Thursday, May 2nd, 2013 6:30 PM

Science/Religion Suite, Room 5307

Graduate Center, CUNY

New York, NY 10016

The question of the relationship of social movements to the state is one of the most pressing of our time. The Occupy Movement, as well as those in Greece and Spain, organize around goals but often without specific demands on the state. Historical experience shows that the autonomy of social movements is necessary for social change. At the same time the state controls important resources, is in a more powerful position than the movements, and tends to try and control or repress them. How can this dilemma be approached beyond either a simple total rejection of the state or a cooptation of the movements? Can autonomy be constructed while with a relationship to the state?

Dario Azzellini will facilitate a discussion using Venezuela, and in particular the local self administration structures Communal Councils and Communes, as a frame for this conversation. He will also address what is to expect in Venezuela after the recent presidential elections won by Chávez successor Nicolás Maduro.

Dario Azzellini is lecturer in Sociology at the Johannes Kepler University (Linz, Austria). He has written extensively on movements, participative democracy and workers control, focussing on Latin America.

(Source: Esteban Feliz/ AP)

Thursday, May 2: Strategies for social change: Movements with, within, against and/or beyond the State?
Date: Thursday, May 2, 2013
Time: 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Location: Room 5307

©  Kalfayan Galleries, Athens-Thessaloniki

Click here to download flyer: April 25 and 26th Contemporality Symposium

April 25 and 26th, 2013: Contemporality: A Symposium on Politics, Time, and Thought
Date: Thursday, April 25, 2013
Time: 4:30 pm - 6:30 pm
Location: CUNY Graduate Center, Skylight Room

Click here to view the embedded video.

Event Details: http://globalization.gc.cuny.edu/events/february-26-2013-the-future-as-cultural-fact-roundtable-with-arjun-appadurai/

Revisiting the Argentine Tango: Stories of Migration, Hybridity, and Pilgrimage

A Roundtable Presentation featuring:
Alicia Borinsky (Boston University)
Arlene Dávila (NYU)
Nora Glickman (Queens College and Graduate Center, CUNY)
Marta Savigliano (UC Riverside)
Anahi Viladrich (Queens College and Graduate Center, CUNY)

Thursday, April 18, 2013
Room C198
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Ave, NYC 10016

Revisiting the Argentine Tango: Stories of Migration, Hybridity, and Pilgrimage
Date: Thursday, April 18, 2013
Time: 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm
Location: CUNY Graduate Center, Room C198

Full details of the event here: http://globalization.gc.cuny.edu/events/jean-and-john-comaroff-roundtable-discussion-on-theory-from-the-south/

Click here to view the embedded video.

A Two-Day Conference
March 14-15, 2013
The Graduate Center, CUNY

Keynote Speaker: Serge Gruzinski
Thursday, March 14, 2013
7:30 PM
Proshansky Auditorium

Full Conference Schedule

Registration required. Please click here to register

The transoceanic voyages of the fifteenth century began a transformation of the planet’s ecology, economy, culture, and politics that produced the globalized world we live in today. From the exchange of capital to land use, from religious practice to cultural production, contact with hitherto separated peoples and places sparked ongoing changes worldwide.

Twenty years ago, the 500^th anniversary of Columbus’ landfall in the “New World” and exhibitions such as “Circa 1492, Art in the Age of Exploration” provoked a rethinking of a global archaeology of culture. Rather than celebrating the accomplishments of the Renaissance or deriding what Walter Mignolo has rightly called its “darker side,” this conference seeks to examine the intermingled perspectives and productions that emerged during this remarkable period. Rather than focusing exclusively on imperial or subaltern perspectives, it aims instead to look at interactions among cultures worldwide. Europeans, native and transplanted, and indigenes, as well as mixed populations were agents in the creation of hybrid cultural productions of the Early Modern Period. Key to this inquiry is transculturation, a concept created by Fernando Ortiz that has been deployed to help explain new cultural forms emerging from the complex interaction of different traditions. Neither one culture nor the other nor the sum of their parts, these new transcultural forms are something entirely different that results from specific instances of cultural intermingling.

Speakers seek to interrogate the concept of a global Renaissance in particular geographical test cases — the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe — probing the impact of interaction, excavating the layers of conflict, or analyzing the hybrid visual or textual productions engendered by the unpredictable alchemy of complex mixtures.

Organized by: Clare Carroll (Comparative Literature), and James Saslow and Eloise Quiñones Keber (Art History)

Sponsored by The Renaissance Society of America, The Hispanic Society of America, and the Graduate Center, CUNY

Full details here: http://globalrenaissance.ws.gc.cuny.edu/

Becoming Global: The Renaissance and the World
Date: Thursday, March 14, 2013
Time: All Day
Location: CUNY Graduate Center, Elebash Recital Hall & Room 5111

with Shalah Talebi

March 14, 2013
Room 6496
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016

In Ghosts of Revolution (2011), Shalah Talebi’s haunting account of her years as a political prisoner in Iran, she engages two interrelated premises put forth by Walter Benjamin: that telling stories of lived experiences opens the possibility of a true human connection, the transmission of wisdom, and individual and social transformation; and, to paraphrase Benjamin, that death sanctions everything the storyteller can tell, for the storyteller borrows her authority from death.

Cosponsored by the Narrating Change Seminar in the Humanities; the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics; Havaar: Iranian Initiative Against War, Sanctions and State Repression; the Postcolonial Studies Group; the Committee on Globalization and Social Change; and the Raha Iranian Feminist Collective.

More info: 
https://www.facebook.com/events/157489104407343/
http://centerforthehumanities.org/events/Narrating-Transformation-and-Transforming-through-Storytelling

Free and open to the public. The building and the venues are fully accessible. For more information please visit http://centerforthehumanities.org, call 212.817.2005, or e-mail ch@gc.cuny.edu

Shalah Talebi: Narrating Transformation and Transforming through Storytelling
Date: Thursday, March 14, 2013
Time: 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Location: CUNY Graduate Center, Room 6496

“After History: Alexandre Kojeve as Photographer”

James Gallery, 6pm Exhibition on view through June 1, 2013. Co-Sponsored with the Center for Humanities

See the Center for Humanities website for more information
Wednesday, April 10th, 2013
6pm

CUNY Graduate Center, James Gallery
Free and open to the public

April 10, 2013: “After History: Alexandre Kojeve as Photographer” with Boris Groys
Date: Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Time: 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Location: CUNY Gradute Center, James Gallery

“A Hauntology of the (Post)colonial: Vincent Meessen’s Vita Nova”

Co-Sponsored by the Center for Humanities and the PhD program in Art History

Wednesday, March 13th, 2013
6:30pm

CUNY Graduate Center, Room 9207

Free and open to the public

See http://centerforthehumanities.org/events/A-Hauntology-of-the-Post-colonial-Vincent-Meessen-s-Vita-Nova for more information.

March 13, 2013: “Return to Postcolony: Spectres of Colonialism in Contemporary Art”
Date: Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Time: 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Location: Graduate Center, Room 9207

Mayanthi Fernando (Assistant Professor of Anthropology at University of California Santa Cruz)

“France is my Bled’: The Unpredictable Future of Impolite Citizenship”

and

Yarimar Bonilla (Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University)

“Non-Sovereign Futures? French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment”

In discussion with:

Tony Alessandrini, English, Kingsborough Community College

Vincent Crapanzano, Distinguished Professor, Comparative Literature and Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center

Kaiama L. Glover, Associate Professor, Department of French and the Africana Studies Program, Barnard College, Columbia University

Judith Surkis, Associate Professor, Department of History, The School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University

Friday, March 8th, 2013
2pm-5pm

CUNY Graduate Center, Room 5109
Free and open to the public

Image from The Frantz Fanon Blog

March 8, 2013: Thinking Politics Through Postcolonial France with Mayanthi Fernando and Yarimar Bonilla
Date: Friday, March 8, 2013
Time: 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Location: Room 5109