End of Season Wrap Up and Forthcoming Events

The Marcus Orr Center, its staff and generous contributors would like to thank everyone who participated in our last run of events for the Fall term. Highlights from the end of the season included a series of provocative French films (including the Academy Award winning Un prophète), local favorite Preston Lauterbach’s talk on the Chittlin Circuit, American roots music, and the ‘road to rock ‘n roll’ and the riveting informance “Prophets of Funk”, a celebration of the oeuvre and broader cultural legacy of Sly and the Family Stone.

Our final event, eminent UC Berkley Hebraist and literary critic Robert Alter’s discussion of the King James Version and its impact on American literature, drew a standing room only crowd.  Alter, author of over a dozen books on topics ranging from the Pentateuch to the writings of Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, was both keynote lecturer for and participant in a larger three day, community-wide series of events commemorating the 400^th anniversary of the first pressing of the KJV.

When we reconvene after the holidays, you can anticipate another fantastic string of MOCH events. On the 26^th, the History Department presents its Sesquicentennial Lecture wherein Timothy Snyder will be discussing his universally acclaimed Bloodlands, an in depth look at impact of Soviet-Nazi competition over the territories of East-Central Europe, modern day Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Western Russia, and the Baltic states.  

Other upcoming events include the 2012 Italian language film festival, presented in cooperation with Indie Memphis, the Freedom of Information Congress, an informance on Arabian Nights, and a talk from Pulitzer Prize winning historian Eric Foner on the 150^th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, all part of our continued effort to bring intellectually stimulating speakers both to the campus and larger Memphis community. 

Richard Wolin and "The Wind from the East"

      Richard Wolin, intellectual historian at CUNY and noted contributor to such national publications as The New Republic and The Nation, delivered the Orr Center’s opening address for the fall semester. Wolin’s new book The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s examines the impact of Maoist thought on French academia and political life and the long-term reverberations of the events of May 1968. Galvanized by revolutionary upheavals far from home, French students (supported by such academic luminaries as Sartre, Foucault, and Kristeva) took the streets, engaging in widespread popular demonstrations and strikes aimed at radically transforming their own society along leftist contours. Though they took their cues from Mao’s ideas – and from the ‘Cultural Revolution’ he initiated in 1966 – these scholars and activists were largely unaware of the horrors then raging in the China that they envisioned as a proletarian utopia. The ultimate failure of the protests, along with disillusionment at the bloody realities of Chinese authoritarian communism, led many of those who associated with the May events to a more moderate politics, which in turn gave way to human rights discourses and the establishment of Médecins Sans Frontières. The significance of this period in French history remains a topic of contentious debate in today’s France, evidenced by some less than complimentary remarks President Sarkozy directed toward the student radicals of his youth during his 2007 electoral bid.

     Dr. Wolin’s talk was given under the aegis of the University of Memphis Department of Philosophy’s annual Nancy Simco Lecture Series.  It was well attended, with both students and the larger community responding enthusiastically.

The Politics of the Veil

An exciting week for the Marcus Orr Center (Dr. Judaken's NPR interview with Joan Scott and a reading group discussion of her book "The Politics of the Veil") culminated with Dr. Joan Scott's lecture on the 2004 French ban on conspicuous religious clothing in public schools. This discussion of the French state's methods of dealing with it's colonial past and it's diverse present and future was extremely interesting, not least because of Dr. Scott's grasp of the issue and her insight into the various sociological elements at play. The lecture drew a large and diverse crowd, including a Swedish gender-studies student at UofM who mentioned having read Dr. Scott throughout her academic career and was delighted to have had the opportunity to meet her. Dr. Scott concluded with a very poised and open question and answer session that further illustrated how well she understood the topic of ethnic and gender discrimination as it applied to France and even as it applied to Western society more generally.

Lewis Gordon and the Fanon Commemoration

Old Man Winter once again interfered with our plans at MOCH in coordinating the Fanon event with Dr. Gordon. Of course, the University was closed that Thursday because of the abrupt snowstorm that dumped several inches of snow on us. Needless to say, we were anxious about how many people would attend the event when it was rescheduled for Friday. Dr. Gordon was already scheduled to give the introduction to the Mid-South Philosophy Conference that weekend, so he graciously decided to extend and merge his talk to include some points on Fanon.

And the event went well! There were around 80 or so in attendance! We were all delighted by Dr. Gordon's talk. In his opening remarks, he cited the (then developing) situation in Egypt as "a textbook example of Fanon's theory". His brief introduction of Fanon's life and works set a lively and intellectual tone for the conference and our event. We are most grateful that things worked out so well!

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Natural And Unnatural Disasters Symposium

            Although the terrible series of January snowstorms (an inconvenience that almost seemed apropos given the subject matter) forced keynote speaker Simon Winchester to join us by video stream, our “Natural and Unnatural Disasters” symposium was a great success. Lee Clarke, Beatrice Magnani and Arleen Hill as well as Simon Winchester were all able to give extremely intellectually stimulating lectures on the realities of disasters in today’s society and their physical and human scope. The expert lineup and the relevance of the subject matter combined to create what was a truly fascinating event. If you weren't there, you missed out, but you can make it up to yourself by attending one of our many upcoming events!