SECT II: "Present Tense Empires, Race, Bio-Politics"
August 15-26, 2005
Presenters
Ien Ang, Director of the Center for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney, Australia
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Professor, University of Chicago
Lisa Lowe, Processor, UC San Diego
Achille Mbembe, Professor, University of the Witwatersrand
Visiting Instructors
Mary Louise Pratt, Professor, New York University
Ella Shoha, Professor, New York University
Special Guest Musical Performer
David Borgo, Assistant Professor, UC San Diego
UCHRI hosted the second annual Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory (SECT II) on the topic "Present Tense Empires, Race, Bio-Politics". Running daily over two intensive weeks, SECT II was attended by 60 participants from around the world.
The plenary sessions were taught by Ien Ang, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lisa Lowe and Achille Mbembe, supplemented by visits from Mary Louise Pratt and Ella Shohat. The many exhilarating highlights included an art exhibit and discussion of work by noted artists Yong Soon Min and Allan de Souza, as well as a jazz concert by acclaimed saxophonist David Borgo and quintet launching his new CD of South African music, Ubuntu.
Graphic Design: Carol Evers
(click to enlarge)
Program Overview
SECT is an intensive two-week summer program for graduate students and
faculty from the UC system and elsewhere, as well as other scholars,
professionals, and public intellectuals. The Seminar brought
together four distinguished instructors and a group of 50-60 students
to study a pressing issue or theme in contemporary critical theory, in
both its "pure" and "applied" modes. SECT is neither exclusively an
introductory survey course nor an advanced research seminar. Rather, it
is an academy or "laboratory" where students and faculty at all levels
of previous experience can study with scholars involved in important
and creative theoretical thought. Truly innovative work is of necessity
both fundamental and advanced, hence needs to be presented in ways that
are simultaneously accessible and challenging for the widest range of
scholars.
The second annual UCHRI Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory focused on "Empires, Race, Bio-Politics".
The Seminar linked our present both theoretically and politically to the
pasts that have produced it. Colonial domination and racial subjection
continue to function as rule, representation, and rationalization
through bio-politics. They mobilize bodily assertions and ascriptions,
penetrations and impositions, rules and commands in and as culture,
class, sexuality and gender. At the heart of these relations of
domination and structures of social definition, of modernity and its
shadows, are not just residual but renewed relations of power, of
violence and distress, of destruction and death.
The Seminar addressed these continuities and discontinuities between
the colonial and the postcolonial, mapping their respective racial
registers, their histories and politics, their materialities and
traces, their bio-political assumptions and expressions. Concerned with
questions of political and aesthetic representation, the Seminar interrogated prevailing assumptions about home, homeland and
homogeneities, chart landscapes of metropolitan urbanity and provincial
marginality, and attend to indigeneities and invasion as much in
structures of feeling as materially and militarily. These questions in
turn prompt reconsideration of travel, shifting trade and consumptive
routes, media of movement, circulations and connectivities, but also
war and terror, and the concomitant concerns of memory and forgetting,
trauma and distrust, what remains buried and what buried alive.
The Seminar focused as much on the profound challenges to
contemporary empires as on the historical conditions of their making
and masking. Woven into these theoretical threads was a concern
with the state of the modern nation-state, with racial states of being
and belonging, rule and regulation, with the shaping and shriveling of
civil society, and with the relational politics of abundance and
superfluity, life and death.
Participants were encouraged to think experimentally and critically,
reflecting on prevailing structures of thought while dynamically
engaging intellectual inheritances and pushing for theoretical
innovations.
Schedule
Plenary and break-out sessions, presentations, and other programs were conducted daily from 10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m. and 3:00-6:00 p.m. at the
UC Humanities Research Institute, located on the UC Irvine campus.
Evening activities included academic, experimental, and social
events.