[ecrea] Conf. cfp: Aesthetics / Class / Worlds

Aesthetics / Class / Worlds

2nd Annual Conference of the Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature
Department at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
October 14-15, 2011

Our conference seeks to examine the many modes through which aesthetic
practices testify to the tensions between the worlds people are determined
by, live in, and create. Mediating global tendencies and local realities,
these lived and imagined worlds often obscure the social relations in which
they are ultimately rooted. Class, as a category that is manifest between
economic and political forces, persists in helping us think through these
tensions between worlds and “the” world. Broadly, we ask, how do
aesthetic practices attempt to imagine the world while always remaining
part of it? What is the role of aesthetic practices in the configuration of
worldviews and everyday practices? To what extent is class a useful
category to conceptualize the relationship between aesthetics and the
worlds that people produce, intervene in, and reflect? How has aesthetics,
as a constitutive element of history, changed in our digital age? And what
does it mean to ask these kinds of questions at this particular juncture
when disciplines in the humanities once again face crisis everywhere?

> From our position in a department committed to radical thought and cultural
criticism, we sense the urgency in asking these questions now, as
departments confront neoliberal restructuring and impending closure.
Programs in the humanities continue to face misrecognition: while we still
traffic in traditional forms such as novels and films, we have long been
asking representational questions that challenge discrete disciplinary
constraints by weaving text and context. To counter this misrecognition, we
insist that this approach is, as always, fundamentally political. We thus
welcome work that examines conditions at sites of intellectual labor across
disciplines, as well as in broader global modes of production and aesthetic
practice.

Possible paper topics include but are not limited to:

- politics and aesthetics (including the politics of aesthetics)
- realisms and modernisms
- the global avant-garde(s)
- theory and praxis of art
- the politics of the vernacular
- cinematic worlds
- translation and interpretation
- trauma and testimony
- theories of capital and empire
- new media in the world system
- rethinking mass culture
- revolution and representation
- utopias and the event
- the politics of social space
- modes of intertextuality
- the future of the humanities


Please submit your abstract of no more than 300 words to
(UMCSCLconference /at/ gmail.com) by May 15th, 2011. Include your name, e-mail
address, brief bio (including school affiliation, position, and research
interests), and any audio-visual requirements. Papers should be in English
and no more than 20 minutes in length. We are also interested in panel
submissions, which should consist of at least three participants and which
should include the above information about each participant and a tentative
title indicating the theme. The conference fee will be $20 for students and
$40 for faculty.


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