WORKSHOP

 

SUBVERSIVE THEORIES OF THE POLITICAL

October 25-26, 2018 • Colorado College (USA)
 

Funded by the 2018 Collaborative Project Proposal Grant of the Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory, this workshop seeks to bring together faculty and graduate students who are working on ways to radically rethink the political in the face of a growing convergence between neoliberalism and neo-fascism. We are interested in interrogating the de-politicization that characterizes neoliberal hegemony, while at the same time investigating the differential modes that resistance to the exploitation of commodified and uncommodified life takes under new structures of disavowal. Our quest for today's subversive theories of the political was inspired by the relational thinking of black feminist theorizing, queer of color critique, intersectional Marxism, critical indigenous studies, decolonial theory, and disability studies, and we believe that the very important work done in these traditions can help us to develop more nuanced theories of the political. But we also want to put these traditions in conversation with each other, to evaluate the concepts developed in each of them, and the problems they have identified. 

Contacts: Michael Sawyer Assistant Professor, Race, Ethnicity, Migration Studies (Colorado College) Andres Fabian Henao Castro Assistant Professor, Political Science (University Of Massachusetts Boston) – subversivepoltheory@gmail.com 

 

PROGRAM

Thursday, October 25, 2018

 

SOUTH COMMONS
9:00 am – Introduction/Breakfast

10:30 am – First Session: After Hegemony and Bio/Necropolitics?
                   Conceptualizing the Political

Moderator: Christopher Sorace (Colorado College)

Ferris Lupino (Brown University)
American Stasiology: Racial Conflict Between the Rule
of Law and Civil War
Alize Arican (University of Illinois-Chicago)
Reframing Spatio-Temporality, Reframing the Political

12:30 pm – Lunch Break

2:30 pm – Second Session: After the demos?
                 Conceptualizing Political Subjectivity

Moderator: Andrés Fabián Henao Castro (University of Massachusetts-Boston)

Elva F. Orozco Mendoza (Texas Christian University)
Responsibility without Sovereignty: Inaugurating a Maternal Contract for the ‘Disappeared’ in Mexico

Jeffrey Feldman (Brown University)
What Can An Arendtian Body Do? Necessity and
the Politics of the Body

4:30 pm – Break

5:00 pm – Laura Padilla Memorial Lecture (Cornerstone Screening Room)

Robyn Marasco (Hunter College)
The Real Possibility of Killing and Dying: A Feminist
Reading of The Concept of the Political

Friday, October 26, 2018

 

TUTT LIBRARY EVENT SPACE
9:00 am – First Session: Rethinking the political

Moderator: Michael Sawyer (Colorado College)

Keidrick Roy (Harvard University)
Sacred or Secular? Racial Capitalism and the Religious
Roots of the Black Radical Tradition

Verónica Zebadúa-Yáñez (New School for Social Research, 
Mount Holyoke College)
Neo-Sovereignty/Neo-Universality: Monique Wittig’s
Les Guérillerès as a Manifesto for a Radical
Politics of Freedom

11:00 am – Break

11:30 am – Second Session: Rethinking political subjectivity

Moderator: Amanda Minervini (Colorado College)

Miriam Tola (Northeastern University)
Intersectionality Meets Marxist Feminism in Contemporary
Italian Feminisms

12:30 pm – Lunch Break

3:30 pm – Third Session: Rethinking de-politicization

Moderator: Dennis McEnnerney (Colorado College)

Siddhant Issar (University of Massachusetts-Amherst)
Rethinking Primitive Accumulation with Black Lives Matter

William Callison (University of California-Berkeley)
Political Deficits: The Dawn of Neoliberal Rationality and
the Eclipse of Critical Theory

6:00 pm – Conclusion/Dinner