In her lecture titled “Marxism, Imperialism and the Beyond of Capitalism: Re-reading Rosa Luxemburg” Amy Allen implores scholars to move beyond the developmental arc of history, a theory of history borrowed from Karl Marx that Luxemburg embeds in her idea of the beyond of capitalism. Allen wants to understand what Luxemburg means by the beyond or outside of capitalism that is present in many of...
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On October 11, 2022, Cameron McCarthy spoke at the Unit for Criticism on “The Postcolonial Imagination: Tools for Conviviality.” Beginning with his own high school education in Barbados, McCarthy used the school’s entrance examination system and literary curriculum—both determined in England and centered on an English canon—as an entry point into his broader questions about postcolonial art and...
On September 27th, Dr. Rosalyn LaPier (History UIUC), an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe of Montana and Métis, delivered a Modern Critical Theory lecture entitled “Land as Text: Environmental Studies.” While “Indigenous” and “Native” are globalized terms, due to the scope of this blog post they are invoked throughout to...
On September 20, 2022, Professor David Wilson (GGIS) delivered a Modern Critical Theory lecture entitled "The Advanced Capitalist City: Conceptual Innovations." David Wilson's articulation of the advanced capitalist city engaged with various important contemporary discourses via an investigation of the nexus of cities, people, and personal and scholarly experiences which shaped his...
Suman Mukhopadhyay, the eminent film director and thespian from West Bengal, India, screened his latest release Nazarband (Captive/2020), a loose cinematic adaption of a short story by Ashapurna Devi, at Temple Hoyne Buell Hall on 15th September 2022. This Hindi film tracks the trajectories of two convicts, Vasanti Mahato (Indira Tiwari) and Chandu (Tanmay Dhanania), shortly after being...
The trio ebb and flow through timbral scenes as if incessantly daydreaming across an eternal triptych, each panel briefly made visible by rumbling left-hand (LH) piano texturing arpeggios beneath transparent open fourths, fifths, and octaves in nightingales. Contrabass bowed tremolo glissandi converge with metal brushes on drum in a white noise of resonance. But these are not just any scenes....
The Asian America Otherwise Conference was the culminating conference of the In Plain Sight: Reckoning with Anti-Asian Racism research initiative. This initiative was funded by the Chancellor’s Call to Action to Address Racism & Social Injustice Research Program for 2021-2022. In Plain Sight has included a series of public lectures and seminars featuring leading scholars in...
The third event of the year-long series, “In Plain Sight: Reckoning with Anti-Asian Racism,” co-organized by the Unit for Criticism and the Department of Asian American Studies, took place on Tuesday, March 22, 2022. Cathy Park Hong (Rutgers), author of...
On Friday, February 4, 2022, Professors Roderick Ferguson (Yale), Mishuana Goeman (UCLA), Viet Thanh Nguyen (USC), and Alfonso Gonzalez Toribio (UCR) kicked off “Making It Plain: Articulating Our Racist Present,” the first event in the year-long series “In Plain Sight: Reckoning with Anti-Asian Racism,” organized by the Unit for Criticism and the Department of Asian...
In the sixth lecture of the Modern Critical Theory Lecture Series, Samantha Frost, Professor of Political Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, introduced us to the modern and contemporary theories of Biopolitics by focusing on three main theorists, Michel Foucault, Robert Esposito, and Giorgio Agamben, all of whom...
In his lecture, Professor Rushing guided us through Sigmund Freud’s “A Child is Being Beaten” essay and three influential essays by Jacques Lacan. In doing so, he showed how psychoanalysis provides a compelling account of the human subject as one defined by a permanent lack, a missing something, which we attempt to get at through the construction of fantasies. In “A Child is Being...
On Tuesday August 31, 2021, Professor Mark Alznauer, philosophy professor at Northwestern, kicked off the 2021 Modern Critical Theory lecture series with his talk “Hegel’s Philosophy of History as Liberal Apologetics.” Quoted content is from Professor Alznauer's lecture unless noted otherwise. In “Hegel’s Philosophy of History as Liberal Apologetics” Mark Alznauer ...
On April 19, the Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory held an author’s roundtable hosting Dipesh Chakrabarty (U of Chicago) to discuss his new book, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (U of Chicago Press, 2021) , with David Sepkoski (History); Roderick Ike Wilson (History/EALC) and Gillen Wood (English/iSEE) as respondents. Below are reflections on the event from graduate student...
"Sanctuary is Not a Place" By Austin D. Hoffman (Anthropology) We were sitting on the picnic table outside the staff kitchen, watching a spectacular sunset over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. As the radiant mosaic of oranges and purples faded to greys and blacks, Tricia and I were reminiscing about the eccentric cast of human and nonhuman characters that had found sanctuary here. We arose from...
"Tiny Homes in a Room of One's Own" By Dr. Nikki Usher (College of Media, Communications/Political Science) For the holidays, I bought my wife a tiny tiny house kit. It sits, a promise of leisure time, a promise of personal space in a miniature box, and it is being built slowly...very slowly, with the spare moments carved out from parenting, research, teaching, and exercise (a...