>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, Gainesville > >Keynote Speakers: Michael Hardt and Kristin Ross > > >Where is the Left now? How do we 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. Particularly, how might >singularities help us rethink and formulate a collective >possibility? And, along these same lines, what might a politics >mean, finally, when it invokes 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--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 of >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 are 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 "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 [log in to unmask] > >For info on previous conferences visit www.english.ufl.edu/mrg. > >Abstracts due: February 10. > >--- ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu