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Potluck and Discussion
New Thinking about Space
Sunday, September 17, 2000
5:30-8:30 p.m.

Come enjoy good food, conversation, and discussion in our first event of he season. Come for just the potluck or stay for the discussion.. Meet the new faculty hired for the Cultural Studies in Global Context Cluster--Kenneth M. George and Guillermina De Ferrari--and other new cultural studies faculty and students. Hear about our upcoming series for 2000-2001, The 'Contact Zone' Revisited: Violence, Reconcialiation, and Co-exexistence, and other plans for the year.

Where: Susan Friedman's House

Bring: Bring a dish or beverage to share. Bring colleagues, friends, students, or anyone interested in Border and Transcultural Studies. Pass the Word!

Discussion: What do we mean by space? How does it relate to time? To Geography, History, Cultural Studies, and other disciplines or interdisciplinary fields? How does thinking about space affect our understanding of the temporal? How does space as an aspect of human thought relate to space as a material phenomenon? What are the relations between space and power, and between space and social construction? How do cultures experience space differently? What are the new parameters of space in the era of mass travel, migration, and globalized labor, cyberspace, global epidemics, land hunger and environmental crisis? Suggested readings will be announced on the BTCS email list and will be available in 7188 Helen White, 1018 Van Hise, 8432 Social Science, and the Humanities Institute. We encourage you to read this material, but it is NOT necessary to do so to participate fully in discussion. Thongchai Winichakul and Rebecca Walsh will initiate discussion with a few remarks.


Suggested Readings

Here are some readings that can serve as springboards to thinking about the implications of new spatialized modes of thought for your own work in cultural studies. We have included a range of readings from which we invite you to select as time permits and desire dictates. The chapter from Edward Soja's Postmodern Geographies (1989) issued a widely influential call for spatial thinking. Lawrence Grossberg's essay posits the "spacing of time" and the "timing of space" as entwined activities. Linda McDowell's essay works with the interconnections of new spatial epistemologies, gender, and feminist theory. Marc Augé's chapter relates space/place distinctions in French cultural theory to popular culture, anthropology, modernity, and "supermodernity." Chapters by Neil Whitehead and Thongchai Winichakul examine specific instances of spatial thinking and cartography in South America, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia, working with the implications of different or competing geographies as modes of thought. Read as much or as little as you wish. All are invited to participate in the discussion, no matter what you have read. The function of the readings is to be suggestive. The aim of the discussion is to provide a forum for dialogue that is broad-ranging-anchored in local knowledges of different spaces and times as the basis for generalized or comparative cultural and transcultural theory.

  • Edward Soja. "History: Geography: Modernity." Chapter 1 of Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory . London: Verso, 1989. 10-42. Rpt. Simon During. The Cultural Studies Reader . 1st and 2nd edition.
  • Lawrence Grossberg. "The Space of Culture, The Power of Space." The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons . Eds. Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti. London: Routledge, 1996. 169-88.
  • Linda McDowell. "Spatializing Feminism: Geographical Perspectives." Body Space . Ed. Nancy Duncan. London: Routledge, 1996. 29-44.
  • Augé, Marc. "From Places to Non-Places." Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity . Trans. John Howe. London: Verso. 75-120.
  • Neil Whitehead. "Indigenous Cartography in Lowland South America and the Caribbean." The History of Cartography . Vol. 2, book 3. Eds. David Woodward and Malcolm Lewis. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. 301-28.
  • Thongchai Winichakul. "The Coming of a New Geography." Chapter 2 of Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation . Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 1994. 37-61.

Readings are available in 7188 Helen White, 1018 Van Hise, 8432 Social Science, and the Humanities Institute. You may make copies, but please return originals to folder immediately.