Archive for January 2015

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[ecrea] CFP: ASA 2015: The (Re)production of Misery and the Ways of Resistance

Thu Jan 08 09:58:32 GMT 2015



   CFP: ASA 2015: The (Re)production of Misery and the Ways of Resistance

Proposals are invited for a session on “Representing Misery without Civil Society” to be held at the American Studies Association conference in Toronto, October 8-11 2015.

Scholars, such as Partha Chatterjee and Frank Wilderson, have recently shown the profound analytical limitations of civil society as the political terrain of social struggle. Whether from the standpoint of colonial and/or black positionality, these scholars have demonstrated that civil society has not only historically encompassed few people but it has also relied upon the exclusion of various subject positions to establish its normative order. As such, the deployment of civil society and its derivative concepts to describe and comprehend social struggle elide both this fraught history and potentially misconstrue the political aims of radical ways of resistance. Yet, as thorough-going as this critique may be, our contention is that its impact has not been fully realized at the level of scholarly practice by literary and cultural studies scholars. Indeed, though we may theoretically acknowledge and examine the conceptual limitations of civil society, it, more often than not, continues to shape, implicitly or explicitly, how we define and historicize political crisis and interpret cultural practices of resistance. Especially when it comes to questions of the work of representation, how can we resist the assumption that the cultures we study are operating within or upon the conceptual geography of “civil society”?

In this panel, we invite participants to investigate how the concept of civil society has been mobilized in critiques of the politics of representation of misery and suffering. What role has it played in the making of our scholarly conceptions of the work of representation – both its means and ends? How has it framed what counts as a legitimate means of “resistance” (and what doesn’t) in representational contexts? In asking these questions, we hope to both identify the particular critical practices which harbor these assumptions and begin imagining alternatives which would portray the politics of representing misery in a different light.

Please submit paper abstracts (250 words) and brief C.V. to Christian Ravela ((cravela /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(cravela /at/ gmail.com)>) and Curtis Hisayasu ((curtishisayasu /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(curtishisayasu /at/ gmail.com)>) by January 23, 2015




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