Call for Proposals:
Alternative Culture Now: The Politics of Culture at the Present Conjuncture
Conference and Event
Budapest, Hungary
April 8-10, 2010
Proposal Deadline: January 25, 2010
How do things stand with respect to the fate of the alternative?
Branded and normativized, incorporated into a whole ensemble of
mainstream discourses, and no longer the threat it once posed to
capitalist and communist states alike, the political and social force
of the alternative seems to have faded away. And yet the dream of the
alternative continues to inspire political and social movements,
artists, theorists, and all kinds of creative practices. How might we
begin to situate and think alternativity as a global phenomenon at
this precise conjuncture in world history? What is alternative about
culture today? And what might or can it become?
The alternative, of course, has always been phraseable in the singular
and the plural. On the one hand, it is a phenomenon locked into local
configurations, a multi-polar and non-totalizable practice of myriad
deviation. Here, its ambit can be that of a family drama or workplace,
a national concatenation, or the homogenizing logic of a dominant
cultural medium or genre. The dreams it holds in reserve are vitally
minor: the fissuring of a regime with a joke or dissidence, the
freedom mobilized in small, almost imperceptible defections or
reversals. The production of the alternative is in this sense the
aggregate, spontaneous effort of innumerable cultural agents to resist
every species of stasis and capture, every grammar and vernacular,
every gestural hierarchy and total system.
At the same time, this molecular vision of the alternative, of a
plurality of fissions and margins, has always been accompanied by
attempts to think what it is in the tendency of a moment which
suppresses cultural possibilities on a global level. This is a dream
of a communication or inter-mediation between margins, a system of
deviances which comprehensively address the conditions which
negatively hypostatize the life of the virtual. Global patriarchy,
violent state expansionisms, the inhibiting logics of capital, and the
globalization of the English language can be envisioned as
transnational, systematized normativities that threaten cultural
specificity or possibility in a way that is never exhausted by its
expression on the register of the local. Is there, in this sense, only
one alternative: an alternative to which there is no alternative? This
notion of a single alternative?a universal difference necessary to
shelter the future lives of difference--immediately sets into motion
its own paradoxical dialectics of alternativity, itself appearing to
erase the thing it promises. How do we escape this vortex, or at least
make its impasses productive?
Is one alternative more important than another? Can alternatives be
exhausted or rendered obsolete? What kind of method could we develop
to test the valences of alternatives? Can or should alternative
culture polemically charge the space of its own marginality, or would
this degenerate into an infinite sectarianism?
We understand ?alternative culture? to include diverse forms of
cultural expression and activity, which are connected by their shared
goal of creating just, humane, and equitable human relations by means
of their opposition to existing cultural, social, and political forms.
This conference encourages contributions from scholars, educators,
artists, cultural workers, policy makers, journalists, and others
involved in alternative culture and international cultural policies.
We are especially interested in contributions addressing alternative
culture in Central/Eastern Europe and countries/regions of the former
Soviet Union.
Areas of inquiry for submissions may include, but are not limited to,
the following general topics in relation to the politics of
alternative culture today:
Aesthetics Collectivity post-Communist Culture - Creativity -
Cultural Studies - Eastern Europe Geography Globalization - Higher
Education Media - Memory/Nostalgia Music - New Media -
ex-Socialist History - ex-Soviet Urban Spaces - Visual Culture
The ?Alternative Culture Now: The Politics of Culture at the Present
Conjuncture? conference will take place at the OSA Archivum in
Budapest, Hungary, April 8-10, 2010. It is organized and sponsored by
the International Alternative Culture Center, with the support of the
Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology (Central European
University) and the Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies
(University of Alberta). The conference format will be diverse,
including paper presentations, panels, round-table exchanges, artistic
performances, and exhibitions. We encourage individual and
collaborative paper and panel proposals from across the disciplines
and from artists and community members.
Paper Submissions should include: (1) contact information; (2) a
300-500 word abstract; and (3) a one page curriculum vitae or a brief
bio.
Panel Proposals should include: (1) a cover sheet with contact
information for chair and each panelist; (2) a one-page rationale
explaining the relevance of the panel to the theme of the conference;
(3) a 300 word abstract for each proposed paper; and (4) a one page
curriculum vitae for each presenter.
Please submit individual paper proposals or full panel proposals via
e-mail attachment by January 25, 2010 to
(alternativeculturenow /at/ gmail.com) with the subject line ?Alternative
Culture Now.? Attachments should be in .doc or .rtf formats.
Submissions should be one document (i.e. include all required
information in one attached document).
Website: http://www.alternativeculture.org
Conference Organizing Team: Sarah Blacker (University of Alberta,
Canada), Jessie Labov (Ohio State, USA), Andrew Pendakis (University
of Bonn, Germany), Justin Sully (McMaster University, Canada), Imre
Szeman (University of Alberta, Canada), Maria Whiteman (University of
Alberta, Canada), and Olga Zaslavskaya (OSA, Hungary)
--
Sarah Blacker
Department of English and Film Studies
3-5 Humanities Centre
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
T6G 2E5
