods available only to a limited class of people. The diverse pieces and themes in American Copia pulsate with all that can be both communal and autonomous in everyday life. Men take advantage of women; people protest against practices that place corporate profits above a fair wage for farmworkers; and, sometimes, people commit acts of violence.

Javier O. Huerta is the author of Some Clarifications y otros poemas (Arte Publico Press, 2007), recipient of the Chicano / Latino Literary Prize from UC Irvine and of American Copia (Arte Publico 2012). His poems have been included in numerous anthologies, including American Tensions: Literature of Identity and the Search for Social Justice (New Village Press, 2011) and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011 (Mariner Books, 2011). A native of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, he currently lives in Berkeley, where he is working on his doctorate in English at the University of California, Berkeley.

Saturday, 5 May 2012, 3:00 – 4:30 PM

Sudha Balagopal

There Are Seven Notes

‘Sudha Balagopal’s writing crafts quiet, compelling stories full of life’s small but defining moments. Her unique narrative style contains unforeseen character choices that catch the reader off guard—and yet feel absolutely right. Balagopal involves the reader by letting them participate, not only in the narrative events as they unfold, but in the story’s ultimate meaning.’ – Martin Etchart, author of The Good Oak

‘Sudha Balagopal’s stories are infused with a deep understanding and love of music; it is music that lies at the very heart of her characters’ inner worlds. She probes gently beneath seemingly ordinary lives, and through the recurring theme of music, finds in their stories a luminosity and poignancy that is far from ordinary. ’ – Anjana Appachana, author of Listening Now

Sudha Balagopal was born and raised in India. Her stories have appeared in a number of magazines of international repute. An avid listener and admirer of Indian classical music, Sudha has lived in the United States for the past quarter century. There are Seven Notes is her first book.

See a review here:  http://belletrista.org/2012/Issue16/features_4.php

 

Thursday, 3 May 2012, 5:30 – 7:00 PM

Rory O’Connor

Friends, Followers and the Future: How Social Media are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands and Killing Traditional Media

In this insider’s look at how social media are transforming our world, Rory O’Connor explains the trends and explores what tech visionaries, media makers, political advisers, and businesspeople are saying about the meteoric rise of the various social networks of friends and followers, and what they bode for our future.

Rory O’Connor is an author, filmmaker and journalist whose work centers around media and politics. Author of Shock Jocks: Hate Speech & Talk Radio (2008), and co-author of Nukespeak (2nd ed, 2011) his broadcast, film and print career has been recognized with two Emmys, a George Orwell Award, a George Polk Award, a Writer’s Guild Award among other honors.

 

Tuesday, 1 May 2012, 5:30 – 7:00 PM

Victoria Nelson

Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods and the New Supernatural

“This is an admirable, strong, and original book, a worthy sequel to The Secret Life of Puppets. Nelson’s prose is clear and restrained, very winning and illuminating of the dark corners in 21st-century America and beyond in a stricken world. I can think of no rival works this substantial.”—Harold Bloom, Yale University

The Gothic, Romanticism’s gritty older sibling, has flourished in myriad permutations since the eighteenth century. In Gothicka, Victoria Nelson identifies the revolutionary turn it has taken in the twenty-first. Today’s Gothic has fashioned its monsters into heroes and its devils into angels. It is actively reviving supernaturalism in popular culture, not as an evil dimension divorced from ordinary human existence but as part of our daily lives.

To explain this millennial shift away from the traditionally dark Protestant post-Enlightenment Gothic, Nelson studies the complex arena of contemporary Gothic subgenres that take the form of novels, films, and graphic novels. She considers twentieth-century Gothic masters H.P. Lovecraft, Anne Rice, and Stephen King in light of both their immediate ancestors in the eighteenth century and the original Gothic—the late medieval period from which Horace Walpole and his successors drew their inspiration.

Victoria Nelson is an essayist and fiction writer who teaches in the Goddard College graduate program in creative writing.

Wednesday, 18 April 2012, 5:30 – 7:00 PM

John Bateson

The Final Leap: Suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge

“John Bateson takes us on a gripping journey through the lives of everyone who has been affected. He boldly counters myths with facts, eloquently speaks of the unspeakable, and helps us all to care about those who, in an instant, stopped caring about themselves. This book stirs the soul to fight for the day when the protective net is finally cast under the Golden Gate Bridge, when it will become a national monument to both beauty and compassion.”—John Draper, Director of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline

“Extremely well done. It’s the single most important contribution to the debate surrounding suicide and the Golden Gate Bridge to date.” -Thomas Joiner, author of Lonely at the Top and Why People Die by Suicide

John Bateson was executive director of a Bay Area crisis center for more than 15 years, and is the author of Building Hope. He has served on the steering committee of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. In 2007 he was appointed to a blue-ribbon committee charged with creating the California Strategic Plan on Suicide Prevention.

 

Tuesday, 17 April 2012, 6:00 – 7:30 PM

Daniel Boyarin

The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ   

Guiding us through a rich tapestry of new discoveries and ancient scriptures, The Jewish Gospels makes the powerful case that our conventional understandings of Jesus and of the origins of Christianity are wrong. In Boyarin’s scrupulously documented account, the coming of the Messiah was fully imagined in the ancient Jewish texts. Jesus, moreover, was embraced by many Jews as this person, and his core teachings were not at all a break from Jewish beliefs and teachings. Jesus and his followers, Boyarin shows, were simply Jewish. What came to be known as Christianity came much later, as religious and political leaders sought to impose a new religious orthodoxy that was not present at the time of Jesus’ life.

Daniel Boyarin, Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture and rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships. His books include A Radical Jew, Border Lines, and Socrates and the Fat Rabbis. He lives in Berkeley, California.

 

Friday, 13 April 2012, 4:00 – 5:00 PM

José David Saldívar

With a panel including

Donald Pease

Marcial Gonzalez

Kathleen Donegan

Guadalupe Carrillo

Alma Granado

Munia Bhaumik

for a discussion of

Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico

A founder of U.S.-Mexico border studies, José David Saldívar is a leading figure in efforts to expand the scope of American studies. In Trans-Americanity, he advances that critical project by arguing for a transnational, antinational, and “outernational” paradigm for American studies. Saldívar urges Americanists to adopt a world-system scale of analysis. “Americanity as a Concept,” an essay by the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein, the architect of world-systems analysis, serves as a theoretical touchstone for Trans-Americanity. In conversation not only with Quijano and Wallerstein, but also with the theorists Gloria Anzaldúa, John Beverley, Ranajit Guha, Walter D. Mignolo, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Saldívar explores questions of the subaltern and the coloniality of power, emphasizing their location within postcolonial studies. Analyzing the work of José Martí, Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy, and many other writers, he addresses concerns such as the “unspeakable” in subalternized African American, U.S. Latino and Latina, Cuban, and South Asian literature; the rhetorical form of postcolonial narratives; and constructions of subalternized identities. In Trans-Americanity, Saldívar demonstrates and makes the case for Americanist critique based on a globalized study of the Américas.

José David Saldívar is Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His books include Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies, and The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History and Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology.

 

Thursday, 12 April 2012, 6:00 – 7:30 PM

Nancy Boas

in conversation with

Kari Dahlgren

David Park: A Painter’s Life

“What David Park: A Painter’s Life accomplishes is to deepen our understanding of an artist who celebrated humanity, friendship and connection. Just as Park put the humanity back into an era of abstraction, Boas brings David Park the man into the foreground in a literary and historical sense. She has given us a detailed, truthful, credible picture of a man who tussled with the lofty claims made for abstract art. Somehow he made peace with abstraction, but he had to do it by putting human presence, in all its beautiful imperfection, into the forefront once again.”—Huffington Post

David Park (1911–1960), transplanted Bostonian turned ground-breaking West Coast painter, led the way in creating what became known as Bay Area Figurative Art—a daring move during the post-World War II years when abstract expressionism held sway. In this beautifully illustrated biography, compiled from comprehensive and sweeping interviews, Nancy Boas traces Park’s resolute search for a new kind of figuration, one that would penetrate abstract expressionism’s thickly layered surfaces and infuse them with human presence. Boas changes our understanding of Park as a painter, highlighting his strong influence on Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, and other artists at the California School of Fine Arts and the University of California, Berkeley. She plunges us into the lively 1940s and 1950s Bay Area art scene, pointing to Park’s work as a bold alternative to the abstractions of Clyfford Still. As the book deepens our admiration for Park’s figurative paintings, it affirms his stature as a major figure in American art, one who spurred the figurative impulse across the United States and abroad.

Nancy Boas is the author of The Society of Six: California Colorists (UC Press) and a contributor to the exhibition and catalog Facing Eden: 100 Years of Landscape Art in the Bay Area (UC Press). She was Adjunct Curator of American Paintings at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and co-curated the exhibition California Colorists: Paintings by the Society of Six.

 

 

Wednesday, 11 April 2012, 5:30 – 7:00 PM

Charles Post

The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class Structure, Economic Development and Political Conflict, 1620-1877

shortlisted for the 2011 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize

“Charles Post’s new book, The American Road to Capitalism,is sure to become a reference point for debates among historians and Marxists about the transformation of the English colonies into the fully developed capitalist United States. [...] it should be widely read, appreciated for its insights and rigor, and also debated.” —Ashley Smith, International Socialist Review
“This is a thoughtful, learned, stimulating, challenging and altogether valuable volume. It reprints a series of reflections by the Marxist sociologist Charles Post on various aspects of the rise and evolution of capitalism in North America between the colonial era and the late 19th century. The book is anchored in a wide-ranging study of (and it duly credits) the work of generations of historians.” —Bruce Levine, author of Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War, in Against the Current
“Explaining the origin and early development of American capitalism is a particularly challenging task. It is in some ways even more difficult than in other cases to strike the right historical balance, capturing the systemic imperatives of capitalism, and explaining how they emerged, while doing justice to historical particularities… To confront these historical complexities requires both a command of historical detail and a clear theoretical grasp of capitalism’s systemic imperatives, a combination that is all too rare. Charles Post succeeds in striking that difficult balance, which makes his book a major contribution to truly historical scholarship.” —Ellen Meiksins-Wood, York University, author of The Origins of Capitalism: A Long View.
Unable to analyze the dynamics of specific forms of social labour in the antebellum U.S., most historians of the US Civil War have ignored its deep social roots. To search out these roots, Post applies the theoretical insights from the transition debates to the historical literature on the U.S. to produce a new analysis of the origins of American capitalism.
Charles Post Ph. D. (1983) in Sociology, SUNY-Binghamton, is Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College-CUNY. He has published in New Left Review, Journal of Peasant Studies, Journal of Agrarian Change, Against the Current and Historical Materialism.

 

 

Thursday, 5 April 2012, 6:00 – 7:30 PM

Douglas A. Cunningham

The San Francisco of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: Place, Pilgrimage, and Commemoration

Considered by many as one of the greatest films of all time, Vertigo regularly places near the top of critics’ lists, including the American Film Institute’s 100 Years, 100 Movies where it ranked in the top 10. In Sight and Sound magazine’s most recent poll, the film placed second, behind only Citizen Kane. Often regarded as Hitchcock’s most personal work, the film explores such themes as obsession, exploitation, and voyeurism. In The San Francisco of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: Place, Pilgrimage, and Commemoration, Douglas A. Cunningham has assembled provocative essays that examine the uniquely integrated relationship that the 1958 film enjoys with the histories and cultural imaginations of California and, more specifically, the San Francisco Bay Area. Contributors to this collection ponder a number of topics such as the ways in which Vertigo resurrects the narratives of San Francisco’s violent past; how sightseeing informs the act of watching the film; the significance that landmarks in the film hold in our collective cultural memory; and the variety of ways in which Vertigo enthusiasts commemorate the film. The essays also ask larger questions about the specificities of place and the role such specificities play in our comprehensive efforts to understand this layered and seminal film. Because of its interdisciplinary approach, The San Francisco of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo will have a broad appeal to scholars of film, anthropology, geography, ethnic studies, the history of California and the West, tourism, and, of course, anyone with an abiding interest in the work of Alfred Hitchcock.

Douglas A. Cunningham is a film scholar and historian. He has contributed essays on film to many publications, including Screen, Cineaction, The Moving Image, and Critical Survey. He earned his Ph.D. in Film Studies from UC Berkeley.

 

 

Wednesday, 4 April 2012, 5:30 – 7:00 PM

John Connelly

From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933-1965

“A brilliantly original and an extremely important reconstruction of what motivated the Roman Catholic Church in the 1960s to declare a new and positive appreciation of Jews and Judaism.”—Susannah Heschel, author of The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany

In 1965 the Second Vatican Council declared that God loves the Jews. Before that, the Church had taught for centuries that Jews were cursed by God and, in the 1940s, mostly kept silent as Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis. How did an institution whose wisdom is said to be unchanging undertake one of the most enormous, yet undiscussed, ideological swings in modern history?

The radical shift of Vatican II grew out of a buried history, a theological struggle in Central Europe in the years just before the Holocaust, when a small group of Catholic converts (especially former Jew Johannes Oesterreicher and former Protestant Karl Thieme) fought to keep Nazi racism from entering their newfound church. Through decades of engagement, extending from debates in academic journals, to popular education, to lobbying in the corridors of the Vatican, this unlikely duo overcame the most problematic aspect of Catholic history. Their success came not through appeals to morality but rather from a rediscovery of neglected portions of scripture.

From Enemy to Brother illuminates the baffling silence of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust, showing how the ancient teaching of deicide—according to which the Jews were condemned to suffer until they turned to Christ—constituted the Church’s only language to talk about the Jews. As he explores the process of theological change, John Connelly moves from the speechless Vatican to those Catholics who endeavored to find a new language to speak to the Jews on the eve of, and in the shadow of, the Holocaust.

John Connelly is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley.

 

Thursday, 29 March 2012, 6:00 – 7:30 PM

Jacqueline Francis

Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art”
in America

“Francis’s subject is not only these three artists, but encompasses as well broader issues of how social identities are constructed at particular historical moments and the complex relationships among racial and ethnic identity positions, critical reception, patronage, and artistic style.” – Melanie Herzog, author of Milton Rogovin: The Making of a Social Documentary Photographer

Malvin Gray Johnson, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Max Weber were three New York City artists whose work was popularly assigned to the category of “racial art” in the interwar years of the twentieth century. The term was widely used by critics and the public at the time, and was an unexamined, unquestioned category for the work of non-whites (such as Johnson, an African American), non-Westerners (such as Kuniyoshi, a Japanese-born American), and ethnicized non-Christians (such as Weber, a Russian-born Jewish American). The discourse on racial art is a troubling chapter in the history of early American modernism that has not, until now, been sufficiently documented. Jacqueline Francis juxtaposes the work of these three artists in order to consider their understanding of the category and their stylistic responses to the expectations created by it, in the process revealing much about the nature of modernist art practices.

Most American audiences in the interwar period disapproved of figural abstraction and held modernist painting in contempt, yet the critics who first expressed appreciation for Johnson, Kuniyoshi, and Weber praised their bright palettes and energetic pictures – and expected to find the residue of the minority artist’s heritage in the work itself. Francis explores the flowering of racial art rhetoric in the 1920s and 1930s, and analyzes its underlying presence in contemporary discussions of artists of color. Making Race is a history of a past phenomenon which has significant ramifications for the present.

Jacqueline Francis is a senior lecturer at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco.

 

Wednesday, 14 March 2012, 6:00 – 7:30 PM

Eran Kaplan

The Origins of Israel, 1882-1948

“There is no comparable volume available today that allows English readers direct access to such an array of primary sources.” —David Engel, author of Zionism: A Short History of a Big Idea

In 1880 the Jewish community in Palestine encompassed some 20,000 Orthodox Jews; within sixty-five years it was transformed into a secular proto-state with well-developed political, military, and economic institutions, a vigorous Hebrew-language culture, and some 600,000 inhabitants. The Origins of Israel, 1882–1948: A Documentary History chronicles the making of modern Israel before statehood, providing in English the texts of original sources (many translated from Hebrew and other languages) accompanied by extensive introductions and commentaries from the volume editors.

This sourcebook assembles a diverse array of 62 documents, many of them unabridged, to convey the ferment, dissent, energy, and anxiety that permeated the Zionist project from its inception to the creation of the modern nation of Israel. Focusing primarily on social, economic, and cultural history rather than Zionist thought and diplomacy, the texts are organized in themed chapters. They present the views of Zionists from many political and religious camps, factory workers, farm women, militants, intellectuals promoting the Hebrew language and arts—as well as views of ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionists. The volume includes important unabridged documents from the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict that are often cited but are rarely read in full. The editors, Eran Kaplan and Derek J. Penslar, provide both primary texts and informative notes and commentary, giving readers the opportunity to encounter voices from history and make judgments for themselves about matters of world-historical significance.

Eran Kaplan is the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Professor in Israel Studies at San Francisco State University and author of The Jewish Radical Right, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press. Derek J. Penslar is the Samuel Zacks Professor of Jewish history at the University of Toronto. His most recent book is Israel in History: The Jewish State in Comparative Perspective.

 

Wednesday, 7 March 2012, 6:00 – 7:30 PM

Stephen Zavestoski and Rachel Morello-Frosch

Contested Illnesses: Citizens, Science and Health Social Movements

“Contested Illnesses is filled with brilliant ground breaking work at the frontier of environmental health and justice. Phil Brown and his colleagues, all leaders in their fields, address the critical issues in science and sociology of the epidemic of environmental illnesses we all face. This necessary book will be essential reading for scientists, patient advocates and all those engaged in the greatest public health issues of our time.”–Michael Lerner, President of Commonweal and Co-founder of the Collaborative on Health and the Environment
“Contested Illnesses has elevated “community-based participatory research” to a high standard of theory and practice. The work provides a deep understanding of cultural conflicts in disease causation and sets a new path for interdisciplinary environmental research. The “Contested Illness Research Group” will be modeled whenever public interest science partners with communities to assess and improve environmental health.”–Sheldon Krimsky, co-author of Genetic Justice: DNA Databanks, Criminal Investigations and Civil LibertiesThe politics and science of health and disease remain contested terrain among scientists, health practitioners, policy makers, industry, communities, and the public. Stakeholders in disputes about illnesses or conditions disagree over their fundamental causes as well as how they should be treated and prevented. This thought-provoking book crosses disciplinary boundaries by engaging with both public health policy and social science, asserting that science, activism, and policy are not separate issues and showing how the contribution of environmental factors in disease is often overlooked.

Rachel Morello-Frosch is Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management and the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley.

Stephen Zavestoski is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and the Environmental Studies Program at the University of San Francisco.

 

Tuesday, 28 February 2012, 5:30 – 7:00 PM

At the Musical Offering Café

Wendy Lesser

for a celebration of the paperback edition of her book

Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and his 15 Quartets

Tuesday, 28 February 2012, 5:30 – 7:00 PM

With a Live Performance by the Town Quartet

 

 Most previous books about Dmitri Shostakovich have focused on either his symphonies and operas, or his relationship to the regime under which he lived, or both, since these large-scale works were the ones that attracted the interest and sometimes the condemnation of the Soviet authorities. Music for Silenced Voices looks at Shostakovich through the back door, as it were, of his fifteen quartets, the works which his widow characterized as a “diary, the story of his soul.” The silences and the voices were of many kinds, including the political silencing of adventurous writers, artists, and musicians during the Stalin era; the lost voices of Shostakovich’s operas (a form he abandoned just before turning to string quartets); and the death-silenced voices of his close friends, to whom he dedicated many of these chamber works.

Wendy Lesser has constructed a fascinating narrative in which the fifteen quartets, considered one at a time in chronological order, lead the reader through the personal, political, and professional events that shaped Shostakovich’s singular, emblematic twentieth-century life. Weaving together interviews with the composer’s friends, family, and colleagues, as well as conversations with present-day musicians who have played the quartets, Lesser sheds new light on the man and the musician. One of the very few books about Shostakovich that is aimed at a general rather than an academic audience, Music for Silenced Voices is a pleasure to read; at the same time, it is rigorously faithful to the known facts in this notoriously complicated life. It will fill readers with the desire to hear the quartets, which are among the most compelling and emotionally powerful monuments of the past century’s music.

Wendy Lesser, the editor of The Threepenny Review, is the author of seven previous nonfiction books and one novel. She divides her year between Berkeley and New York.

 

Friday, 24 February 2012, 4:00 – 5:00 PM

Eric Klinenberg

in conversation with

Neil Fligstein

Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone

Renowned sociologist and author Eric Klinenberg explores the dramatic rise of solo living and examines the seismic impact it’s having on our culture, business, and politics. Conventional wisdom tells us that living by oneself leads to loneliness and isolation, but, as Klinenberg shows, most solo dwellers are deeply engaged in social and civic life. In fact, compared with their married counterparts, they are more likely to eat out and exercise, go to art and music classes, attend public events and lectures, and volunteer. There’s even evidence that people who live alone enjoy better mental health than unmarried people who live with others and have more environmentally sustainable lifestyles than families, since they favor urban apartments over large suburban homes.

Eric Klinenberg is a professor of sociology at New York University and the editor of the journal Public Culture. His first book, Heat Wave, won several scholarly and literary prizes and was declared a “Favorite Book” by the Chicago Tribune. His research has been heralded in The New Yorker and on CNN and NPR, and his stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and on This American Life.

 

Tuesday, 21 February 2012, 6:00 – 7:30 PM

Joseph McBride

in conversation with San Francisco State University’s

Professor of Cinema  

Jameson (Jim) Goldner

Writing in Pictures: Screenwriting Made (Mostly) Painless

“In this unique contribution to the screenplay literature, Joe McBride invites writers to connect themselves to literary tradition, relying less on formulas and more on intelligent uses of classic storytelling technique. Writing in Pictures blends general precepts, concrete examples, hard-won experience, and lively anecdotes into something more than the usual script manual: an invitation to participate in the great human adventure of sharing stories.” — David Bordwell, author of Poetics of Cinema

“I must confess that I had never read a how-to book straight through for the sheer pleasure of it, and I never expected to — until I got my hands on the splendid Writing in Pictures.  Of course, Joe McBride has spent the bulk of his distinguished career working alongside, talking to, and writing about great American filmmakers, so it should come as no surprise that his war stories are as irresistibly entertaining as his professional wisdom is sound.

“A word of warning to would-be screenwriters: in this book you will not find the Six Keys to Compelling Characters, the Seven Secrets of Successful Plotting, or the Eight Jungian Archetypes No Studio Executive Can Resist.  There are no magic formulae here—but if you do have a story to tell, this book will give you the solid practical advice you need to tell it, and sell it, in the most effective way.  Writing in Pictures is a short course in how to think cinematically.  It will change the way you write.  It will change the way you watch.“ – Sam Hamm, screenwriter of Batman, Batman Returns, and ”Homecoming”

“An impressively readable, unpretentious, and remarkably useful handbook on how to, and how not to, write a screenplay. Based on a lifetime of experience and observation, as well as conversations with some of the greats (like Orson Welles, John Ford and Howard Hawks), Joe McBride’s comprehensive  yet very succinct work should become a standard text.” — Peter Bogdanovich, screenwriter, director

Joseph McBride is an associate professor in the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University, where he has been teaching screenwriting and film history since 2002. Among his fifteen other books are biographies of Frank Capra, John Ford, and Steven Spielberg. He lives in Berkeley.

 

Thursday, 16 February 2012, 6:00 – 7:30 PM

Louise Mozingo

Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes

“Louise Mozingo offers us the first serious look at the largest and most ambitious works of twentieth-century landscape architecture in the United States. If suburban bedroom communities represented ‘white flight’ from the city, suburban corporate campuses, estates, and office parks, visually appealing as they were, constituted a parallel middle-class flight from urban social diversity and the realities of industrial work. Pastoral Capitalism is the best of recent studies of the corporate landscape and an incisive history of the making of the contemporary American cultural landscape.”
—Dell Upton, Professor of Architectural History, UCLA

By the end of the twentieth century, America’s suburbs contained more office space than its central cities. Many of these corporate workplaces were surrounded, somewhat incongruously, by verdant vistas of broad lawns and leafy trees. In Pastoral Capitalism, Louise Mozingo describes the evolution of these central (but often ignored) features of postwar urbanism in the context of the modern capitalist enterprise.

These new suburban corporate landscapes emerged from a historical moment when corporations reconceived their management structures, the city decentralized and dispersed into low-density, auto-dependent peripheries, and the pastoral–in the form of leafy residential suburbs–triumphed as an American ideal. Greenness, writes Mozingo, was associated with goodness, and pastoral capitalism appropriated the suburb’s aesthetics and moral code. Like the lawn-proud suburban homeowner, corporations understood a pastoral landscape’s capacity to communicate identity, status, and right-mindedness.

Louise A. Mozingo is a Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. She was a practicing landscape architect for nearly a decade.

 

Wednesday, 15 February 2012, 6:00 – 7:30 PM

Donald Donham

in conversation with

Gillian Hart

Violence in a Time of Liberation: Murder and Ethnicity at a South African Gold Mine, 1994

How can we account for the apparent increase in ethnic violence across the globe? Donald L. Donham develops a methodology for understanding violence that shows why this question needs to be recast. He examines an incident that occurred at a South African gold mine at the moment of the 1994 elections that brought apartheid to a close. Black workers ganged up on the Zulus among them, killing two and injuring many more. While nearly everyone came to characterize the conflict as “ethnic,” Donham argues that heightened ethnic identity was more an outcome of the violence than its cause. Based on his careful reconstruction of events, he contends that the violence was not motivated by hatred of an ethnic other. It emerged, rather, in ironic ways, as capitalist managers gave up apartheid tactics and as black union activists took up strategies that departed from their stated values. National liberation, as it actually occurred, was gritty, contradictory, and incomplete. Given unusual access to the mine, Donham comes to this conclusion based on participant observation, review of extensive records, and interviews conducted over the course of a decade. Violence in a Time of Liberation is a kind of murder mystery that reveals not only who did it but also the ways that narratives of violence, taken up by various media, create ethnic violence after the fact.

Donald L. Donham is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution; History, Power, Ideology: Central Issues in Marxism and Anthropology; and Work and Power in Maale, Ethiopia.

Tuesday, 14 February 2012, 5:30 – 7:00 PM

Paula Fass

in conversation with

Mary Ann Mason

Reinventing Childhood after World War II

and the paperback release of

Inheriting the Holocaust: A Second-Generation Memoir

“The essays in this volume not only survey a broad range of topics central to historical study, such as policy, family life, education, culture, and law, but also offer fresh and provocative interpretive content. The combination of overview and analysis is noteworthy; no existing work matches the depth and significance of these essays. The scholarship in Reinventing Childhood After World War II  is more than sound; it is path-breaking.”—Howard Chudacoff, Brown University

In the Western world, the modern view of childhood as a space protected from broader adult society first became a dominant social vision during the nineteenth century. Many of the West’s sharpest portrayals of children in literature and the arts emerged at that time in both Europe and the United States and continue to organize our perceptions and sensibilities to this day. But that childhood is now being recreated. Taken together, the essays argue that children’s experiences have changed in such dramatic and important ways since 1945 that parents, other adults, and girls and boys themselves have had to reinvent almost every aspect of childhood.

“Paula Fass combines her skills as an historian, writer, and researcher with her position as a child of survivors with memories imparted by her parents to create an unusual memoir of being part of the ‘second generation.’ Her exceptional skills as a writer make this book more than the usual random memoir of information. The result is a touching family story supported by historical fact.”  —Jewish Book World

In Inheriting the Holocaust, Paula S. Fass explores her own past as the daughter of Holocaust survivors to reflect on the nature of history and memory. Her journey through time and relationships begins when she travels to Poland and locates birth certificates of the murdered siblings she never knew. Recovering her family’s story provides Fass with ever more evidence for the perplexing reliability of memory, its winding path toward historical reconstruction, and a re-imagining of the role Jews played in Poland’s past.

Paula S. Fass is Margaret Byrne Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley.

Thursday, 26 January 2012, 6:00 – 7:30 PM

James Martel

Textual Conspiraces: Walter Benjamin, Idolatry and Political Theory

and

Divine Violence: Walter Benjamin & the Eschatology of Sovereignty

In Textual Conspiracies, James R. Martel applies the literary, theological, and philosophical insights of Walter Benjamin to the question of politics and the predicament of the contemporary left. Through the lens of Benjamin’s theories, as influenced by Kafka, of the fetishization of political symbols and signs, Martel looks at the ways in which various political and literary texts “speak” to each other across the gulf of time and space, thereby creating a “textual conspiracy” that destabilizes grand narratives of power and authority and makes the narratives of alternative political communities more apparent.

Divine Violence looks at the question of political theology and its connection to sovereignty. It argues that the practice of sovereignty reflects a Christian eschatology, one that proves very hard to overcome even by left thinkers, such as Arendt and Derrida, who are very critical of it. These authors fall into a trap described by Carl Schmitt whereby one is given a (false) choice between anarchy and sovereignty, both of which are bound within—and return us to—the same eschatological envelope. In Divine Violence, the author argues that Benjamin supplies the correct political theology to help these thinkers. He shows how to avoid trying to get rid of sovereignty (the “anarchist move” that Schmitt tells us forces us to “decide against the decision”) and instead to seek to de-center and dislocate sovereignty so that its mythological function is disturbed. He does this with the aid of divine violence, a messianic force that comes into the world to undo its own mythology, leaving nothing in its wake. Such a move clears the myths of sovereignty away, turning us to our own responsibility in the process. In that way, the author argues, Benjamin succeeds in producing an anarchism that is not bound by Schmitt’s trap but which is sustained even while we remain dazzled by the myths of sovereignty that structure our world.

James R. Martel is Associate Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University.

 

Wednesday, 25 January 2012, 6:00 – 7:30 PM

Aaron Belkin

in conversation with

David Serlin

Bring Me Men:

Military Masculinity and the Benign Façade of American Empire, 1898-2001

“Belkin reveals a dense web of gender confusions and contradictions that   foster a culture of obedience inside the military, while nurturing a dangerously undemocratic set of myths among civilians. This is a timely, significant book.” — Cynthia Enloe, author of Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War

“This gripping account of the strength and weakness, sadism and masochism, masculinity and femininity, boundedness and porosity,
cleanliness and filth that together make up military masculinity – both at the most intimate level of a single troop’s corporeality and the vastest expanse of American imperial power – will shock…”  — Janet Halley, Royall Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

“A must read book for anyone interested in gender and war.” — Joshua
Goldstein, author of War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System  and Vice Versa

A surprising investigation into the performance of gender and the illusion of American power. America’s conception of military masculinity is full of contradictions. To attain masculinity, a warrior must renounce the things in his life that are unmasculine, yet in military practice, warriors are asked to do exactly the opposite. Since America’s overseas ambitions began to expand in 1898, warriors have been encouraged to form intimate relationships with their unmasculine foils, not just to disavow their legitimacy. The creation of a masculine armed force therefore requires a surprising degree of engagement with the unmasculine other–while, at the same time, maintaining a strict separation from the very unmasculine things warriors define themselves against. Aaron Belkin explores these contradictions in great detail, along with ongoing attempts by the American military to maintain and perpetuate them.

Aaron Belkin is associate professor of political science at San Francisco State University and director of the Palm Center at the University of California. He was a MacArthur Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of California Berkeley and a predoctoral fellow at Stanford, and he has published more than twenty-five books, chapters, and peer-reviewed journal articles. His most recent book is United We Stand? Divide and Conquer Politics and the Logic of International Hostility.

Thursday, 19 January 2012, 5:30 – 7:00 PM

Julie Guthman

Weighing in: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism

“If you liked Michael Pollan, this should be your next read. Guthman gives us the research behind the questions we should be asking, but, falling all over ourselves in the rush to consensus, we have overlooked. A self-described Berkeley foodie, Guthman takes on the self-satisfaction of the alternative food movement and places it in rich context, drawing on research in health, economics, labor, agriculture, sociology, and politics. This marvelous, surprising book is a true game-changer in our national conversation about food and justice.” —Anna Kirkland, author of Fat Rights: Dilemmas of Difference and Personhood

“A bold, compelling challenge to conventional thinking about obesity and its fixes, Weighing In is one of the most important books on food politics to hit the shelves in a long time.” —Susanne Freidberg, author of Fresh: A Perishable History

Julie Guthman is Associate Professor in the Community Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Agrarian Dreams? The Paradox of Organic Farming in California (UC Press).

 

Wednesday, 18 January 2012, 6:00 – 7:30 PM

Jasper Rubin

in conversation with

John King

A Negotiated Landscape: The Transformation of the San Francisco Waterfront since 1950

A Negotiated Landscape examines the transformation of San Francisco’s iconic waterfront from the eve of its decline in 1950 to the turn of the millennium. What was once a major shipping port is now best known for leisure and entertainment.

To understand this landscape Jasper Rubin not only explores the built environment but also the major forces that have been at work in its redevelopment. While factors such as new transportation technology and economic restructuring have been essential to the process and character of the waterfront’s transformation, the impact of local, grassroots efforts by planners, activists, and boosters have been equally critical.

While centered on San Francisco, A Negotiated Landscape illuminates the processes by which many American cities have negotiated the demands of public and private interests.

Jasper Rubin is assistant professor of urban studies and planning at San Francisco State University. Before his career as an academic he worked as a planner and senior policy analyst in the San Francisco Planning Department.


Thursday, 12 January 2012, 5:30 – 6:30

Peter Selz: Sketches of a Life in Art

Paul J. Karlstrom

with contributions by

Ann Karlstrom 

This absorbing biography, often conveyed through Peter Selz’s own words, traces the journey of a Jewish-German immigrant from Hitler’s Munich to the United States and on to an important career as a pioneer historian of modern art. Paul J. Karlstrom illuminates key historical and cultural events of the twentieth century as he describes Selz’s extraordinary career—from Chicago’s Institute of Design (New Bauhaus), to New York’s Museum of Modern Art during the transformative 1960s, and as founding director of the University Art Museum at UC Berkeley. Karlstrom sheds light on the controversial viewpoints that at times isolated Selz from his colleagues but nonetheless affirmed his conviction that significant art was always an expression of deep human experience. The book also links Selz’s long life story—featuring close relationships with such major art figures as Mark Rothko, Dore Ashton, Willem de Kooning, Sam Francis, and Christo—with his personal commitment to political engagement.

 

 

Thursday, 8 December 2011, 5:30 – 7:00 PM

Christopher K. Ansell

Pragmatist Democracy: Evolutionary Learning as Public Philosophy

What does it mean to be a political pragmatist? Does it mean a willingness to take opportunities where you find them, acting expediently and in a spirit of compromise? Building on the revival of pragmatist philosophy, Ansell argues that pragmatism means something quite different. It is indeed a problem-driven philosophy that values practical solutions. But its’ ultimate concern is with the development of our human capacities through continuous learning. Pragmatist Democracy demonstrates how “evolutionary learning” can serve as the basis for a powerful public philosophy.

To apply the insights of pragmatism at the societal level, Ansell argues that we need to be concerned about the quality and character of our institutions. A pragmatist is first and foremost an “institutionalist,” because institutions make collective learning possible. But what does it mean to be an “institutionalist”? Does it mean to allow impersonal rules and bureaucratic structures to dominate our lives? The book develops a distinctly pragmatist approach to institutions that seeks to unify their formal and informal qualities in order to make them humane frameworks for evolutionary learning.
Christopher K. Ansell is Professor of Political Science at the University of California-Berkeley.

Wednesday, 7 December 2011, 5:30 – 7:00 PM

Paul Rabinow

The Accompaniment:

Assembling the Contemporary

“One of our most vividly original thinkers, Paul Rabinow has produced a richly informed meditation on collaboration.  It is, in its own terms, an ‘untimely’ book in the best sense, immersed in history, focused on the present, and dedicated to the ‘demands of the day.’  With reflections on art, music, philosophy, biology, as well as on his teachers, mentors, and collaborators, The Accompaniment is the culminating book of an extraordinary career, and secures Rabinow’s place as our leading anthropologist of knowledge.”

—Geoffrey Harpham, director, National Humanities Center

In this culmination of his search for anthropological concepts and practices appropriate to the twenty-first century, Paul Rabinow contends that to make sense of the contemporary anthropologists must invent new forms of inquiry. He begins with an extended rumination on what he gained from two of his formative mentors: Michel Foucault and Clifford Geertz. Reflecting on their lives as teachers and thinkers, as well as human beings, he poses questions about their critical limitations, unfulfilled hopes, and the lessons he learned from and with them.

Paul Rabinow is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He has written numerous books, including Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology and French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

 

Tuesday, 6 December 2011, 5:30 – 7:00 PM

Blakey Vermeule

Why Do We Care about Literary Characters?

“Mind reading, a term oft-circulated within cognitive quarters, refers to the human capacity to infer and keep track of the intentional states of others… Vermule’s main contention is that literature refines this skill and helps readers cultivate ‘Machiavellian intelligence’—her name for the cognitive advantages that may have evolved in the context of an increasingly complex social order.”—Michelle Ty, Qui Parle

Blakey Vermeule wonders how readers become involved in the lives of fictional characters, people they know do not exist. Vermeule examines the ways in which readers’ experiences of literature are affected by the emotional attachments they form to fictional characters and how those experiences then influence their social relationships in real life. She focuses on a range of topics, from intimate articulations of sexual desire, gender identity, ambition, and rivalry to larger issues brought on by rapid historical and economic change. Vermeule discusses the phenomenon of emotional attachment to literary characters primarily in terms of 18th-century British fiction but also considers the postmodern work of Thomas Mann, J. M. Coetzee, Ian McEwan, and Chinua Achebe.

Blakey Vermeule is an associate professor of English at Stanford University and author of The Party of Humanity: Writing Moral Psychology in Eighteenth-Century Britain, also published by Johns Hopkins.

 

Thursday, 1 December 2011, 5:30 – 7:00 PM

Victoria Frede

in conversation with

Alissa Valles

Doubt, Atheism & the 19th Century Russian Intelligentsia

 

“Frede offers an intriguing, complex, often subtle, and
always well-documented answer to the question, How did Russian intellectuals (unlike their European counterparts) come to ground their systemic worldviews on an assertive atheism?”
—David McDonald, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Victoria Frede looks at how and why atheism took on such importance among several generations of Russian intellectuals from the 1820s to the 1860s, drawing on meticulous and extensive research of both published and archival documents, including letters, poetry, philosophical tracts, police files, fiction, and literary criticism. She argues that young Russians were less concerned about theology and the Bible than they were about the moral, political, and social status of the individual person. They sought to maintain their integrity against the pressures exerted by an autocratic state and rigidly hierarchical society. As individuals sought to shape their own destinies and searched for truths that would give meaning to their lives, they came to question the legitimacy both of the tsar and of Russia’s highest authority, God.

Victoria Frede is associate professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley.

 

Wednesday, 30 November 2011, 6:00 – 7:30 PM

Kathy Sloane

Keystone Korner: Portrait of a Jazz Club

During the 1970s, when jazz clubs all over America were folding under the onslaught of rock and roll and disco, San Francisco’s Keystone Korner was an oasis for jazz musicians and patrons. Tucked next to a police station in the city’s North Beach area, the Keystone became known as one of the most important jazz spots in the United States. It was so beloved by musicians that superstars McCoy Tyner, Freddie Hubbard, Ron Carter, and Elvin Jones played a benefit concert just so the club could buy a liquor license. In this book, more than 100 black and white photographs, a collage of oral histories, and a marvelous CD of recordings from the club chronicle the Keystone experience.

Kathy Sloane has been a freelance photographer for 35 years and has exhibited her jazz images in San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles. In New York, she exhibited together with bassist/photographer Milt Hinton. A portfolio of her work was featured in Jazz Times, and five of her images appeared in Ken Burns’s PBS miniseries, Jazz.

 

Tuesday, 29 November 2011, 5:30 – 7:00 PM

Brandi Catanese

The Problem of the Color(blind):

 Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance

“Catanese’s beautifully written and cogently argued book addresses one of the most persistent sociopolitical questions in contemporary culture. She suggests that it is performance and the difference it makes that complicates the terms by which we can even understand ‘multicultural’ and ‘colorblind’ concepts. A tremendously illuminating study that promises to break new ground in the fields of theatre and performance studies, African American studies, feminist theory, cultural studies, and film and television studies.”
—Daphne Brooks, Princeton University

Brandi Wilkins Catanese is Associate Professor of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies and African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

 

 

Wednesday, 16 November 2011, 6:00 – 7:30

Tantra Bensko

Lucid Membrane

Lucid Membrane is “trance-media,” with color coded stories embedded, which can be read by the subconscious as well as the conscious, and also transmedia, with a password in the text that open up the rest of the book in innovative presentations online such as calendar fiction. 

Tantra Bensko, MFA, teaches Fiction Writing and Experimental Fiction through UCLA Extension Writing Program, Writers College, and her own academy online. She runs Exclusive Magazine, the FlameFlower contest, and the Experimental Writing resource site. She recently guest edited the Lucid Fiction at Medulla Review.

 

 

 

 

 Tuesday, 15 November 2011, 5:30 – 7:00 PM

Na’ilah Suad Nasir

in conversation with

Prudence Carter

Racialized Identities: Race and Achievement Among African American Youth

“Bottom line-this volume represents a unique and important body of work. Nasir stakes out new territory as she describes how identities are shaped through local interactions within and outside of school. By anchoring the discussions around African American youth, she interrogates assumptions that have guided practice and policy about learning and motivation. This book will be a classic in the field.”—Carol Lee, Northwestern University

Unique in its attention to the challenges that social and educational stratification pose, as well as to the opportunities that extracurricular activities can offer for African American students’ access to learning, this book brings a deeper understanding of the local and fluid aspects of academic, racial, and ethnic identities. Exploring agency, personal sense-making, and social processes, this book contributes a strong new voice to the growing conversation on the relationship between identity and achievement for African American youth.

Na’ilah Suad Nasir is Associate Professor of Education and African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is coeditor of Improving Access to Mathematics: Diversity and Equity in the Classroom (2006), with Paul Cobb.

Prudence L. Carter is Associate Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Sociology at Stanford University. She is also the Co-Director of the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE). She is the author of the award-winning book, Keepin’ It Real: School Success beyond Black and White (2005), the forthcoming Stubborn Roots: Cultivating Cultural Flexibility and Equity in U.S. & South African Schools, and numerous journal articles and book chapters.

Saturday, 5 November 2011, 2:00 – 4:00 PM

Americ Azevedo

Meditation: Waking Up to Life

Will be of great value to people who have a meditation practice, and to those who have never meditated. …It is a call to waking up, to being fully present in each moment.
—Charles Halpern, Chair and Co-Founder, Center for Contemplative Mind in Society; Author of Making Waves and Riding the Currents: Activism and the Practice of Wisdom

Meditation: Waking Up to Life is a collection of spontaneous reflections on meditation and daily life. These short considerations express the flavor of the meditative experience. Meditation is different for each person. There is no right or wrong way; there is no successful or unsuccessful outcome. In fact, focusing on results is antithetical to the meditative process. In hopes of freeing you to come up with your own personal experience and practice, the author leaves his thoughts: Let go, relax. Be present. Here-and-Now. Find a moment, any moment; anywhere; any time; right now. Meditate into Life.

Americ Azevedo teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a life-long meditator and philosopher of everyday life. In addition to his background in philosophy and world religions, he has taught and worked in computer technology, where he was a pioneer in online education and virtual communities; and in business, as a consultant specializing in company reorganizations. He has conducted “Philosophers’ Forums” in the community, as well as leading meditation retreats. He currently teaches Nonviolence, Engineering Ethics, and Meditation.

 

 

Thursday, 10 November 2011, 6:00 – 7:30 PM

Julian Hoxter

in conversation with

Joseph McBride

Write What You Don’t Know: An Accessible Manual for Screenwriters


Write What You Don’t Know is a friendly manual for aspiring screenwriters. It encourages you to move beyond your comfort zones in search of stories. We all write what we know – how could we not? Writing what you don’t know and doing it in an informed and imaginative way is what makes the process worthwhile.

Hoxter draws on his wealth of experience teaching young film students to offer help with every aspect of the writing process, including how we come up with ideas in the first place. Light hearted and full of insight into the roundabout way film students approach their scripts, it also discusses the important issues like the difference between stories and plots and what your characters should be doing in the middle of act two. Write What You Don’t Know contains examples and case studies from a wide range of movies, both mainstream and alternative such as The Virgin Spring, Die Hard, The Ipcress File, For The Birds, (500) Days of Summer, Juno, Up In The Air, Knocked Up and Brick.

Julian Hoxter is the Screenwriting Coordinator and Assistant Professor of Screenwriting in the Cinema Department of San Francisco State University. He is an award winning educator and filmmaker whose films have been shown in festivals around the world. He has taught screenwriting and filmmaking in the US and the UK for over 15 years.

 

Thursday, 3 November 2011, 5:30 – 7:00 PM

Charles P. Henry, Robert L. Allen & Robert Chrisman

The Obama Phenomenon: Toward a Multiracial Democracy

“These eminent scholars of African American politics provide rich, multigenerational perspectives on the Obama election and the first year of his presidency. A significant and distinctive contribution to the emerging scholarship on Obama that will be useful in African American studies and political science courses.”–Robert C. Smith, coauthor of American Politics and the African American Quest for Universal Freedom

Barack Obama’s campaign and electoral victory demonstrated the dynamic nature of American democracy. Beginning as a special issue of The Black Scholar, this probing collection illustrates the impact of “the Obama phenomenon” on the future of U.S. race relations through readings on Barack Obama’s campaign as well as the idealism and pragmatism of the Obama administration. Some of the foremost scholars of African American politics and culture from an array of disciplines–including political science, theology, economics, history, journalism, sociology, cultural studies, and law–offer critical analyses of topics as diverse as Obama and the media, Obama’s connection with the hip hop community, the public’s perception of first lady Michelle Obama, voter behavior, and the history of racial issues in presidential campaigns since the 1960s.

Charles P. Henry is the H. Michael and Jeanne Williams Chair of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Long Overdue: The Politics of Racial Reparations.

Robert L. Allen is an adjunct professor of African American studies and ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytic History.

Robert Chrisman is the editor-in-chief and publisher of The Black Scholar.

 

Thursday, 3 November 2011, 6:00 – 7:30 PM

At the Musical Offering Café

Barry Guerrero

discusses Jens Malte Fischer’s book

Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler is the best-sourced and most balanced biography available about the composer, a nuanced and intriguing portrait of his dramatic life set against the backdrop of early 20th century America and fin de siècle Europe.

Barry Guerrero is a musician whose instruments are tuba, bass trombone and utility percussion, and is a retail music buyer for the Musical Offering and Rasputin Music.  He has played in performances of almost all of the major works of Gustav Mahler, mostly with The Redwood Symphony. He has played some of the Mahler symphonies on tuba, and as a utility percussionist. Guerrero has also been studying the scores for many years, and is deeply involved at mahlerdiscussionboard.com.

Jens Malte Fischer is professor of the history of theater at the University of Munich. He writes regularly for leading German newspapers and periodicals and is the author of several books, including a documentary study of Wagner’s anti-Semitism. He lives in Munich, Germany.

Stewart Spencer is an acclaimed translator whose work includes biographies of Richard Wagner, Cosima Wagner, and W.A. Mozart, all published by Yale University Press.

 

Wednesday, 2 November 2011, 5:30 – 7:00 PM

Robert Alter

In Conversation with Ron Hendel

The Art of Biblical Poetry

&

The Art of Biblical Narrative

Three decades ago, renowned literary expert Robert Alter radically expanded the horizons of biblical scholarship by recasting the Bible as not only a human creation but a work of literary art deserving studied criticism. In The Art of Biblical Poetry, his companion to the seminal The Art of Bibical Narrative, Alter takes his analysis beyond narrative craft to investigate the use of Hebrew poetry in the Bible. Updated with a new preface, myriad revisions, and passages from Alter’s own critically acclaimed biblical translations, The Art of Biblical Poetry is an indispensable tool for understanding the Bible and its poetry.

Robert Alter is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a recipient of the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime contributions to American letters, he lives in Berkeley, California.

 

 

Thursday, 27 October 2011, 5:30 – 7:00 PM

Ala Alryyes

A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said

 

“Expertly introduced, edited, and translated from the Arabic by Ala Alryyes, A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said offers the fullest historical, cultural, linguistic, and religious contexts for an understanding of this fascinating American slave narrative.”
—Werner Sollors, Harvard University

Born to a wealthy family in West Africa around 1770, Omar Ibn Said was abducted and sold into slavery in the United States, where he came to the attention of a prominent North Carolina family after filling “the walls of his room with piteous petitions to be released, all written in the Arabic language,” as one local newspaper reported. Ibn Said soon became a local celebrity, and in 1831 he was asked to write his life story, producing the only known surviving American slave narrative written in Arabic. In A Muslim American Slave, scholar and translator Ala Alryyes offers both a definitive translation and an authoritative edition of this singularly important work, lending new insights into the early history of Islam in America and exploring the multiple, shifting interpretations of Ibn Said’s narrative by the nineteenth-century missionaries, ethnographers, and intellectuals who championed it.

Ala Alryyes is a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the department of Comparative Literature, Yale University.

 

 

Wednesday, 26 October 2011, 5:30 – 7:00 PM

Patricia Zavella

I’m Neither Here Nor There:

Mexicans’ Quotidian Struggles with Migration and Poverty

I’m Neither Here nor There explores how immigration influences the construction of family, identity, and community among Mexican Americans and migrants from Mexico. Based on long-term ethnographic research, Patricia Zavella describes how poor and working-class Mexican Americans and migrants to California’s central coast struggle for agency amid the region’s deteriorating economic conditions and the rise of racial nativism in the United States. Zavella also examines tensions within the Mexican diaspora based on differences in legal status, generation, gender, sexuality, and language. She proposes “peripheral vision” to describe the sense of displacement and instability felt by Mexican Americans and Mexicans who migrate to the United States as well as by their family members in Mexico.

Patricia Zavella is Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Women’s Work and Chicano Families: Cannery Workers of the Santa Clara Valley and a co-author of Sunbelt Working Mothers: Reconciling Family and Factory. Zavella is a co-editor of Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader, Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios, and Women and Migration in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: A Reader all also published by Duke University Press.

 

Wednesday, 19 October 2011, 6:00 – 7:30 PM

Ann Brooks

Social Theory in Contemporary Asia 

 “Professor Brooks shows consequently that the intimate and emotional cultures that have been described by Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck with respect to the West have not arrived in Asia or at least that they have not become visible and permanent aspects of the social landscape.” – Bryan Turner

 Philosophical debates around individualization and the implications for intimacy, reflexivity and identity have occupied a central part of social and cultural theorizing in the West in the last decade. In fact, late modernity has become conspicuously engaged with issues of intimacy, reflexivity and identity. The author analyses the relevance of these debates in the context of contemporary Asia and combines an analysis of significant social theorists including Beck, Giddens, Bourdieu, McNay, Adkins, and Ong with an application of these debates to social, political and cultural contexts. Drawing on empirical research, case studies, global reports, media and academic literature, the book provides a relevant, wide-ranging and contemporary analysis of the debates on Asian culture and society.

Ann Brooks is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley from 2011-2012. Ann’s PhD is from the University of London (1995).  She is author of Academic Women (Open University Press, 1997); Postfeminisms: Feminism, Cultural Theory and Cultural Forms (Routledge, 1997); Gendered Work in Asian Cities: The New Economy and Changing Labour Markets (Ashgate, 2006) and Gender and the Restructured University: Changing Management and Culture in Higher Education (with Alison Mackinnon) (Open University Press, 2001). Her most recent books are: Social Theory in Contemporary Asia: Intimacy, Reflexivity and Identity (Routledge, 2010); and Gender, Emotions and Labour Markets (with Theresa Devasahayam) (Routledge, 2010). Her latest book is Emotions in Transmigration: Transformation, Movement and Identity (with Ruth Simpson) (forthcoming Palgrave 2012), for which she is undertaking original research in the San Fransisco Bay area. She is also writing an undergraduate textbook on Popular Culture, Hybridity and Identity with Palgrave/Macmillan for 2012.

 

Wednesday, 12 October 2011, 6:00 – 7:30 PM

Mark Bevir

The Making of British Socialism

“Mark Bevir skillfully analyzes the complex ideological strands that were woven together to form the political thought of British socialism and he deftly corrects the numerous misunderstandings that have accumulated in the secondary literature. He takes the intellectual history of socialism in this period to a new level of sophistication.”    -  Ben Jackson, University of Oxford

The Making of British Socialism provides a new interpretation of the emergence of British socialism in the late nineteenth century, demonstrating that it was not a working-class movement demanding state action, but a creative campaign of political hope promoting social justice, personal transformation, and radical democracy. Mark Bevir shows that British socialists responded to the dilemmas of economics and faith against a background of diverse traditions, melding new economic theories opposed to capitalism with new theologies which argued that people were bound in divine fellowship.

Mark Bevir is professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Democratic Governance (Princeton).

 

Thursday, 6 October 2011, 5:30 – 7:00 PM

Robert Bellah 

Religion in Human Evolution 

“This great book is the intellectual harvest of the rich academic life of a leading social theorist who has assimilated a vast range of biological, anthropological, and historical literature in the pursuit of a breathtaking project. Robert Bellah first searches for the roots of ritual and myth in the natural evolution of our species and then follows with the social evolution of religion up to the Axial Age. In the second part of his book, he succeeds in a unique comparison of the origins of the handful of surviving world-religions, including Greek philosophy. In this field I do not know of an equally ambitious and comprehensive study.” – ­Jürgen Habermas                                                                              

Robert Bellah is the Elliott Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and coauthor of Habits of the Heart. In 2000, President Clinton awarded Bellah the National Humanities Award for the Public Understanding of Religion.  Religion in Human Evolution is the result of Bellah’s lifetime interest in the evolution of religion, and thirteen years of work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo by Meriel Melendrez