Please join CSCL for presentations from finalists in their Assistant Professor search. There will be four talks over the next two weeks.
Michael Gallope
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"Listening as a Philosophical Act: A Case of Free Improvisation"
This talk explores ways in which the activity of listening to music might help us illustrate the nature of conceptually driven questions about the dynamics of improvisation. I will begin by playing a brief excerpt of an improvisation by Ornette Coleman and Joachim Kühn. Then I will distinguish and compare the key elements of two different philosophies of improvisation, one forwarded by Vladimir Jankélévitch and the other proposed by Jacques Derrida. Both describe the phenomenon as a negotiation between temporal experience and technical mediation, though the two differ as to the experiential character of the vanishing now, the weight and character of various mediations, and the exact role of skill and virtuosity. The talk concludes by returning to the recording in order to test how one might "translate" the details of listening into a new speculative conversation with the two philosophical positions.
Friday, February 15
4:00 PM
135 Nicholson Hall
Tsitsi Jaji
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"Pirate's Choice: Hacking into (Post-)pan-African Futures"
"Pirate's Choice: Hacking into (Post-)pan-African Futures" shows how new technologies have given rise to a set of practices that pirate, informalize and distribute the sonic archives of transnational black solidarity traced throughout my current book project Africa in Stereo, potentially opening participation in pan-African imaginaries to new subjects. I trace the development of this pirate logic in three recent works by the Ghanaian-British filmmaker John Akomfrah, Senegalese feminist author Ken Bugul, and the South African-based duo known as the Heliocentrics, Neo Muyanga and Ntone Edjabe. Music forges new publics in the Afro-futurism of Akomfrah's 1987 film, The Last Angel of History, which traces the "mothership connection" between Africa and experimental diasporic music from Sun Ra to George Clinton. Ken Bugul's 2005 novel Rue Félix-Faure is suffused with Billie Holiday's blues and Cesaria Evora's Cape Verdean mornas, the soundtrack for the emergence of transnational feminist solidarity. And the Heliocentrics' ongoing internet radio project, the Pan-African Space Station hacks into the future archive of solidarity as an exploration mission that has yet to dock.
Monday, February 18
4:00 PM
135 Nicholson Hall
Duy Nguyen
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"The Image of Death and Redemption in B·∫£o Ninh's Sorrow of War"
This paper explores representations of the Vietnamese Revolution in Bảo Ninh's The Sorrow of War (Nỗi Buồn Chiến Tranh), which is considered to be one of the most important literary works on the Vietnam War. The reading will focus in particular on the novel's peculiar conception of a freely-appropriable common. This common, which the novel opposes to both private possession and state collectivization, is characterized in the text as the product of a de-sacralization of the commodity-fetish resulting from the devastation produced by the War.
Wednesday, February 20
4:00 PM
135 Nicholson
Jasper Bernes
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"Art, Work, and Endlessness in the 2000s"
In this talk, Jasper Bernes will consider the consequences of the postindustrial restructuring of labor for art and literature today, focusing in particular on the effect of new media technologies. Drawing from his book project, The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization, he will narrate how utopian projections of both the "end of art" and the "end of labor" cancelled each other out in the 1960s and 1970s. The result was a reorganization of the workplace in accord with certain values associated with art and artists (flexibility, cooperation, autonomy, and openness to risk) as well as a growing indistinction between work and non-work time, an indistinction felt especially poignantly now that digital and network technologies have joined home and workplace into a single manifold. What possibilities for the artistic critique of work remain today, in the face of a workplace designed to anticipate and neutralize such critiques? Analyzing the internet trolls, office-poets and would-be Bartlebys of contemporary literary and artistic engagements with the digitized workplace, Bernes will trace some consequences of the foreclosure of qualitative and artistic challenges to the dominion of work. He will conclude by examining signs that these challenges might soon re-emerge on a new basis.
Friday, February 22
4:00 PM
135 Nicholson
