Litquake

Image of the poster for LiqQuake.

Litquake

Language & Politics: The Discourse of Power
The Book Club of California

Faculty from Stanford and UC Berkeley examine how language affects politics and vice versa. What are the conditions that make political language possible, and what are the conditions that render language political? From a racially-inflected "rhetoric of contempt" to shades of totalitarian references in contemporary political discourse, the participating faculty members of both universities will engage in a wide-ranging and spirited discussion at the Book Club of California.

Faculty participants:

Brandi Wilkins Catanese is Associate Professor of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies and African American Studies at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on African American performance and culture, spanning theater, film, television, visual art, and politics.

Stanford Associate English professor Paula Moya is the editor of Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century. Her research interests lie chiefly in the areas of 20th and 21st century American literatures, Chicana/o cultural studies and feminist theory.

Vaughn Raspberry is assistant professor of English at Stanford University, and his current book project challenges the notion that landmark civil rights initiatives emancipated African American writers from the constraints of writing.

Free and open to the public. Co-presented by the Stanford Humanities Center and the Townsend Center for the Humanities.

More on Litquake