WSU | CLAS | English | DeRoy Lectures

"Bring the Pain: Post-Soul Memory, Neo-Soul Affect and Lauryn Hill in the Black Public Sphere"

Daphne A. Brooks is an associate professor of English and African-American Studies at Princeton University where she teaches courses on African-American literature and culture, performance studies, critical gender studies, and popular music culture. She is the author of two books: Bodies in Dissent: Performing Race, Gender, and Nation in the Trans-Atlantic Imaginary (Duke UP, 2006), winner of the Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship on African-American Performance from ASTR, and Jeff Buckley’s GraceThe Great Escapes: The Narratives of William Wells Brown, Henry Box Brown, and William Craft, and The Performing Arts volume of The Black Experience in the Western Hemisphere Series. Brooks is currently also a contributing writer to The Nation where she has published articles on Beyonce and Amy Winehouse. She is currently working on a new book entitled Subterranean Blues: Black Feminist Musicial Subcultures from the Minstrelsy to the Post-Hip Hop Era (Harvard UP, forthcoming).

Joshua Clover is a professor of poetry and poetics at University of California Davis, with a sideline in Marxist economic theory. Books include the poetry collections Madonna anno domini and The Totality for Kids; a book on The Matrix for the British Film Institute's Film Classics series; and the cultural history, 1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing About. He sits on the editorial board of Film Quarterly, where he writes a column called "Marx and Coca-Cola." His current work concerns "feelings of financialization" - a phenomenology of "fictitious capital" and life within its regime.

As well as a being a co-editor of Screen and Feminist Theory, Stacey's publications include Star Gazing: Female Spectator's and Hollywood Cinema (1994) and Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer (1997). She has further served as co-editor of Thinking Through the Skin with Sara Ahmed (2001), and Queer Screens with Sarah Street (2007). She is currently completing a new book for Duke University Press entitled The Cinematic Life of the Gene.

This talk is co-sponsored by the English Department, Film Studies, and Women's Studies.

Charles Altieri teaches in the English Department of the University of California, Berkeley. This privilege has allowed him to write several book, the most recent of which are The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetic of the Affects (Cornell UP, 2004) and The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry: Modernism and After (Blackwell, 2006). He is working on a book on Wallace Stevens and a sequel to The Particulars.

Tom Gunning is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Professor in the Department of Art History and The Committee on Cinema and Media at the University of Chicago. He is the author of D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (University of Illinois Press) and The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (British Film Institute), as well as over 100 articles on early cinema, film history and theory, avant-garde film, film genre, and cinema and modernism.

Eugene Thacker is the author of Biomedia (University of Minnesota, 2004), The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture (MIT, 2005) and co-author with Alexander Galloway of The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (University of Minnesotta, 2007). He co-edits the book series "Anonymous Theory," and has previously collaborated with RSG (Radical Software Group), Biotech Hobbyist, and Fakeshop. Thacker is Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, & Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Bruce Robbins is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Upward Mobility and the Common Good (Princeton UP, 2007), Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (NYU Press, 1999), Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (Verso, 1993), and The Servant's Hand: English Fiction From Below (Columbia UP, 1986).

Andrew Hoskins is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. He attained his BA, MA, and PhD in Sociology at Lancaster. His research focuses on the theoretical and empirical investigation of today's 'new media ecology' and the nature of and the challenges for individual, social, and cultural memory in this environment. He is founding Principal Editor of the international and interdisciplinary SAGE journal of Memory Studies (mss.sagepub.com) and Director of the Warwick Centre for Memory Studies. His latest book is: Television and Terror: Conflicting Times and the Crisis of News Discourse (with Ben O'Loughlin, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

Dr. Beth Coleman is a professor in Writing and Humanistic Studies and Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Her research interests include virtual world design and use, networked subjectivity, global media emergence and practice in China, India and Africa, contemporary art and technology, and critical history of race and technology. For excerpts from her forthcoming book, Hello Avatar: A Virtual World Primer and other publications, see her website. She blogs on emergent media practices at projectgoodluck.com.

The DeRoy Lecture Series is cosponsoring the Virtual Citizenship | New Technologies Symposium taking place in at the Bernath Auditorium at 9 AM November 30. The symposium is a joint effort of, in addition to the DeRoy Lecture Series, Wayne State's Center for the Study of Citizenship, its Office for Teaching and Learning, and its Honors Program, to study the intersection between new information technologies and the practice of citizenship. The symposium will launch a broader research, teaching, and service project that can help us understand what citizenship means in the 21st century and how the notions of community membership and the exercise of power are affected by newly pervasive technologies such as (but certainly not limited to) text-messaging, Facebook, del.icio.us, and Second Life.

Erik Davis is a writer and independent scholar, and the author, most recently, of The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape. He also wrote the cult media studies classic TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Information Age, and a critical volume on Led Zeppelin’s fourth album. A frequent speaker and teacher at universities and festivals alike, Davis has contributed articles and essays to scores of books and publications, including the recent volumes AfterBurn: Reflections on Burning Man and Everything You Know About God is Wrong. He posts regularly at www.techgnosis.com.

Madhu Dubey is a Professor in the Departments of English and African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic (1994) and Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism (1993).

Lauren Berlant
Friday, February 16, 2007

"On the Desire to be Normal: Post-Fordist Affect in La Promesse and Rosetta"

Lauren Berlant is George M. Pullman Professor of English and Director of the Lesbian and Gay Studies Project at the University of Chicago. She is author of The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (1991), The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997), and the forthcoming The Female Complaint: the Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (2008). She has also edited a number of volumes, including Intimacy (2000), Our Monica, Ourselves (2001), Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion(2004), and the forthcoming On the Case (2007). This talk comes from her manuscript, "Cruel Optimism."

“What Do Gay Men Want? Sex, Risk, and the Subjective Life of Homosexuality”

David M. Halperin is the W. H. Auden Collegiate Professor of the History and Theory of Sexuality at the University of Michigan, where he teaches English, Women’s Studies, Comparative Literature, and Classical Studies. He is the author or editor of eight books, including The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, Saint Foucault, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, and Gay Shame (forthcoming). With Carolyn Dinshaw he founded and edited GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

“PLAY MONEY: Gold Farms, Polar Bear Rugs, and the Theory and Practice of Contemporary Ludocapitalism”

Julian Dibbell has, in the course of over a decade of writing and publishing, established himself as one of digital culture’s most thoughtful and accessible observers. He is the author of two books on virtual worlds, My Tiny Life (Henry Holt, 1999) and Play Money (Basic, 2006), and has written essays and articles on hackers, computer viruses, online communities, encryption technologies, music pirates, and the heady cultural, political, and philosophical questions that tie these and other digital-age phenomena together. Currently a contributing editor for Wired magazine, he lives in South Bend, Indiana.

Jonathan Marks is Professor of Anthropology at University of North Carolina — Charlotte. He is the author of Human Biodiversity: Genes, Race and History (1995), What It Means to be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and Their Genes (2002), and Our Place in Nature: A Biological Anthropology (forthcoming), and of numerous articles on human genetics and evolution.

The talk was moderated by Professor Jacalyn Harden (Anthropology), with responses by Professors John Kamholz (Medical School), Marsha Richmond (Interdisciplinary Studies) and Steven Shaviro (English).

Elizabeth Grosz was born in Sydney, Australia and gained her BA (Hons) and PhD in Philosophy from the Department of General Philosophy, University of Sydney, where she taught as a lecturer and senior lecturer from 1978-1991. She moved to Monash University in Melbourne as Director of the newly formed the Institute of Critical and Cultural Studies in 1992, where she was Associate Professor and Professor in Critical Theory and Philosophy. She has been a Visiting Professor at University of Califoria, Santa Cruz, University of California, Davis, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Richmond, George Washington University and the University of California, Irvine.

This lecture was co-sponsored by the Students' Association of Graduates in English and organized by graduate student Justin Prystash.

DemoKino is a virtual parliament that through topical film parables provides the voters (participants) with the opportunity to decide on issues that are, paradoxically, becoming the essence of modern politics: the questions of life. The project questions not only the utopia of contemporary virtual forum that is supposed to open ways for a more direct and influential participation but also points out a much deeper problem of modern democracy (virtual as well). With its reduced narrativeness--the story is built on the ‘pro and contra’ inner dialogues of the protagonist who is led around his home in a parliamentary kind of way by the ‘voters,’ based on their decisions--Demokino shows how these ethical dilemmas of modern life suddenly become the core of our political participation. When the issue of life enters the political arena and modern politics becomes biopolitics the democratic decision reaches an impasse: in the political arena laws are being debated on issues that can actually tolerate no decisions and any kind of majority rule is problematic in itself, any political regulation a publicly legitimated act of violence. Demokino is a virtual parliament that clearly displays how politics comes before law. Law is just a utopic and redundant technical procedure to cover the political essence.

Mark Amerika was recently named a "Time Magazine 100 Innovator" as part of their continuing series of features on the most influential artists, scientists, entertainers and philosophers into the 21st century, is the author of two novels: The Kafka Chronicles and Sexual Blood. He has also published two anthologies, Degenerative Prose: Writing Beyond Category [co-edited with Ron Sukenick] and In Memoriam to Postmodernism: Essays on the Avant-Pop [co-edited with Lance Olsen].

Mark Amerika was a Creative Writing Fellow and Lecturer on Network Publishing and Hypertext at Brown University where he developed the GRAMMATRON project, a multi-media narrative for network-distributed environments. In Spring 2000, GRAMMATRON was selected as one of the first works of Internet art to ever be exhibited in the prestigious Whitney Biennial of American Art.

Mark Anthony Neal is an Associate Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Program in African and African American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of four books, including New Black Man (2005) and is the co-editor (with Murray Forman) of That's the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader.

Jodi Dean is a Professor in the Department of Political Science of the Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She is a noted feminist scholar and author of Aliens in America and Zizek's Politics.

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