Monthly Archives: October 2017

Representations at ASAP

Posted on by

ASAP/9 starts today in Oakland!

The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present presents a jam-packed schedule at the Oakland Marriott City Center beginning on Thursday, October 26, and running through Sunday, October 29.

A quick glance at the schedule shows that no fewer than 24 of the conference presenters have published in, organized special issues of, or worked on the staff of Representations:

Charles Altieri

Weihong Bao

Natalia Brizuela

Sarah Brouillette

Julia Bryan-Wilson

Christopher Chen

Joshua Clover

Christopher Fan

Shannon Jackson

Peter Hitchcock

Joseph Jeon

SanSan Kwan

Colleen Lye

Theodore Martin

Annie McClanahan

Tom McEnaney

Mark McGurl

Christopher Miller

Debarati Sanyal

Jeffrey Skoller

Michael Szalay

Rebecca Walkowitz

Barrett Watten

Dora Zhang

The Rhetoric of Hiddenness in Traditional Chinese Culture

Posted on by

BERKELEY BOOK CHATS at the Townsend Center

Wednesday, Oct 25, 2017 | 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm

Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall, UC Berkeley

Editor Paula Varsano talks about this collection of essays exploring the role of hiddenness  in the history of cultural production in China from the Warring States Period (403–221 BCE) to the end of the Qing Dynasty (1911) and beyond.

After an introduction by Michael Nylan, Varsano will speak briefly about her work and then open the floor for discussion. 

Paula Varsano is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages & Cultures at UC Berkeley, where she specializes in classical Chinese poetry and poetics from the third through the eleventh centuries. She is the author of Tracking the Banished Immortal: The Poetry of Li Bo and its Critical Reception, and is currently at work on a book tentatively titled Coming to Our Senses: Locating the Subject in Traditional Chinese Literary Writing. Her essay “Disappearing Objects/Elusive Subjects: Writing Mirrors in Early and Medieval China” was published in Representations 124.

On Race in Art

Posted on by

Black Futures: On Race in Art, Curation, and Digital Engagement 
with Kimberly Drew in conversation with Stephen Best

Arts + Design Mondays @ BAMPFA
Monday, October 16, 6:30pm

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY ART MUSEUM & PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE

2155 Center Street, Berkeley

Kimberly Drew has been dubbed an “international tastemaker in contemporary art” on account of her Tumblr blog Black Contemporary Art and her Instagram @museummammy. As social media manager at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she has been pivotal in moving that venerated institution in directions both democratic and dialogical. Drew will discuss curation, social media, race, and institutions with UC Berkeley professor Stephen Best.

Kimberly Drew is a writer and curator based in New York City. Drew received her BA from Smith College in art history and African-American studies, with a concentration in museum studies. She first experienced the art world as an intern in the director’s office of the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she was inspired her to start her blog and to pursue her interest in social media as it relates to the arts.

A member of the Representations editorial board, Stephen Best is an associate professor of English at UC Berkeley and the author of The Fugitive’s Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession, a study of property, poetics, and legal hermeneutics in nineteenth-century American literary and legal culture. He co-convened a research group at the University of California’s Humanities Research Institute on “Redress in Law, Literature, and Social Thought” that led, in part, to the special issue “Redress” in 2005. He is also the co-editor of the 2009 special issue “The Way We Read Now” and the 2016 volume “Description Across Disciplines.”

Fray: Art and Textile Politics

Posted on by

Julia Bryan-Wilson will be talking about her new book

Fray: Art and Textile Politics

in the Townsend Center for the Humanities‘ monthly Berkeley Book Chat series

 

Wednesday, Oct 11, 2017 | noon to 1:00 

Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall, UC Berkeley

In 1974, women in a feminist consciousness-raising group in Eugene, Oregon, formed a mock organization called the Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society. Emblazoning its logo onto T-shirts, the group wryly envisioned female collective textile making as a practice that could upend conventions, threaten state structures, and wreak political havoc. Elaborating on this example as a prehistory to the more recent phenomenon of “craftivism”— the politics and social practices associated with handmaking— UC Berkeley’s Julia Bryan-Wilson explores textiles and their role at the forefront of debates about process, materiality, gender, and race in times of economic upheaval.

After an introduction by Natalia Brizuela, Bryan-Wilson will speak briefly about her work and then open the floor for discussion.

Julia Bryan-Wilson, co-editor with Shannon Jackson of the recent Representations special issue Time Zones: Durational Art and Its Contexts, is Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to Fray, she is also the author of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era, Art in the Making: Artists and Their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing.

Advance Look: Jeffrey Knapp on “Selma”

Posted on by

In recognition of the speed at which the world and its histories are changing, we’ve just posted an advance version of “Selma and the Place of Fiction in Historical Films” by Jeffrey Knapp. The essay will appear in print and online in our Winter 2019 issue, but you can read it here right now.

In the essay, Knapp compares the place of historical fictionality in William Wyler’s 1940 film The Westerner and Ava DuVernay’s 2014 Selma.

“’This isn’t right,’” the essay begins, in the voice of Martin Luther King as depicted by David Oyelowo, in Selma. “Almost as soon as the man resembling Martin Luther King Jr. has begun to speak, he interrupts himself in frustration. ‘I accept this honor,’ he’d been saying, ‘for our lost ones, whose deaths pave our path, and for the twenty million Negro men and women motivated by dignity and a disdain for hopelessness.’ What does he think isn’t right? Is it the racial oppression he has been evoking? Or is it the felt inadequacy of his words to that injustice? As the man turns away from us, we find that he has been speaking into a mirror, and that he is frustrated in the immediate context by his efforts at getting dressed. ‘Corrie’ — it is King, we now understand, and he’s not alone; his wife Coretta is with him — ‘this ain’t right.’ ‘What’s that?’ she asks, entering from another room. ‘This necktie. It’s not right.’ ‘It’s not a necktie,’ she corrects him, ‘it’s an ascot.’ ‘Yeah, but generally, the same principles should apply, shouldn’t they? It’s not right.’” Read full article …

JEFFREY KNAPP is the Eggers Professor of English at UC Berkeley and author of An Empire Nowhere: England and America from Utopia to The Tempest (1992); Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (2002); Shakespeare Only (2009); and Pleasing Everyone: Mass Entertainment in Renaissance London and Golden-Age Hollywood, published this year by Oxford University Press. He is also a contributing editor for Representations.

Adam and Eve: The Story Continues

Posted on by

The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, a new study by Stephen Greenblatt, is the subject of an interview broadcast today on Forum, a production of KQED Radio in San Francisco. You can listen to the interview here.

The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve explores the enduring story of humanity’s first parents.

Tracking the tale into the deep past, Greenblatt uncovers the tremendous theological, artistic, and cultural investment over centuries that made these fictional figures so profoundly resonant in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim worlds and, finally, so very “real” to millions of people even in the present. With uncanny brilliance, Greenblatt explores the intensely personal engagement of Augustine, Dürer, and Milton in this mammoth project of collective creation, while he also limns the diversity of the story’s offspring: rich allegory, vicious misogyny, deep moral insight, and some of the greatest triumphs of art and literature.

The biblical origin story, Greenblatt argues, is a model for what the humanities still have to offer: not the scientific nature of things, but rather a deep encounter with problems that have gripped our species for as long as we can recall and that continue to fascinate and trouble us today.

Stephen Greenblatt, winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, cofounded Representations, where many of his essays have appeared.