The History of Consciousness department is pleased to offer a quarterly series of talks by distinguished guests in the History of Consciousness Research Colloquium. Recordings of previous lectures are available in the Research Colloquium Archive. Speakers are selected in collaboration by a committee of faculty and graduate students. Please see the current events list below.
Attend in-person at Humanities 1 or virtually on Zoom. Zoom registration to be shared. Note that you may register to attend more than one event at the time of registration. Masks strongly recommended for those attending in person.
Upcoming events:
The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads with Kevin Anderson, UC Santa Barbara & discussants Pablo Escudero and Anna Yegorova, UC Santa Cruz
Monday October 20th at 1pm PST
Hum 1 Rm 420
At this event, Anna Yegorova and Pablo Escudero will engage Professor Kevin Anderson on his recently published monograph, The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads. In this work, Anderson carries out a systematic analysis of Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks and related texts on Russia, India, Ireland, Algeria, Latin America, and ancient Rome, with an eye to how viewing the world beyond the boundaries of Western modernity fundamentally alters our understanding of capitalism, empire, historical development, and revolutionary possibilities, past and present.
Timescape of Rings with Stephen David Engel, UC Santa Cruz
Monday November 17th at 1pm PST
Hum 1 Rm 420
For this presentation, I will read from an experimental history called “Timescape of Rings.” In it, I meditate on a 2,200-year-old redwood round with markers for historical events affixed to its rings—the birth of Jesus, the invention of gunpowder, the drafting of the Magna Carta, and on. Running my fingers over the rings, I recall histories not commemorated by these markers, in particular revolts and egalitarian movements. From there, my daydreams carry me back deeper in time, all the way back to the first woody trees some 385 million years ago.
Maoism without Guarantees: Third World Currents in Fourth World Anti-Colonialism with Glen Coulthard, University of British Columbia
Monday December 1st at 1pm PST
Hum 1 Rm 420
This lecture will provide a history of Red Power radicalization and Indigenous-Marxist cross-fertilization. It examines the political work undertaken by a small but dedicated cadre of Native organizers going by the name Native Alliance for Red Power (or NARP) in Vancouver, British Columbia (BC), from 1967 to the 1975. It argues that their political organizing and theory-building borrowed substantively and productively from a Third World-adapted Marxism which provided an appealing international language of political contestation that they not only inherited but sought to radically transform through a critical engagement with their own cultural traditions and land-based struggles. Not unlike many radicalized communities of color during this period, NARP molded and adapted the insights they gleaned from Third World Marxism abroad – with a focus on Maoism in particular – into their own internationalist critiques of racial capitalism, patriarchy, and internal colonialism at home. A focus will be placed on NARP’s application of a Red Power- Maoist critique of the political economy of extraction spanning from Palestine and the Middle East to Canada via the Oil Crisis of 1973.
Further Talk Information
The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads with Kevin Anderson, UC Santa Barbara & discussants Pablo Escudero and Anna Yegorova, UC Santa Cruz
Monday October 20th at 1pm PST | Hum 1 Room 420
At this event, Anna Yegorova and Pablo Escudero will engage Professor Kevin Anderson on his recently published monograph, The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads. In this work, Anderson carries out a systematic analysis of Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks and related texts on Russia, India, Ireland, Algeria, Latin America, and ancient Rome, with an eye to how viewing the world beyond the boundaries of Western modernity fundamentally alters our understanding of capitalism, empire, historical development, and revolutionary possibilities, past and present.
Kevin Anderson is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads; Marx at the Margins; Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (with Janet Afary); and Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism.
Timescape of Rings with Stephen David Engel, UC Santa Cruz
Monday November 17th at 1pm PST | Hum 1 Room 420
For this presentation, I will read from an experimental history called “Timescape of Rings.” In it, I meditate on a 2,200-year-old redwood round with markers for historical events affixed to its rings—the birth of Jesus, the invention of gunpowder, the drafting of the Magna Carta, and on. Running my fingers over the rings, I recall histories not commemorated by these markers, in particular revolts and egalitarian movements. From there, my daydreams carry me back deeper in time, all the way back to the first woody trees some 385 million years ago.
Stephen David Engel is a transdisciplinary scholar who thinks across big scales of history and time and who writes about them using creative genres. His writing has appeared in Rethinking History, ROAR Magazine, The Anthology of Babel, and other publications. He holds a PhD from the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he received the Hayden White dissertation fellowship for excellence in historical theory. This spring, he will serve as Visiting Professor at Deep Springs College, an alternative liberal arts college in the California desert.
Maoism without Guarantees: Third World Currents in Fourth World Anti-Colonialism with Glen Coulthard, University of British Columbia
Monday December 1st at 1pm PST | Hum 1 Room 420
This lecture will provide a history of Red Power radicalization and Indigenous-Marxist cross-fertilization. It examines the political work undertaken by a small but dedicated cadre of Native organizers going by the name Native Alliance for Red Power (or NARP) in Vancouver, British Columbia (BC), from 1967 to the 1975. It argues that their political organizing and theory-building borrowed substantively and productively from a Third World-adapted Marxism which provided an appealing international language of political contestation that they not only inherited but sought to radically transform through a critical engagement with their own cultural traditions and land-based struggles. Not unlike many radicalized communities of color during this period, NARP molded and adapted the insights they gleaned from Third World Marxism abroad – with a focus on Maoism in particular – into their own internationalist critiques of racial capitalism, patriarchy, and internal colonialism at home. A focus will be placed on NARP’s application of a Red Power- Maoist critique of the political economy of extraction spanning from Palestine and the Middle East to Canada via the Oil Crisis of 1973.
Glen Coulthard is Yellowknives Dene and an associate professor in the First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program and the Departments of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), winner of the 2016 Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Frantz Fanon Award for Outstanding Book, the Canadian Political Science Association’s CB Macpherson Award for Best Book in Political Theory, published in English or French, in 2014/2015, and the Rik Davidson Studies in Political Economy Award for Best Book in 2016. He is also a co-founder of Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning, a decolonial, Indigenous land-based post-secondary program operating on his traditional territories in Denendeh(Northwest Territories).