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

   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