The nascent Center for the Humanities and Public Sphere, the Department
of English, and the Marxist Reading Group presents:
Born of Desertion: Singularity, Collectivity, Revolution
March 20-22 at the University of Florida
Keynote Speakers: Michael Hardt and Kristin Ross
Where is the Left now? How do we invest in community, materialize
collective formations, and enact a justice in their name? How do we do
this at a moment when the world market and the right-wing body politic,
prodigiously engineering and rewriting the global imaginary, have appeared
as the frightening answer to certain strains of a communal impulse so
crucial to the Left?
Our conference seeks papers that engage with those leftist politics
occluded from public discourse. How might singularities help us rethink
and formulate a collective possibility? And, along these same lines, what
might we mean, finally, when we invoke the word "revolution"? This will
not be limited to but certainly and inevitably caught up in considerations
of the spatial, the temporal, production, everyday exploitation, and the
state. Is it within the scope of these concerns, especially in the context
of the imperial world order, that a truly radical Left can emerge?
Michael Hardt is widely acknowledged as a major voice—both nationally and
internationally—in the ongoing debates around globalization. The
publication of Empire, which he coauthored with Antonio Negri, has
contributed to this debate by suggesting new conceptions between capital,
space, and subjectivity. In addition to Empire, Hardt’s publications
engage with issues of contemporary politics and philosophy. He is author
of Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (1993) and coauthor
with Antonio Negri of Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-form
(1994). He is coeditor with Paolo Virno of Radical Thought in Italy (1996)
and coeditor with Kathi Weeks of The Jameson Reader (2000).Hardt is an
Associate Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University.
Kristin Ross engages with French social theory and cultural studies and
examines how insurgent moments in history—the Paris Commune, May ‘68—are
written and rewritten in the cultural imaginary. Key to her work is the
new spatial formations and social practices that emerge from revolutionary
actions. In Emergence of Social Space (1988), Ross argues that space is
political, and that through space, the Commune challenges the capitalist
notion of work, leisure, and identity. Her most recent book, May ‘68 and
its Afterlives (2002), explores how normalizing discourses erase the
revolutionary aspects of this event, and explain them away as an
apolitical "youth movement." In addition to these books, Ross has written
Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French
Culture (1995), and she is co-editor (with Alice Kaplan) of a special
issue of Yale French Studies on on "everyday life" (1987). Ross is a
professor of Comparative Literature at New York University.
Prospective papers may address (but are not limited to) the following:
* Anti-humanism/post-humanism in Empire.
* Reification of history.
* Narrative mappings of the political.
* The racisms without race.
* Re-thinking subjectivities through singularity.
* Society of control and new forms of policing/discipline.
* The aesthetics of security.
* Re-writing the frontiers of the nation-state.
* Antimedia and counter-empire.
* Prosthetics, Clones, Cyborgs: The body and technological ontologies.
* Strategies of containing revolutionary practices.
* Gender and the place of work.
* Global capital and imagining the apocalypse.
* Pedagogies and reorganizing relations to space.
* Literature and collectivity.
* Insurgent spatial practices: sites for alternative production.
* Professionalization and the corporate university.
* Media and formulations of collectivity.
* Constructions of a revolutionary identity.
* Politics of zoning.
* US policy, war, and terrorism.
Non-traditional or performative panels will also be considered.
One page abstracts, questions, and comments should be submitted to the
Marxist Reading Group at extinction@clas.ufl.edu.
For info on previous conferences visit www.english.ufl.edu/mrg.
Abstracts due: January 30.
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From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List
CFP@english.upenn.edu
Full Information at
http://www.english.upenn.edu/CFP/
or write Erika Lin: elin@english.upenn.edu
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