Call for Papers: The Politics of Community
Book collection under contract with Davies Publishing Group
A number of important texts began appearing in the late 1980s and early
1990s that focused on what could be called the "politics of community,"
including announcements that community as we know it had either come to
an end, or should come to an end. The most notable books included
Giorgio Agamben's _The Coming Community_; Benedict Anderson's _Imagined
Communities_; Maurice Blanchot's _The Unavowable Community_; Alphonso
Lingis' _The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common_; the Miami
Theory Collective's _Community at Loose Ends_; and, Jean-Luc Nancy's
_The Inoperative Community_.
I am editing a collection of essays on this topic. This volume will
contain a total of approximately fifteen essays, drawn from two sources:
1) twelve new essays by leading and emerging scholars in the field,
specially commissioned for this project, and 2) several reprinted essays
(which include Dennis A. Foster, "Pleasure and Community in Cultural
Criticism"; Ernesto Laclau, "Politics and the Limits of Modernity";
Jean-Francois Lyotard, "The Wall, the Gulf, the System"; and, Michael
Strysick, "The End of Community and the Politics of Grammar").
Those already committed to the project include Verena Andermatt Conley,
Ernesto Laclau, and Alphonso Lingis.
To gloss the opening of Lyotard's "The Wall" essay, my hope is that this
collection will be an occasion "to take stock of the present historical
juncture," specifically as we head into a new century and a new
millennium. As Lyotard suggests a few pages into his essay, "The task
of criticism is precisely to pinpoint and denounce every failure of the
system with regard to emancipation." In what seems almost a reversal,
if not an extension, of his earlier work, he adds: "I would say that
criticism thus contributes to transforming differends, if any still
remain, into litigations." How does this alter or possibly extend the
challenges, possibility, or impossibility of community in the current
critical moment? In all, I am hoping that the new essays will address
any of the following questions:
* Today, does community seem more possible or more impossible?
* What role can theory play in discussions of community?
* Is, as Alphonso Lingis suggests, mortality the main form of communal
unity? If so, how do we respond to continued violence (Rwanda,
Columbine, Chechnya et al)?
* Do recent tragedies in America and abroad, which point to communal
failure, foster or dispirit society's nostalgia for the past?
The previous texts on the topic have proven to be of lasting importance
to those concerned with the past and future of our being-together.
However, these positions demand re-assessment, and I hope this
collection will be a positive crucible through which those ideas can be
tested, re-examined, and expanded. I believe that the collection will
be especially strengthened by finding ways in which to foreground our
current communal failures against the backdrop of critical inquiry, and
by working closely at the intersection between theory and practice.
Please send abstracts or essays by July 1, 2000, to:
Michael Strysick, Dept. of English, Wake Forest University,
Winston-Salem, NC 27109.
Or, send as an attached Word document to: strysim@wfu.edu.
If you have any questions about the project, and wish to see a longer
abstract, please contact me via email.
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or write Erika Lin: elin@english.upenn.edu
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