Author Events
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.
Wednesday, 15 February 2012, 6:00 – 7:30 PM
Donald Donham
in conversation with
Gillian Hart
for a reading and discussion of his new book
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.
Thursday, 16 February 2012, 6:00 – 7:30 PM
Louise Mozingo
for a reading and discussion of her new book
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.
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
for a reading and discussion of McBride’s new book
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.
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, 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.
Past Events
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.
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.
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.
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
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.