Joseph Keene Chadwick Lecture Series

Joseph Keene Chadwick was born in California in 1954 and died in Hawai‘i in 1992. He was a vigorous thinker, a generous colleague, and a dedicated teacher. His early interventions in Irish studies, gay studies, creative writing, and emergent literatures were progressive and important contributions to those fields at the time he wrote and even more so now.

The Joseph Keene Chadwick endowment fund was established after Professor Chadwick’s death through the generosity of his mother, Lois Huxtable, and her husband Robert. The endowment supports the Joseph Keene Chadwick Lecture Series at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, an annual series of lectures in the areas most associated with Chadwick’s work: gay studies, Irish studies, multiculturalism and emergent literatures, creative writing, and translation studies.

In 2002 The College of Language, Linguistics, and Literature published Joseph Keene Chadwick: Interventions and Continuities in Irish and Gay Studies, co-edited by John Rieder, Joseph H. O’Mealy, and Valerie Wayne. The volume contains a susbstantial section of the book on Yeats’s tragedies that Professor Chadwick left unfinished at his death, along with essays, poems, and translations by Chadwick, Frank McGuiness, Jacqueline Hill, Witi Ihimaera, George E. Haggerty, Kathy J. Philips, and Steve Bradbury.

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For our next series of lectures, we are pleased to present Andrew Lam, journalist, fiction writer, and commentator for National Public Radio; and Michael Kimmel (SUNY-Stony Brook), author of "Manhood in America" and "The Gendered Society". The official announcement will be posted early in the Spring 2008 semester.

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2007

Gayatri Gopinath (PhD UC-Davis)
“Queer Regions: Locating Lesbians in Ligy Pullappally’s The Journey” - March 22, 2007, HIG Auditorium 7pm

This paper explores the possibility of a trans-regional analysis of gender and sexuality, one that maps the lines of connection between different locations in the global South. Such an analysis would challenge a model of a “global gay” subject who is imagined as always and everywhere male, elite, urban and cosmopolitan. Shifting our critical lens from the gay male public cultures of the global city – such as Mumbai, Delhi, London or New York – to non-metropolitan locations allows us to foreground those spaces and bodies that are elided within dominant narratives of global gayness. The 2004 film The Journey, by Indian American director Ligy Pullappally, provides us with a useful point of departure from which to consider the uses of thinking about queer desire in relation to the notion of the region. Filmed entirely in the South Indian language Malayalam, The Journey depicts a burgeoning love affair between two school girls growing up in a small town in rural South India, and was screened at film festivals both in India and in the US to critical acclaim. Not since Deepa Mehta’s Fire (1996) has a feature film set within India dealt so explicitly with the theme of lesbian desire. The vastly different responses to each film forces us to consider the different meanings and effects of a regionally inflected representation of queer female desire (The Journey), as opposed to that which is quite clearly marked as (anti)national (Fire). As such, The Journey raises interesting questions around the discursive production of both queerness and regionalism within both national and transnational contexts.

Gayatri Gopinath is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of California at Davis. She received her Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and is the author of Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Duke, 2005). Her work on sexuality, gender, and South Asian diasporic literature, film, and popular music has appeared in the journals GLQ, Positions, and Diaspora, as well as in the anthologies Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader, eds. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (Blackwell, 2003), Queer Globalizations: Citizenship, Sexualities, and the Afterlife of Colonialism, eds. Arnaldo Cruz Malave and Martin Manalansan (NYU Press, 2002), and Burning Down the House: Recycling Domesticity, ed. Rosemary M. George (Westview Press, 1998).

Professor Gopinath will also lead a seminar on March 23, 2007 at 1:30 in Kuykendall Hall 410; readings will be available ahead of time. For more information, contact the Department of English (956-3085).

2006
Jonathan Goldberg
" Homoeroticism in Literary History: Some Early Modern Couples"
Thursday, January 6, 2006; 3:00 p.m., Kuykendall 410

Jonathan Goldberg is the Sir William Osler Professor of English Literature at the Johns Hopkins University. A distinguished scholar of the Renaissance, he has written Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities, Shakespeare's Hand, and several other books, and he has edited a groundbreaking collection, Queering the Renaissance. In his lecture, Professor Goldberg considers the pedagogy of Renaissance literature today. He takes some works from this literature--the poetry of Thomas Wyatt and Thomas Surrey, as well as Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene--and shows that they are much sexually multi-faceted than we might imagine from standard textbooks and anthologies. He both analyzes and offers an alternative to "heteronormative" literary history.

Michael Moon
Seminar presentation: "Insides Out: Contexts for Darger"
Friday, January 27, 2006; 3:30 p.m., Kuykendall 410

Michael Moon, an Americanist, is Professor in the Department of English at the Johns Hopkins University. He has authored Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass, A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol, and written extensively on sexuality and contemporary art and culture.

In his seminar, Michael Moon investigates the "outsider art" of Henry Darger in the broad context of both popular and avante-garde art of the twentieth century. Instead of seeing it as anomalous or bizzare, he finds analogues for this art in a wide range of discourses, including early newspaper comic strips such as Mutt and Jeff and Little Orphan Annie, children's serials such as the Oz books and the Bobbsey Twins series, and such devotional literature as the writings of Anne Emmerich, whose alleged visions of the Cruxificxion served as a source for Mel Gibson's The Passion.

Past Lectures:
Ann Cvetkovich (2005)
Judith Halberstram (2004) Poster-"Queer Forgetting"
Earl Jackson (2003)
Valerie Traub (2002)
Justin Chin (2001)
Witi Ihimaera (2000)
Elizabeth Butler Cullingford (1999)
Elizabeth Grosz (1998)
Susan Schweik (1996)
Douglas Crimp (1996)
Jeff Nunokawa (1995)
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1995)
Judith Butler (1994)