Culture, Gender and Aesthetics
Research Focus Group

Conveners

Maurizia Boscagli (Associate Professor, English), boscagli@english.ucsb.edu
Bhaskar Sarkar (Assistant Professor, Film Studies), sarkar@filmstudies.ucsb.edu


Statement of Purpose

Our Research Focus Group analyzes contemporary and twentieth century culture from a materialist and feminist perspective in order to study how particular textualizations of gender and aesthetics in popular, literary, and visual culture can offer alternatives to, or forms of resistance to, the culture of capital.

Past Activities, 2003-2005

We have met as a reading group, over a period of two years, during which we have hosted, with the help of Andrea Fontenot, Emil Davis, Gina Valentino, and Susan Keller, graduate students in English, four talks:

1) Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Out of the Archives and Into the Street: The Fae Richards Archive” (Reading: Ann Cvetkovich, “In the archives of Lesbian Feelings: Documentary and Popular Culture”) 11/21/03

2) Swati Chattopadhyay, “Culture and Subalterneity”, (Reading: Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Subaltern Histories and Post-Enlightenment Rationalism”) 12/03/04

3) A discussion of Ousmane Sembene’s film “Moolade”, led by Jude Akudinobi (Film Studies) and Stefan Miescher (History) 2/04/05

4) Erika Rappaport, “The History of Tea: Chinese Tea, the Nation, and Modernity” 5/27/05

Upcoming Activities, 2005-06

For the coming academic year, 2005-06, we are planning a lecture series and a reading group on the theme “Culture and Ornament”. The series will be organized around three related issues: 1) gender and style 2) value and the aesthetics of the useless 3) the academy and cultural capital.
We start with the Czech architect Adolf Loos’ 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime” to examine the history and cultural semiotics of the ornament in the twentieth century, with its penchant to override function and use value in the name of erotic, useless, style, the feminine and the primitive. We take to task each of these qualities of the ornament to address the very issue of the modern (post-Arnoldian) ornamentality of culture, both for orthodox Marxism and for capital. In so doing we come to address the split between ornament and the production of value in nowadays academy and in the culture in which American university is situated. The aim is to interrogate and reflect upon our work as cultural producers as a possible means of cultural resistance and social change. This interrogation of our own work and pedagogy is particularly important at a particular historical moment of cultural retrenchment and conservatism, when the “uselessness”, and “femininity” of the Humanities and Social Sciences is pitted against the “function” of the scientific disciplines.
During this past year we have been in touch with the members of the CISM research group here on campus, led by Professor Sonia Tamar Seeman (Ethnomusicology), and, given the convergence of our interests and methodology, we have tentatively planned a few events in conjunction with them. The year-long process of presentations and discussions will lead us to an end of the year symposium on the them of “Culture and Ornament”.

Invited Speakers:
Aranye Fradenburg (UCSB, English)
Fred Moten (UCI, English and Comparative Literature)
Bishnuprya Gosh (UCSB, English)
Mary Hancock (UCSB, Anthropology)
Heidi Brevic (Brown, French)
Peter Wollen (UCLA, Film and Television)

Reading List:
Antonio Gramsci
Walter Benjamin
Ernst Bloch
Etienne Balibar
Louis Althusser
Marianne Doane
Slavoj Zizek
Stuart Hall
Dipesh Chakrabarty
Antonio Negri
Gayatri Spivak
Laura Kipnis
Donna Haraway

Participants

Andrea Fontenot (graduate student, English)
Emily Davis (graduate student, English)
Gina Valentino (graduate student, English)
Susan Keller (graduate student, English)