The CUNY Graduate Center Postcolonial Studies Group Colloquium Series 2010-2011
 
Nicole Rizzuto
Oklahoma State University
 
Confession and the Juridical Crisis of the Colonial State in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat
 
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat (1967) circles around the Emergency in Kenya, a traumatic historical event of anticolonial insurgency and counter-insurgency. In detailing this period of indefinite detention and torture undertaken in the name of a benevolent civilizing mission, the novel states that the struggle over two specific losses suffered under British colonialism are at the heart of the Emergency. Those losses are land and freedom.  And yet, the work’s formal strategies simultaneously challenge this direct statement by indirectly constituting the Emergency as an event whose losses exceed that of territory and control of the polity; the Emergency is staged also as a crisis of the juridico-legal order by which the category “human” becomes the contested site of, and justification for, exceptional state violence. Placing Ngữgi’s writing in conversation with Judith Butler’s and Giorgio Agamben’s theorizations of sovereignty and bare life in modernity reveals how the novel might displace a Euro-centered trajectory in Trauma Studies.  By elaborating a state of exception in Africa under colonial rule, A Grain of Wheat both calls for and enacts what Michael Rothberg terms “multi-directional memory,” by which the insights of Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies illuminate each other while addressing the ethico-politics of responding to occluded pasts.
 
April 1st at 2 p.m.
CUNY Graduate Center, Room 5409
 
All are welcome
 
Nicole Rizzuto is Assistant Professor of English at Oklahoma State University. She has published on issues of testimony and trauma in journals such as World Picture and Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, and is completing a book manuscript entitled Spectral Witnesses: Testimony, Historical Memory, and the Modern Novel.
 
The CUNY Graduate Center is located at 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016.
The Postcolonial Studies Group is a chartered organization of the Doctoral Students’ Council. Please visit our website at www.opencuny.org/psg. Questions? Email Lily Saint at lsaint@gc.cuny.edu

The CUNY Graduate Center
Postcolonial Studies Group Colloquium Series 2010-2011

The Postcolonial Studies Group presents:

Kandice Chuh
The Graduate Center, CUNY

How Monique Truong’s Book of Salt
is a 12th-century Novel

March 4th at 2 p.m.
CUNY Graduate Center, Room 5414
All are welcome.

In this talk, Chuh responds to the ways that the consequences of the nation:narration connection so compellingly argued by many scholars continues to shape critical inquiry and to invite metatextual consideration. The latter is perhaps particularly true given the currency of “postnational” (and, relatedly, “post-identity”) critique. Chuh observes that the contemporary interest in aesthetics and ethnic literatures may be seen as one facet of a broad critical interest in theorizing and grappling with “difference” in this putatively “post-national” era. As other critics are doing, Chuh attempts here to apprehend the impact of post-national critique through this turn to aesthetics, which effectively functions as a way of considering the centrality of the forms through which national identity has been apprehended. Put otherwise, given that nation and narration have been so intimately linked in postmodern/postcolonial cultural studies, especially through the investigation of the bildungsroman and the crucial importance that the concept of bildung has had in modern subject formation, Chuh asks, what forms might make the current practices of culture and politics and their organizing ideologies apprehensible? As narration is to nation, what form(s) or genre(s) is to post-nation? Here, she thinks through Monique Truong’s 2004 novel The Book of Salt, to consider the representative forms of modernity—sovereignty, subjectivity, and territoriality key among them, to pursue these questions of form.

Kandice Chuh is a professor in the PhD program in English at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where she is affiliated to the Center for Globalization and Social Change. The author of Imagine Otherwise: on Asian Americanist Critique (2003), which won the American Studies Association’s Lora
Romero Book Prize, Chuh is also the co-editor, with Karen Shimakawa, of Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (2001), and has published in such venues as Public Culture, American Literary History, and the Journal of Asian American Studies. Her current research involves aesthetic philosophies and theories, minority discourse, and globalization.

The CUNY Graduate Center is located at 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016.
The Postcolonial Studies Group is a chartered organization of the Doctoral Students’ Council. Please visit our website at www.opencuny.org/psg

Questions? Email Fiona Lee at fiona.lee@gmail.com

The CUNY Graduate Center

Postcolonial Studies Group Colloquium Series 2010-2011

The Postcolonial Studies Group presents:

Una Chung

Sarah Lawrence College

Subsumption of Violence or

Grounds for a New Ethics of Digital Culture?
Remembering Frantz Fanon in

an Era of Capture and Governmentality

Feb 25^th at 1:30 p.m.

CUNY Graduate Center, Room 5414

All are welcome.

Today the increasingly common description of our contemporary world depicts a global situation dominated by information systems, the demands and strains of “cognitive capitalism,” and strategies of governance centered on risk, security, and preemptive global conflicts. It seems that apparatuses of capture have taken prominence in the very definition of affect itself, such that affect is increasingly perceived to be just that—an object of capture—by institutions of mental health, police, security, and communications technology from infrastructure to mobile devices. Given the emergence of such a politics of affect, how are we theoretically to reconsider the relationship of affect to ethics and politics? In Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Baruch Spinoza, the concept of affect provides new ground for an ethics beyond morality; however, contemporary studies of affect veer between the amoral objectivity of cognitive science on the one hand and the arbitrary imposition of diverse moral codes deriving from other traditions (criminal justice, human rights, Western psychology, etc.) on the other. I would like to suggest a different possible course, in this paper, by specifically turning to Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonial politics in hopes of discovering the necessary relation of contemporary politics to studies of affect. Fanon described the colonial situation as an intense site of affective malpractice, requiring an appeal to the founding limit of politics—absolute violence. The appearance of the absolute counters the trend of much of contemporary cultural studies of affect, which have tended to domesticate affect into a liberal individual context. Between domestication and capture, the line of absolute violence cuts deeply through the heart of the modern subject. Working through Deleuze and Fanon, I propose a reworking of aesthetics, ethics, and politics for digital culture today.

Una Chung (Ph.D, CUNY Graduate Center) is Assistant Professor in Global Studies at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. She writes on contemporary film, new media art and design, and literary culture, within a theoretical framework emphasizing critical theory, postcolonial studies, globalization, materialist philosophies, and aesthetics. She is currently working on a book project investigating critical approaches to the analysis of affect, and specifically how such discourses shape our thinking about ethics today.

The CUNY Graduate Center is located at 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016.

The Postcolonial Studies Group is a chartered organization of the Doctoral Students’ Council. Please visit our website at www.opencuny.org/psg

Questions? Email Fiona Lee at fiona.lee@gmail.com.