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...

"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...

"Some Reflections on the Webinar Explosion in South Asia in the Time of Covid" Anustup Basu (English) At this point we are well aware of the extent to which the ongoing pandemic has unsettled intellectual lives and disrupted academic relationships and rhythms. It has closed off spaces, isolated bodies, and scattered established institutional and collaborative arrangements. These latter have...

"We All Get Sick and Die" Written by Dr. Catherine Prendergast (UIUC, English) “We all Get Sick and Die.” That used to be the subtitle of my courses in disability studies. It announced that disability studies demands a shift in our frame of reference with regard to bodies, away from a presumption of their invulnerability. I promised students that when they left the class, they would either...

[On Tuesday, November 10, Dr. Sean Metzger (Theater, Film & Television, UCLA) presented a lecture on Queer Theory as part of the Modern Critical Theory Lecture Series. Below is a response by Joe Coyle (Anthropology, UIUC) Thinking Queer Theory Transnationally and Geopolitically Joe Coyle (Anthropology, UIUC) Sean Metzger’s Modern Critical Theory Lecture on queer theory traced important...

[On Tuesday, October 13, 2020, Dr. Jenny Sharpe presented a lecture on Postcolonial Theory as part of the Modern Critical Theory Lecture Series. Below is a response by Ji Hyea Hwang (Comparative & World Literature, UIUC).] Postcolonial Theory and Western Humanism Ji Hyea Hwang (Comparative & World Literature, UIUC)   In this lecture, Sharpe provided an overview of postcolonial...