In The Virus Touch, Ghosh argues that media are central to understanding emergent relations between viruses, humans, and nonhuman life. Writing in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 global pandemics, Ghosh theorizes “epidemic media” to show how epidemics are mediated in images, numbers, and movements through the processes of reading test results and tracking infection and mortality rates. Scientific, artistic, and activist epidemic media that make multispecies relations sensible and manageable eschew anthropocentric survival strategies and instead recast global public health crises as biological, social, and ecological catastrophes, pushing us toward a multispecies politics of health. Ghosh trains her analytic gaze on these mediations as expressed in the collection and analysis of blood samples as a form of viral media; the geospatialization of data that track viral hosts like wild primates; and the use of multisensory images to trace fluctuations in viral mutations. Studying how epidemic media inscribe, store, and transmit multispecies relations attunes us to the anthropogenic drivers of pathogenicity like deforestation or illegal wildlife trading and the vulnerabilities of diseases that arise from socioeconomic inequities and biopolitical neglect.

Bishnupriya Ghosh is Professor of English and Global Studies at UC Santa Barbara, author of Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular, and coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk.

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/events/humanities-decanted/

Sponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

Humanities Decanted

Bishnupriya Ghosh: The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media

A dialogue between Giuliana Perrone (History) and Jeannine DeLombard (English) about Perrone’s new book, Nothing More than Freedom: The Failure of Abolition in American Law (Cambridge University Press, 2023). 

Nothing More than Freedom explores the long and complex legal history of Black freedom in the United States. From the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 until the end of Reconstruction in 1877, supreme courts in former slave states decided approximately 700 lawsuits associated with the struggle for Black freedom and equal citizenship. This litigation – the majority through private law – triggered questions about American liberty and reassessed the nation’s legal and political order following the Civil War. Judicial decisions set the terms of debates about racial identity, civil rights, and national belonging, and established that slavery, as a legal institution and social practice, remained actionable in American law well after its ostensible demise. The verdicts determined how unresolved facets of slavery would undercut ongoing efforts for abolition and the realization of equality. Insightful and compelling, this work makes an important intervention in the history of post-Civil War law.

Giuliana Perrone is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on the history of slavery, abolition, and race in North America, American socio-legal history, the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the development of American political institutions.

https://ihc.ucsb.edu/events/humanities-decanted/

Sponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

Giuliana Perrone: Nothing More than Freedom: The Failure of Abolition in American Law

A dialogue between Yunte Huang (English) and Constance Penley (Film and Media Studies) about Huang’s new book, Daughter of the Dragon: Anna May Wong’s Rendezvous with American History. Refreshments will be served.

Daughter of the Dragon is a trenchant reclamation of the Chinese American movie star, whose battles against cinematic exploitation and endemic racism are set against the currents of twentieth-century history. Born into the steam and starch of a Chinese laundry, Anna May Wong (1905–1961) emerged from turn-of-the-century Los Angeles to become Old Hollywood’s most famous Chinese American actress, a screen siren who captivated global audiences and signed her publicity photos—with a touch of defiance—“Orientally yours.” Now, more than a century after her birth, Yunte Huang narrates Wong’s tragic life story, retracing her journey from Chinatown to silent-era Hollywood, and from Weimar Berlin to decadent, prewar Shanghai, and capturing American television in its infancy. As Huang shows, Wong’s rendezvous with history features a remarkable parade of characters, including a smitten Walter Benjamin and (an equally smitten) Marlene Dietrich. Challenging the parodically racist perceptions of Wong as a “Dragon Lady,” “Madame Butterfly,” or “China Doll,” Huang’s biography becomes a truly resonant work of history that reflects the raging anti-Chinese xenophobia, unabashed sexism, and ageism toward women that defined both Hollywood and America in Wong’s all-too-brief fifty-six years on earth.

Yunte Huang is Distinguished Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara and is the author of Chinese Whispers: Toward a Transpacific Poetics (2022), Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics (2008), CRIBS (2005), Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature (2002), and Shi: A Radical Reading of Chinese Poetry (1997), and the translator into Chinese of Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos. His book, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History (Norton, 2010), won the Edgar Award and was the finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as being named a New York Times Notable Book and one of the Best Books of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle, Village Voice, Amazon, and Kirkus Reviews. A Guggenheim Fellow in 2014-15, he has also published articles in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Daily Beast, and others. His most recent book is Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History (2018).

https://ihc.ucsb.edu/events/humanities-decanted/

Sponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

Yunte Huang: Daughter of the Dragon

A dialogue between Janet Afary (Religious Studies) and Dwight Reynolds (Religious Studies) about Afary’s new book, Mollā Nasreddin: The Making of a Modern Trickster, 1906-1911. 

In the early twentieth century, a group of artists and intellectuals reinterpreted the Middle Eastern trickster figure Nasreddin in their periodical Mollā Nasreddin. They used folklore, visual art, and satire to disseminate a consciously radical and social democratic discourse on religion, gender, sexuality, and power in Transcaucasia and Iran. The periodical reached tens of thousands of people in the Muslim world, impacting the thinking of a generation.

This highly-illustrated book explores the milieu in which Mollā Nasreddin was born, the way the periodical recreated the trickster trope, and the influence of European graphic artists, especially Francisco Goya, on the journal. It focuses on the most creative period, 1906-11, when the journal reflected the social and political concerns of three major upheavals: the 1905 Russian Revolution, the 1906–1911 Iranian Constitutional Revolution, and the 1908 Young Turk Movement. Afary received the 2023 Eugenia M. Palmegiano Prize in the History of Journalism from the American Historical Association, awarded annually to the author of the most outstanding book published in English on the history of journalism. The book also received the 2023 British-Kuwait Friendship Award, given to the best scholarly work on the Middle East published in the U.K.

Janet Afary is Professor of Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara and the author of Sexual Politics in Modern Iran, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, and The Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906-11: Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy, and the Origins of Feminism.

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/events/humanities-decanted/

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

Janet Afary: Mollā Nasreddin: The Making of a Modern Trickster, 1906-1911

A dialogue between Thomas Mazanec (East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies) and Xiaorong Li (East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies) about Mazanec’s new book, Poet-Monks: The Invention of Buddhist Poetry in Medieval China.

Poet-Monks focuses on the literary and religious practices of Buddhist poet-monks in Tang-dynasty China to propose an alternative historical arc of medieval Chinese poetry. Combining large-scale quantitative analysis with close readings of important literary texts, Mazanec describes how Buddhist poet-monks, who first appeared in the latter half of the Tang dynasty, asserted a bold new vision of poetry that proclaimed the union of classical verse with Buddhist practices of repetition, incantation, and meditation. Mazanec traces the historical development of the poet-monk as a distinct actor in the Chinese literary world, arguing for the importance of religious practice in medieval literature. As they witnessed the collapse of the world around them, these monks wove together the frayed threads of their traditions to establish an elite-style Chinese Buddhist poetry. Poet-Monks shows that during the transformative period of the Tang-Song transition, Buddhist monks were at the forefront of poetic innovation.

Thomas Mazanec is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He researches premodern Chinese literature and religion as well as their encounters with other cultures. He is also interested in world literature, poetics, digital humanities, and translation studies. His publications cover a broad range of topics, from the evolution of a Sanskrit literary term in medieval China; to systems of monetary, religious, and literary debts; to the potential contributions of network analysis to literary history. He is especially fond of the art of literary translation, maintaining a collection of bizarre and obscure translations of classical Chinese poetry into English and co-editing an online bibliography of Chinese poetry in translation. 

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/events/humanities-decanted/

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

Thomas Mazanec: Poet-Monks: The Invention of Buddhist Poetry in Medieval China

A dialogue between Swati Chattopadhyay (History of Art and Architecture) and Cristina Venegas (Film and Media Studies) about Chattopadhyay’s new book, Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire. Chattopadhyay recasts the history of the British empire by focusing on the small spaces that made the empire possible. Her book takes as its subject a series of small architectural spaces, objects, and landscapes of the British empire in India and uses them to narrate the untold stories of the marginalized people—the servants, women, children, subalterns, and racialized minorities—who held up the infrastructure of empire. In so doing, it opens up an important new approach to architectural history: an invitation to shift our attention from the large to the small scale.

Swati Chattopadhyay is Professor of History of Art and Architecture at UC Santa Barbara. She specializes in modern architecture and urbanism and the cultural landscape of the British empire. She is a Founding Editor of PLATFORM and has served as a director of the Subaltern-Popular Workshop, a University of California Multi-campus Research Group, and as the editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH). Her other works include Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field (2012) and Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (2005).

https://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/events/humanities-decanted/

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

Swati Chattopadhyay: Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire

The IHC’s mission is to advance knowledge about human experience in cultural, historical, and social contexts and to do so through programs that foster human agency, social connectivity, and civic empowerment.

IHC events include lectures, seminars and conferences organized by IHC research focus groups and sub-units as well as events co-sponsored with campus departments. In addition, the IHC mounts year-long public programs on themes suggested by UCSB faculty and graduate students.

New tracks tagged #Humanities Decanted