The Center for the Humanities is excited to invite you to our May events which include screenings, lectures, performances, readings, seminars, workshops, exhibitions, gallery tours, and more.
Thank you for being a part of the conversation. We hope to see you at the Graduate Center, CUNY this Spring!
John Weiners: Love in the Archive
Mon, May 2, 6:30 pm | Room C201-202
Michael Seth Stewart, Basil King
Michael Seth Stewart, Graduate Center alum and editor of Stars Seen in Person:Selected Journals John Wieners (City Lights Publishers, 2015), gives a talk detailing his love affair with the letters and journals of poet John Wieners, and the primacy of love in Wieners' poetry and prosody. He will be joined by painter, writer, and Black Mountain College alum Basil King, who will perform a beautiful poem about his friend John Wieners.
Turnstyle Reading Series: Rosamond King & Helen Phillips
Tue, May 3, 6:30 pm | Skylight Room 9100
Faculty authors and graduating students from the four City University of New York MFA Programs in Creative Writing (City College, Brooklyn College, Hunter College, and Queens College) come together for readings of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama and translation at the Graduate Center.
Turnstyle Series Featured Faculty: Helen Phillips (The Beautiful Bureaucrat, And Yet They Were Happy) Rosamond King (Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination)
MFA Candidates: Andrew Stone (Brooklyn) Courtney Bush (Brooklyn) Will Lung (City College) Carly Rubin (City College) Meagan Washington (Hunter) Dustin Parmenter (Queens College) Lori Balaban (City College)
Fight for the City: School Desegregation, Race, Resistance, and Class Struggle
Wed, May 4, 6:00 pm | Room C198
Matthew Delmont,Ujju Aggarwal, Nelson Flores, Brian Jones, Celina Su, Jeanne Theoharis
Over the past year, there has been increased attention to—and growing struggle over—public school segregation. In New York City, two school districts—District 13 (Brooklyn) and District 3 (Manhattan)—have been site of heated and contentious rezoning battles. Referred to at times as civil, class, race, or turf wars, these contestations over the lines that dictate public school boundaries have illuminated the ways that racism, fear, and class struggle continue to drive efforts to stymie public school desegregation. Struggles for educational justice have long roots in New York City, yet are largely absent from our history books, newspapers, and public conversation, and often only pictured as having taken place in the South. What changes when we recognize the long history of white resistance to Black and Latino organizing against school segregation and how can this history shift how we understand our present moment? How has the media played a key role in naturalizing white and middle class perspectives and obscured school segregation and inequity in the city? Please join us for an urgent and timely conversation where we will discuss these and other questions Dr. Matthew Delmont (Professor of History, Arizona State University), who will speak about his new book, Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation. Nelson Flores (University of Pennsylvania), Jeanne Theoharis (Brooklyn College, CUNY), Celina Su (Brooklyn College & CUNY Graduate Center), Brian Jones (CUNY Graduate Center), and Ujju Aggarwal (CUNY Graduate Center) will join the conversation.
This event kicks off a new series organized by the Center for the Humanities on schools, policing, cities, and racial justice where we hope to create spaces for co-learning and collaboration among educators, community organizers, artists, researchers, and activists.
Translation Theory Today: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Critical Theory
Thu, May 5, 10:00 am – Fri, May 6, 8:30 pm | The Skylight Room (9100)
Keynotes: Homi Bhabha, Edwin Frank
Participants: Barbara Epler, Jonathan Galassi, Jill Schoolman
The fifth annual interdisciplinary conference on Critical Theory, this event will examine translation theory through a wide range of disciplines and theoretical approaches, including literary theory, psychoanalysis, identity theory, semiotics, philosophy, social theory, cultural studies, postcolonialism, gender studies, and political theory.
This conference will employ Critical Theory to examine all aspects of translation—its history, evolution, practice, and effects on language, identity, culture, and society—in order to interrogate the functions of and standards for a successful translation.
Thursday, May 5th, 6:30pm: Keynote lecture by Edwin Frank
Friday, May 6th, 11:30am: discussion with Barbara Epler, Jonathan Galassi, and Jill Schoolman
Friday, May 6th, 6:30pm: Keynote lecture "Critical Theory Today" by Homi Bhabha.Free, Reservations Required. To reserve seats for this event, click here. For more information, click here.
The Political Biography of the Caribbean & Other Lessons: A Symposium in Honor of Colin A. Palmer
Thu, May 5, 12:00 pm to 6:00 pm | The Skylight Room (9100)
Nicole Burrowes, Peter Hudson, Aisha Khan, George Mentore, Harvey Neptune, Don Robotham, David Scott, Faith Smith, Alissa Trotz,Herman L. Bennett
Over the last decade, Colin A. Palmer has produced a prodigious amount of scholarship on the Modern Caribbean, most notably the British West Indies. His monographs Eric Williams & the Making of the Modern Caribbean (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Cheddi Jagan and the Politics of Power: British Guiana’s Struggle for Independence (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press,2010); and Freedom’s Children: The 1938 Labor Rebellion and the Birth of Modern Jamaica (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014) are transforming how scholars think and might write about the modern political history of the Caribbean. Indeed, this body of work underscores that Colin has crafted a biography of the Caribbean with which present and future scholars have to contend.
Symposium Schedule
12:00 – 12:15 Welcome & Introductory Remarks Herman L. Bennett (The Graduate Center)
12:15 - 2:00 Eric Williams & the Making of the Modern Caribbean
Participants: Peter Hudson (UCLA), Aisha Khan (NYU), Harvey Neptune (Temple)
2:15 - 4:00 Cheddi Jagan & the Politics of Power: British Guiana's Struggle for Independence
Participants: Nicole Burrowes (Brown), George Mentore (UVA), Alissa Trotz (Toronto)
4:15 - 6:00Freedom’s Children: 1938 & the Birth of the Modern Jamaica
Participants: Donald Robotham (The Graduate Center), David Scott (Columbia), Faith Smith (Brandeis)
Fri, May 6, 9:00 am - 6:00 pm | Martin E. Segal Theatre
Amitav Ghosh, Margaret Cohen, Charne Lavery, Jason Rudy, Cannon Schmitt, Chris Taylor, Hester Blum
Please join us for the annual CUNY Graduate Center Victorian Committee's conference. The topic this year is "Ocean's 19: Currents in Victorian Transoceanic Studies.” We will look at Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean studies, transatlantic maritime practices, ecocritical and geological readings, and Victorian marine science. Speakers are Margaret Cohen, Charne Lavery, Jason Rudy,Cannon Schmitt, Chris Taylor, and Hester Blum, with Amitav Ghosh giving the keynote address.
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He is the author of one book of non-fiction, a collection of essays and eight novels, of which the most recent is Flood of Fire. His books have won prizes in India, Europe and Myanmar and he has been awarded honorary degrees by the Sorbonne, Paris, and by Queens College, New York. He divides his time between Brooklyn, Goa and Kolkata.
Eminent literary and critical theorist Homi K. Bhabha will discuss translation’s impact on the construction of social memory, historical narrative, and cultural identity. Through an examination of today’s globalized world, Dr. Bhabha will highlight translation’s ability to foster communication while also emphasizing disparity, simultaneously illuminating and distorting meaning. One of the foremost figures in postcolonial studies, Dr. Bhabha is the author of The Location of Culture and is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. This lecture is the fourth installment of the “Critical Theory Today” lecture series and is the keynote talk of the “Translation Theory Today” conference.
Free, Reservations Required. To reserve seats for this lecture, click here.
Murray Perahia: A Conversation with Music
Mon, May 9, 6:30 pm | Elebash Recital Hall
Leo Carey, Murray Perahia
In 40 years of concerts on the world’s great stages, Murray Perahia has become one of the most venerated pianists of our time. He discusses his stellar career and shares some musical excerpts with Leo Carey, senior editor and contributor at the New Yorker.
Ariella Azoulay—The Imperial Condition of Photography in Palestine: Archives, Looting, and the Figure of the Infiltrator
Wed, May 11, 6:30 pm | Elebash Recital Hall
Ariella Azoulay, Susan Buck-Morss
A vast treasure of books, documents, and photographs looted from Palestinians in 1948 became part of the Israeli archives established or reorganized after the founding of the Israeli state. But this did not remain a single past event. The looting of archives has been ongoing and should not be understood merely as a violation of Palestinian property and rights, but rather as an ongoing performance of national sovereignty in which the persona of the “infiltrator” plays a foundational role. The looting has been one of the acts by which this sovereignty has been performed as the ongoing project of partition of populations into distinct, differentiated groups, whereby violence among the two groups is both the pretext and the effect. Considering the archive as a medium for the performance of national sovereignty, Azoulay will refute the Schmittian conceptualization of sovereignty as power that hinges on brief, singular moments of decision. Rather than the full control of the archive that Schmitt's conceptualization implies, she will conceptualize the archive as the ongoing struggle over sovereignty that takes place in and through it.
The lecture will be followed by a discussion with Susan Buck-Morss, Professor of Political Philosophy, The Graduate Center, CUNY.
This seminar brings together students, faculty and the public for an informal seminar on the development of the essay as a literary and social form.
Ian Buruma studied Chinese at Leyden University and film at Nihon University, Tokyo. He has worked as the cultural editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review in Hongkong, as the foreign editor of The Spectator in London. He has won the LA Times Book Award for Murder in Amsterdam, received the Erasmus Prize in 2008, and the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for Theater of Cruelty. His books include Bad Elements, Occidentalism, Anglomania, Year Zero, and Their Promised Land. He teaches at Bard College and contributes regularly to the New York Review of Books, and the New Yorker. He writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate.
RSVP REQUIRED: please email tharlin@gradcenter.cuny.edu if you are interested in attending.
Fri, May 13, 9:30 am - 7:30 pm | Elebash Recital Hall
The complex and dynamic relationship between consciousness and revolution is essential to the strategic analysis of the hegemonic forms of politics, economics, thought, and action we are currently caught in. It is also central to the collective imagination and realization of other worlds. This conference reflects on legacies of revolutionary thought and practice and considers how these can be reimagined and reenergized within current contingencies. How has internationalism come to terms with new regimes of globalization and polity? How do the logics of financialization, the working of institutions, and money itself mediate our daily lives and sense of possibility with regard to social change? With major foundations investing in and influencing struggles for social justice, the question arises, who owns these movements? What does an anticapitalist critique of “social justice” entrepreneurship models look like? How are we, activists and scholars alike, forging new connections between consciousness and revolution building?
Schedule
9:30am–10:00am | Welcome
10:00am–12:00pm | Internationalism
Panelists: Christina Heatherton, Rob Robinson, Cindi Katz, Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Moderator)
12:00pm–2:00pm | Money
Panelists: David Stein, Peter Hitchcock, Juan De Lara, David Harvey (Moderator)
Thu, May 19, May 26, 12:00-3:00pm | The James Gallery
Christian Palestinian Archive (CPA) is a growing collection of scans of archival documents, documenting the personal histories of Christian Palestinian communities worldwide. Unlike other archives, the CPA is not engaged in material conservation, and all “original” photographs are returned after being scanned and added to the archive.
On select Thursdays in April and May, an open call will be held in the James Gallery for members of local Christian Palestinian communities to submit their photographs and materials for the archive.
If you are unable to attend an open call but would like to contribute to the archive, please contact christianpalestinianarchive@gmail.com.
Queer Circuits in Archival Times: Experimentation and Critique of Networked Data
Fri, May 20, 9:30 am – 7:30 pm | Martin E. Segal Theatre
Keynote: Sandy Stone
We live in a world in which quantified understandings of embodiment and sociality have taken on an increasingly central place in the strategies of capital circulation and state control. The messy entanglements of queer lives and bodies are archived for speculative monetization by a variety of proprietary digital networks whose central motivation is to serve advertisements rather than to promote vibrant and just social forms. While gender-neutral marriage law is nationalized and gay and soon trans people are slowly integrated into the military, whistleblower Chelsea Manning sits in jail. For this conference we mobilize the insights of queer theory and queer sociality to critically reimagine the possibilities of these growing archives of the everyday. We are interested in digital experimentation and inventive critique to theorize LGBTQ lives in a strikingly fluid legal, political, and media landscape. Just as important however, we see queer thought playing an essential role in analyzing social life beyond the LGBT. How might we queer these digital networks that are increasingly constitutive of how we understand and witness the social? How can we reflexively and critically engage with queer social formations that seem to resonate with data capitalism? What archival practices and performances can help reinvigorate the queer histories forgotten in the linear narratives of gay progress?
Participants are encouraged to reflect on these questions and others that use queer theoretical frames to engage with digital media and archiving. We will give priority to those whose work focuses on digital experimentation in the practices of everyday: queerly social media, haptic reorganizations of boundaries between body/world and body/mind, hacked software and dubious hardware, monstrous digital assemblages across space/time/identity/species.
CONFERENCE SCHEDULE
9:30-9:45: Opening Remarks (Benjamin Haber)
10:00-11:40: The Politics of Queer Archives
Rustem Ertug Altinay “Digital BDSM Archives and Queer Political Critique in Turkey”
Jason Baumann “Sex, Drugs, Rock-N-Roll and AIDS”: Iris de la Cruz Haunting the Media Archive”
Margaret Galvan “Recuperating Queer Networks: Alison Bechdel & Grassroots Politics”
Shyamolie Singh “Archival Resistance in Contemporary Queer India”
Respondent: Jaime Shearn Coan, English, CUNY Graduate Center
11:50-1:30: Really Gay: Social Circuits of Sex and Identity
Harris Kornstein “Real Names, Digital Drag: Queer Strategies of Obfuscation”
Patrick Sweeney “Ways of Seeing Sexuality: Resisting the ontological primacy of biology and challenging the oculocentric imperative”
Mikhel Proulx “Protocol and Performativity: Queer Selfies and the Coding of Identities Online”
T Fleischmann and Benjamin Haber “Gheez this is Uncomfortable: Performing the Impotence of Masculinity”
Respondent: Edward Miller, Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island
2:40-4:20: Deathly or Inhuman? Queer Life and the Biopolitics of the Digital
Shaka McGlotten “Black Data”
Josh Scannell “Inhumanist Archiving and Smart City Surveillance”
Jake Silver “Deathly Energies in the Wake of the Digital”
Scott W. Schwartz “Uncontrollable Knowledge: Vulnerability in the Age of Algorithms”
Respondent: Daniel Sander, Performance Studies, NYU
4:30-6:10: Queer Data, Queer Method
Melissa Rogers “Soft Circuitry: Queer Craft as Social Media”
Jen Jack Gieseking “Size Matters to Lesbians Too: Queer Feminist Interventions into the Scale of Big Data”
Noah Tsika “CompuQueer: Machine Reading, Memetic Mutation, and the Search for Queer Cinema Online”
Marika Cifor “Quantified Sex: Queer Archival Practices of Sexuality and Self”
Respondent: Amy Herzog, Associate Professor of Media Studies at Queens College and Coordinator of the Film Studies Program at the CUNY Graduate Center
6:30-7:30: Keynote by Sandy Stone- “Impalpable Desires”
Please visit the conference website for full schedule and more information: http://queercircuits.com/
The conference will take place at the CUNY Graduate Center and a variety of locations throughout the city. Click here for more information.
Between Neighborhoods
Thu, May 26, 4:00 pm - 7:30 pm | Martin E. Segal Theatre
Freddy Castiblanco, Amy Chazkel, Seth Fein, Peter L'Official, Mary Louise Pratt, Laura Wexler
How have Queens neighborhoods challenged interborough and interamerican imperialisms during the last fifty years? If we view outerborough and third world as ideological neighbors, how does this challenge geopolitical and disciplinary boundaries, notably of Latin America and Latin American Studies? How can art and scholarship productively inhabit the same neighborhood, to examine and dynamically express the present and the past? This panel brings together scholars, critics, and activists to discuss these issues as explored in the audiovisual installation Between Neighborhoods: outerspace innerborough.3 by audiovisual historian-filmmaker Seth Fein. The multimedia work examines the forces that constructed the Unisphere, Robert Moses's iconic monument to 1960s globalization from above in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, and the forces of globalization from below that redefine it in Queens today. Presented in the Founders Lounge adjacent to the café on the main level of The Graduate Center from May 16 through June 16, the installation was created for the Fiftieth Anniversary meeting of the Latin American Studies Association in New York City, which co-sponsors this forum where Freddy Castiblanco (Terraza 7), Amy Chazkel (CUNY), Peter L'Official (Bard), Mary Louise Pratt (NYU), and Laura Wexler (Yale) join the artist for a public conversation.
Event Schedule:
4:00-5:30pm: Public viewing of the multimedia work in the Martin E. Segal Theatre
5:30-7:30pm: Public forum in Martin E. Segal Theatre
