Kritik

On 15 November 2022, at the penultimate Fall lecture in the Modern Critical Lecture series, art historian Lisa Rosenthal discussed the gendered gaze that beholds the female nude through a series of paintings from the early modern period. The lecture began with a viewing of Johan Joseph Zoffany’s oil painting The Tribuna of the Uffizi. This painting guided the selection of the subsequent paintings and the theme of the male gaze throughout the lecture. As Rosenthal explained, the painting, in the collection of the Medici family, was a baroque work that captured the...

On November 1, 2022, Zsuzsa Gille (Sociology, UIUC) delivered the Modern Critical Theory lecture entitled “The Material(ity) Turn” which centered around texts and theories about how humans-nonhuman assemblages form political powers. All images and quotes are from the lecture unless otherwise noted. Gille began by addressing the inseparability of the material from the social, showing two seemingly contrasting videos of plastic trash. In a scene from the film American Beauty, a plastic bag is portrayed as a vibrant matter, an autonomous subject swaying to and fro in the wind...

On Tuesday October 25, 2022, Professor Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández (Toronto) delivered “The Pedagogies of Solidarity,” a lecture about understanding and developing pedagogies of solidarity. Quoted content is from the lecture unless noted otherwise. All images are by 愚木混株 Cdd20 from Pixabay. Rubén...

In her lecture titled “Marxism, Imperialism and the Beyond of Capitalism: Re-reading Rosa Luxemburg” Amy Allen implores scholars to move beyond the developmental arc of history, a theory of history borrowed from Karl Marx that Luxemburg embeds in her idea of the beyond of capitalism. Allen wants to understand what Luxemburg means by the beyond or outside of capitalism that is present in many of her writings. She centers the project within a larger scholarly project on Marx’s theory of history and 20th-century Marxist thinkers. Allen situates her lecture as a critique of Rosa Luxemburg amid...

On October 11, 2022, Cameron McCarthy spoke at the Unit for Criticism on “The Postcolonial Imagination: Tools for Conviviality.” Beginning with his own high school education in Barbados, McCarthy used the school’s entrance examination system and literary curriculum—both determined in England and centered on an English canon—as an entry point into his broader questions about postcolonial art and aesthetics. He defined postcolonial theory as the “practices of systematic reflection on dominant relations, produced in the process of elaboration of colonial and neocolonial relationships and...

On September 27th, Dr. Rosalyn LaPier (History UIUC), an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe of Montana and Métis, delivered a Modern Critical Theory lecture entitled “Land as Text: Environmental Studies.” While “Indigenous” and “Native” are globalized terms, due to the scope of this blog post they are invoked throughout to primarily refer to those people, communities, and tribal nations Indigenous to Turtle Island. Through her education in dual Western and Indigenous knowledge systems, LaPier illustrated how the...

On September 20, 2022, Professor David Wilson (GGIS) delivered a Modern Critical Theory lecture entitled "The Advanced Capitalist City: Conceptual Innovations." David Wilson's articulation of the advanced capitalist city engaged with various important contemporary discourses via an investigation of the nexus of cities, people, and personal and scholarly experiences which shaped his scholarship as an urban geographer. Urban studies scholarship understands "capitalist cities" through Neo-classical, institutional, Neo-Marxist, hermeneutic, post-modern, and post-structural frameworks of...

Suman Mukhopadhyay, the eminent film director and thespian from West Bengal, India, screened his latest release Nazarband (Captive/2020), a loose cinematic adaption of a short story by Ashapurna Devi, at Temple Hoyne Buell Hall on 15th September 2022. This Hindi film tracks the trajectories of two convicts, Vasanti Mahato (Indira Tiwari) and Chandu (Tanmay Dhanania), shortly after being freed from incarceration. Together, despite initial hiccups, they traverse the length and breadth of Kolkata and its hinterlands, to seek a new start, or perhaps a reunion with the past. The screening...

The trio ebb and flow through timbral scenes as if incessantly daydreaming across an eternal triptych, each panel briefly made visible by rumbling left-hand (LH) piano texturing arpeggios beneath transparent open fourths, fifths, and octaves in nightingales. Contrabass bowed tremolo glissandi converge with metal brushes on drum in a white noise of resonance. But these are not just any scenes. They make a place where there is no space, where there is no room for you. And maybe by making place, they also produce “being-with.” Their sounds are less music making than world-making, hybrid worlds...

The Asian America Otherwise Conference was the culminating conference of the In Plain Sight: Reckoning with Anti-Asian Racism research initiative. This initiative was funded by the Chancellor’s Call to Action to Address Racism & Social Injustice Research Program for 2021-2022. In Plain Sight has included a series of public lectures and seminars featuring leading scholars in Asian American studies and related fields. The Asian America Otherwise Conference took place May 6-7, 2022 at the I Hotel in Champaign.             The conference’s first panel, “Other Politics,...