Northwestern University
School of Speech/Department of Communication
and The Center For Transcultural Studies

Symposium on

WHAT IS CULTURAL POLITICS?:
Transnational Perspectives on a Contemporary Question

May 15-16, 1998
at
Norris University Center, Room 1E

Friday, May 15

Session 1, 1:00-6:00 PM

Opening Remarks

Dialectic of Deception
Ackbar Abbas, Comparative Literature, University of Hong Kong

Transnational Pragmatism: First Contact, Ethnocentrism, and Cultural Politics
Steven Mailloux, English, University of California at Irvine

Moderator: Michael Leff, Communication Studies

Session II, 3:45-5:45 PM

Temptations of Aggrandizing Agency: Feminist Histories and Cultural Analysis
Amanda Anderson, English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Cultural Politics for Liberals
Bruce Robbins, English, Rutgers University

Moderator: Jules Law, English

Saturday, May 16

Session III, 9:00-10:45 AM

The (Bad) Cultural Politics of (Good) Music: The Case of Richard Strauss Revisited
Michael Steinberg, History, Cornell University

Melodrama, Theory and the Politics of Culture
Ravi Vasudevan, Film Studies, CSDS, New Delhi

Moderator: Dilip Gaonkar, Communication Studies

Session IV, 11:00 AM-12:45 PM

Settler Modernity and the Quest for Indigenous Tradition
Elizabeth Povinelli, Anthropology, University of Chicago

Cultural Politics and the Demise of Yugoslavia
Andrew Wachtel, Slavic Languages and Literature, Northwestern University

Moderator: Regina Schwartz, English

Session V, 2:00-3:45 PM

Sex Panics: Cultural Politics of Privatization from Jesse Helms to Andrew Sullivan
Lisa Duggan, American Studies, New York University

Transnational Seduction Narratives
Laura Kipnis, Radio, Television, and Film, Northwestern University

Moderator: Bonnie Honig, Political Science

Session VI, 4:00-6:00 PM
Philosophy and Race: The Whiteness (Apparently Not So Unbearable) of Being
Charles Mills, Philosophy, University of Illinois at Chicago

Politics, Culture and Circulation
Benjamin Lee, Anthropology, Rice University

Moderator: G. Thomas Goodnight, Communication Studies