Talking War

The Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan sponsors a lecture series that convenes every Monday evening (time off for holidays and semester breaks) during the Fall & Spring semesters. Monday is usually a quiet day for the arts and humanities so, if you're a curious type, it would be worth your while to go to the Russell House, 350 High Street, for the 8 p.m. sessions.

For Fall 2009, the topic is "War." From the CHUM's website:

"Wars bring brutality, death, upheaval, and trauma. Participants and survivors bear witness to the disruptions of war in concrete detail. Nothing is so urgently documented as war, and war-making itself is often organized with reverence and precision. Yet accounts of war struggle with the limits of their narrative grasp. How might we make sense of the very breakdown of meaning and order? Can war be understood, as commonly claimed, to be the continuation of politics by other means or is it more accurate to understand politics as the continuation of war by other means? By virtue of the vivid struggles bound up in our ordinary and literal understanding of combat, war inevitably becomes the ground for metaphorical extensions, and these in turn affect our understanding of war in its most visceral form. The interaction between concrete and symbolic dimensions of war is far from simple.

The Center for the Humanities invites scholars and visitors for 2009-2010 to shed light on the realities and meanings of war, and to explore whether and how these are changing. Is war paradoxically presented as a state of exception, yet one from which there is no exit? What is the impact of bringing war home to civilian life, whether in the marketing of combat games and paraphernalia or in the involuntary re-enactments of post-traumatic stress disorder? What new responses to war are emerging in politics, theory, and religious and social movements?"

Tonight (September 21), the speaker is Catherine Lutz, Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at Brown University. Her most recent books include "The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle of US Military Posts" (NYU Press, 2009) and "Local Democracy Under Siege" Activism, Public Interests, and Private Politics" (NYU Press, 2007.) The title of her talk at Wesleyan is "The Military Normal and the Human Terrain of Warfare."

This event is free and open to the public. For more information, call 685-3044 or go to www.wesleyan.edu/chum.