A workshop with Christian David Alvarado KAPLAN HALL ROOM #348 1:00-2:30pm Workshop 2:30-3:00pm Reception   This workshop is open to UCLA Comparative Literature graduate students, UCLA English graduate students, and UCLA African Studies Center students.   Related Document: Workshop Chapter The chapter we will be discussing in this workshop examines a key episode in the...

A Talk by Christian David Alvarado Kaplan Hall Room #348 5:00-8:00 PM In the opening pages of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s 1967 novel A Grain of Wheat, a European district officer asks a version of the question at the core of discourse about the anticolonial movement that gripped Kenya in the 1950s: “What is this thing...

Intangible and Recalcitrant Objects: Balzac’s Pedestrian Observations and the Predicament of the Human Sciences   In 1833, Honoré de Balzac published a short essay entitled La théorie de démarche. In this highly original text, he defines for the first time his historical-anthropological approach to the society of his epoch that would lead to the vast...