Elsa Peralta, University of Lisbon and Lars Jensen, University of Roskilde Enquiries concerning this panel should be sent to: [email protected]m
‘Austerity’ has become a common reference term in relation to the financial crisis (GFC) which struck across the globe in 2008, but whose roots are clearly deeper both economically (Bello and Stieglitz), but as we shall argue also in relation to global power shifts. The deeper economic history that has shaped the GFC reveals deep cracks in the global economic order shaped both by long patterns of exploitation by the global north of the global south that have led to a long row of economic crises in the global south (which have led to analysts talking about the global south as in a state of permanent crisis). Our focus is not on this planetary level which would lead to another form of crisis – a crisis of generalisations. Instead we intend to look more specifically at Europe, and see how the current environment of austerity measures relate to historical and contemporary processes of marginalisation and centralisation in Europe. But also how Europe is never just the sum of all of ‘us’, but because of Europe’s istorical relationship with the world outside through colonialism, is the end product of the relationships between European selves and others. This can be argued on a pan-European level, since virtually every corner of Europe has produced books about its postcolonial condition. But we are more interested in discussing this relationship between the current economic crisis from localized European vantage points. In this sense, we welcome papers that address different European countries that have marked histories as colonial powers, either belonging to the European North and or to the European South in order to discuss their respective positional differences regarding Europeaness, national identity, the colonial past and the postcolonial present, against the general framework of the current European crisis.
2-Forms of the We
Cory Stockwell, Assistant Professor, Program in Cultures, Civilizations and Ideas, Bilkent University, and Rémi Astruc, Professor of Comparative and Francophone LiteraturesUniversité de Cergy-Pontoise Enquiries concerning this panel should be sent to: [email protected]
“With downtown Athens again in flames, that evening was a paroxysm of jubilation and weariness: the movement perceived all its power, but also realized it didn’t know what to do with it.”
Comité invisible, To Our Friends, chap 5., 2014
The question of form has been central to recent debates around radical politics. One of the main issues with which recent popular movements have had to contend, for instance, is that of giving concrete form to their desires for change, coming up with specific objectives or even procedures that don’t alienate large sections of their participants. The Occupy Movement, for instance, was considered by many observers to be too “formless,” in the sense of including such a heterogeneous group of people that it was incapable of imagining a concrete politics that would succeed it; likewise – and in an arena in which the stakes were much higher – the various movements comprising the Arab Spring have been deemed failures by many because of a supposed “formlessness” that allowed reactionary forces to fill the vacuum they created. In a way, all of this is unsurprising, given that the word “movement” seems logically incompatible with the stasis suggested by “form.” Is there any way out of this seeming impasse?
It is here that the concept of community might find its highest political calling, for responses to these debates around form would undoubtedly lie in a thinking of community that refused to revert back to the latter’s traditional forms (based on ethnicity, nation, faith, etc.), but on the contrary would open onto what has been referred to as “forms of life” (Agamben). If there is one thing that joins the very different recent popular movements, it is their insistence on heterogeneity: the Taksim Square protestors (and those joining them throughout Turkey), for instance, whom many viewed as secularists, famously erected human walls around those more religious protestors during prayer time. As is well known, many of the recent theories around community begin from the standpoint of Bataille’s formulation of “the community of those who have nothing in common,” and seek to imagine communities that cannot be reduced to any single form of belonging. It may be, however, that these theories have not done enough to imagine what we will call the concrete forms of community, in other words their material reality. This panel seeks to address this shortcoming by asking these questions: What, today, is the form of community, the form of the we? Is there a way of thinking form without doing violence to the imperative of heterogeneity? Is there a way of imagining communities that takes as its point of departure their material reality – can we do this without simply turning them into an “object” of study?
3-Critical Scope and Limitations of Latin American Militant Memory
Magdalena López, University of Lisbon Enquiries concerning this panel should be sent to: [email protected]
In the last two decades, intellectuals working on Latin America have reflected about the armed struggles and the national liberation projects of the sixties and seventies (e.g., Castañeda, Sarlo, Beverley, Vezetti, Calveiro, Duchense-Winter). After the end of the Cold War, the dictatorships of the Southern Cone, the neoliberal programs of the 1990s, and the current left-populist governments, many social (racial, sexual, gender) grievances remain unattended. This panel welcomes proposals that study how Latin American literary and art works deal with past memories of armed activism to face the present context. What are the legacies of that revolutionary militancy, if there are any? Militant memories seem to produce contradictory movements, from the uncritical rescue of revolutionary experience, to its total obliteration. With this ample range of perspectives in mind, we invite submissions that explore the multiple ways in which past liberation projects are recreated. We will seek to understand whether these recreations serve to generate critical memories or models of activism toward the construction of new communities.
4-Comparar diferenças, criar comunidades, concertar emancipações: histórias da arte periféricas num contexto global
Luisa Cardoso, New University of Lisbon Enquiries concerning this panel should be sent to: [email protected]
A reflexão sobre a possibilidade de uma história da arte global baseia-se, implícita ou explicitamente, na assumpção das limitações e exclusões da historiografia da arte canónica: geográficas, teóricas, conceptuais, metodológicas, críticas, políticas e ideológicas. A reformulação de um cânone historiográfico não se dará, contudo, através da inclusão dos “outros” excluídos, ou seja, da produção artística realizada fora dos centros e até então negligenciada. Nem tão pouco, como propõe James Elkins, através da partilha, em diversas latitudes, dos métodos disciplinares, pois os conceitos, teorias, métodos e critérios de avaliação são parte constituinte de uma forma de fazer história da arte com uma matriz profundamente ocidental e eurocêntrica, impondo, à partida, uma determinada perspectiva na abordagem aos fenómenos artísticos e culturais. Assim, como sustenta Dipesh Chakrabarty, as categorias disciplinares de matriz ocidental, são “simultaneamente indispensáveis e inadequadas” para as interpretar outras realidades e contextos: se por um lado precisamos de dominar o património conceptual de uma disciplina para nela podermos participar, cumpre, por outro lado, reconhecer a sua filiação epistemológica e a sua desadequação na análise de contextos e produções culturais exteriores ao âmbito da sua formulação. Sendo esta uma questão partilhada pelas várias histórias da arte periféricas, a reflexão sobre a sua possibilidade de emancipação deverá ser partilhada, pois deste modo não só se evitará o perigo da uma reacção emancipatória nacionalista e ensimesmada, como abre o potencial de constituição de uma comunidade. Deste modo, pode a escrita das histórias da arte periféricas propor-se como um projecto colectivo de resistência e emancipação face às narrativas historiográficas centrais e canónicas? Alguns dos fios condutores para reflectir sobre esta possibilidade serão: Em que medida as histórias da arte periféricas são subalternas relativamente às narrativas historiográficas canónicas, nomeadamente através da constituição das “narrativas do atraso”? Que modelos alternativos de temporalidade (não historicista), que não a aferição das produções artísticas periféricas com o compasso fixado pelos cânones centrais no alinhamento dos diversos movimentos artísticos, podemos inventar? Como se podem reformular as ferramentas conceptuais e narrativas da história da arte a partir das periferias? Como se pode ultrapassar o binómio originalidade, novo/ derivativo, folclórico, exótico na comparação entre os movimentos/artistas consagrados pela historiografia canónica e a produção feita nas suas margens? O que significa a noção de modernismo e pós-modernismo fora dos centros que os formularam? Ou até o que significa anti-modernismo: será que o foi o par antitético do modernismo ou, como propõe Boris Groys, uma das suas possíveis realizações? Que fios condutores de uma/s narrativa/s podemos inventar, que não as teleologias modernistas profundamente defensoras da autonomia da arte? Será possível, através da comparação das “nossas diferenças”, propor narrativas historiográficas verdadeiramente desafiantes das narrativas centrais? Poderão elas afirmar-se e difundir-se sem ser através da sua ratificação institucional pelos centros da produção de conhecimento científico consagrados?Estas são algumas das questões propostas para discussão neste painel. Ainda que o enfoque da sua problematização parta da história da arte no século XX, a transversalidade das questões acolhe propostas de comunicação de outras áreas disciplinares e de outras cronologias.