Critcal Theory Cluster

The Critical Theory Cluster (CTC), sponsored by Africana Studies, is composed of Williams College faculty from various departments and programs who will explore a chosen theme through an on-going theoretical inquiry.  In its first year (2006-2007), this interdisciplinary group will focus on the theme of "Terror."  Members of the CTC will draw upon various works of critical theory to inquire into multiple and conflicting definitions, permutations,
foundations, and implications of terror as well as the relationships between different experiences of terror. 

To help generate a campus-wide conversation among interested faculty and students, the CTC has invited select guests-theorists and artists-to address "Terror" from various conceptual and disciplinary angles.  Each guest presents
a public lecture or performance, followed by a question-and-answer session,
addressing the annual theme.

2006-2007 Lectures/Performances

September 2006
Susana Cook Public performance:  "The Values Horror Show"
6:00 p.m. Director's Studio, '62 Center for Theatre and Dance
Susana Cook is an Argentinian performance artist whose work focuses on
international and national politics.


November 2006
Saidiya Hartman Public lecture:  "Dead Book"
Griffin Hall  4pm

Saidiya Hartman received her Ph.D. from Yale University and is a Visiting Professor at
Columbia University and Professor at UC-Berkely, where she holds a joint appointment in
the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Institute of
Research on Women and Gender.  She is the author of Scenes of Subjection:
Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford
University Press, 1997) and the upcoming Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the
Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).  The latter book
confronts the disturbing relationships among memory, representation, and
narrative and focuses on the "non-history" of the slave, the way in which the
unnamable catastrophe of slavery erased any conventional modality for writing
an intelligible past.

April 2007
Stephen Best Public Lecture:
Griffin Hall, 4pm

Stephen Best (Williams '89), an Associate Professor of English at UC-Berkeley,
received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of
The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession ( University of
Chicago, 2004), a study of property, poetics, and legal hermeneutics in
nineteenth-century American literary and legal culture. Focused on dead forms
of slave law and emergent forms of intellectual property law -- and on
"fugitive" forms of property in both -- the book tracks a "social text of
fugitivity," interweavings of legal and literary discourses in which
figurations of the fugitive (as errant and inconstant) shape economic
transactions, engender emergent types of social character, and lubricate
transitions in the law. His new project is on redress and the problem of legal
historicism. 



Katrina Articles:

"The Lost Year: Behind the Failure to Rebuild," by Dan Baum, New Yorker, August 21, 2006.

For CTC Members:

Readings
Meeting Schedule


Related Events:

"Revisiting Black Power" Film Forum
October 19-21, Wiliams College Museum of Art
Mark Anthony Neal Lecture, October 19th, Griffin Hall, 4pm