Event Archive 2016 - Present

Dr. Allison Schachter, English Department & Program Director of Jewish Studies, Vanderbilt University, will present a chapter from her new book project for the Jewish Studies Workshop. Michal Peles-Almagor, PhD candidate in Comparative Literature, will respond. Light refreshments will be served. For information, contact the workshop coordinators, Joel Swanson joelhswanson@uchicago.edu or Mendel Kranz mkranz@uchicago.edu.

Moishe Postone, who died in March of last year, was a preeminent interpreter of Marx’s critical theory, a thinker of international renown, and a major intellectual presence at the University of Chicago, where he was the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor in the History Department and the College. Sponsored by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, where he served as co-director, the conference brings together Moishe’s friends, colleagues, and intellectual collaborators. We will reflect on his ideas and further explore the broad range of topics that his thinking and writing have illuminated. We hope to conjure up something of Moishe’s much regretted presence – his incisiveness, his breadth of interests, his political and moral passions, his wit, and his unending practice of constructive critique. SCHEDULE: Friday, April 12 9:00-9:30: Opening remarks, Lisa Wedeen (3CT) 9:30: Coffee 10:00-12:00 Chair: William Sewell Martin Jay, “Postone and the Vicissitudes of Abstraction.” Patrick Murray, “The Illusion of the Economic: Social Theory Without Social Forms.” Robert Hullot-Kentor, “An Attenuated Glossary of Throttled Meanings” 12:00-1:30: Lunch 1:30-3:30 Chair: Lisa Wedeen Bob Meister, “Moishe and Money” Benjamin Lee, “The ‘Value’ of Derivatives” Edward LiPuma, “Gifts and the Commodity” 4:00-6:00 Chair: Stacie Kent Aaron Benanav, “In What Sense Is the End of Work a New Beginning?” Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, “After Labor” Geoff Eley 'Class Formation, Politics, and Structures of Feeling.' Saturday, April 13 9:30: Coffee 10:00-12:00 Chair: Jonathan Levy Andrew Sartori, “Smith, Arendt, and the Possibility of Social Theory” Eric Santner, “Marx and Manatheism” Viren Murthy, “Beyond Particularity and Universality: Moishe Postone's Historical Time and Marx’s Jewish Question” 12:00-1:30: Lunch 1:30-3:30 Chair: Andrew Sartori Neil Brenner, “Critical Theory and the Mutation of the Urban Question: Towards the Real Subsumption of the Hinterland?” Andrew Sloin, “The Soviet Union and the Development of Global Capitalism” Stacie Kent, “Commercial Circulation and Abstract Domination.” 3:30-4:00 Coffee Break 4:00-6:00 Chair: Christine Achinger Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking Socialism: An Expanded View” Eli Zaretsky, “Capitalism and Time” Craig Calhoun, “The End of Capitalism or Another Transformation?”

Dr. Sarai Aharoni, lecturer in the Gender Studies Program of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, will look at the relationship between the United States and Israel – a topic much debated and discussed in the media and the public sphere – by turning away from the official channels of diplomacy and to another form of collaboration and interaction. The lecture will present a microanalysis of US Sixth-Fleet port calls, Rest and Recreation, and naval diplomacy in the Port of Haifa during 1978-2001. The documentation of everyday civil-military encounters in the city supports the claim that in the Mediterranean context, American military expansion was welcomed both by political elites and the general public. In this process, a politics of consensus was created through repeated activities, ceremonies, and cultural frames, that stressed the shared values and importance of US-Israel relations. Although the negative effects of routine visits (vandalism, crime, prostitution, and rape) were never publicly acknowledged on the national level, various mechanisms for containing and minimizing urban conflict were developed over time by local officials, entrepreneurs, and residents. The lecture focuses in particular on the narratives of and about women who were involved as agents in the daily maintenance spaces frequented by American servicemen, and reveals that intimacy, sexuality, and even motherly love were significant elements among the mechanisms of containment.

On March 13th, at 5:30 pm in Fulton Hall, the University will host W. Michael Blumenthal, who came of age in Japanese-occupied Shanghai and then went on to become President Carter’s Secretary of the Treasury. Following his keynote conversation with Creative Writing faculty member and novelist Rachel DeWoskin, there will be a concert of war-time classical music, performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's assistant concertmaster, violinist Yuan-Qing Yu, and her quartet, Civitas Ensemble. On March 14th, a day-long symposium will be held at the Franke Institute, featuring conversations between University of Chicago faculty and invited guests on topics including the experience of the Shanghai Jews; Iraqi Jewish business networks and the financial history of the Jewish elites in China; the literature of war-time childhood and adolescence; the role of fiction in creating and remembering history; the musical and artistic history and legacy of the Shanghai Jews; and readings of both Holocaust-era and contemporary poetry and prose. This series was made possible by support from the Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies; The Franke Institute; The Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS); the Departments of Anthropology, East Asian Languages and Civilizations (EALC), and History; the Program on Creative Writing; and a Title VI National Resource Center Grant from the U.S. Department of Education. For information, visit the Greenberg Center website at ccjs.uchicago.edu or contact Nancy Pardee at npardee@uchicago.edu.