CONFERENCE PANELS PANEL I Visual Arts and the Crafting of a Political World Participants: Geof Oppenheimer, Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Visual Arts Erin Fehskens, Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Humanities Respondent: Jason Smith, Writer, Assistant Professor, Graduate Studies in Art, Art Center College of Design In the wake of a renewed focus on the relation between politics and the visual arts, such as in the work of Jacques Rancière and T.J. Clark, this panel will investigate the imbrications of the production of visual art and the world of politics.  Rather than simply dismissing art as mere “l‘art pour l’art” or condemning its encroachment into politics as an “aestheticization of politics,” the panel will pose the question of the shared practices, epistemologies and craftsmanship linking these two ostensibly distinct domains, as well as what one learns, takes or appropriates from the other.   Indeed, the horizon of the panel may be nothing other than asking how these two terms, “art” and “politics,” spanning from Aristotle’s zoon politikon to the concrete political activity of the Situationists, have continually redefined one another precisely in their shared concrete practices in view of making a particular world visible. * * * PANEL II Literary Worldlessness Participants: Craig Carson, Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Humanities and Conference Co-Organizer Samantha Fenno, Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Humanities Judith Goldman, Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Humanities Respondent: Sunil Agnani, Assistant Professor in the Departments of English and History, University Illinois, Chicago The literary typology delineated in Georg Lukács’s Theory of the Novel rests on a singular presupposition: the wholeness of the epic worldview, in which the “the world and the self (…) never become permanent strangers to one another,” is all but lost to the modern world, with the single exception of synthetic capacity of literature.  Even as modern literary criticism has attempted to outstrip the often elliptical Romantic theories of literature – a lineage of which Lukács’s Theory of the Novel represents the last gasp – literary studies nonetheless remains beholden to literature’s world making capacities, either as representing a world accurately or to synthesizing a coherent world from the disorder of lived experience.  This panel will pose the question immanent to any literary production: what worlds must be suppressed in order for one literary world to take shape?  What are the remnants of these other, heterogeneous worlds that remain inherent to the text?   How can we read the limits of literature’s world making capacity?  Or, finally, given the sovereign decision to create a particular literary world, what textual mechanisms operate in view of recreating a depiction of world that is familiar, whole and, in Lukács’s words, always “like a home”?  * * * PANEL III Affective Worlds: Feeling, Commitment, Relationships Chair: Linda Zerilli, Charles E. Merriam Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the College Professor, Center for Gender Studies Participants: Leigh Clare La Berge, Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Humanities Mara Marin, Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences This panel begins with the assumption that any “world” problematic presumes questions of interiority, relationships, and possibility. We want to investigate questions such as: how does non-ideational content inform claims on the production and contestation of political worlds? What impact does world-making have on individuals, their relationships, and the feelings supporting them? How do individuals make relationships, support them over time, and how do these relationships contribute both to world-making processes and to the contestation of political worlds? We want to address these questions by discussing issues of feelings, commitment, and relational obligations in political and critical theory. We are particularly interested in soliciting work that uses recent studies in affect/feeling theory and action theory to engage and reimagine the formation of political worlds. * * * PANEL IV Inside Out: Making and Breaking Boundaries in Modern France and the United States Participants: Andrew Dilts, Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences Dorith Geva, Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences Elizabeth Heath, Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences Jennifer Palmer, Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences This panel investigates the making of boundaries of belonging within, and the mutual constitution of, families, citizens, nation-states, and colonial empires.  Focusing on the United States and France, the papers explore the surprising and often paradoxical processes through which boundaries of socio-political exclusion and inclusion are formed.  Jennifer Palmer’s paper explores how slavery and colonialism affected women and persons of color in eighteenth-century Metropolitan France in terms of how they understood their own “Frenchness.”  White women, for example, put forth the argument that in order to be French, race mattered more than gender.  Men of color claimed that gender mattered, not race; and women of color claimed that the family was the primary category of importance.  Elizabeth Heath’s paper shows how social legislation aimed primarily at agricultural workers in Metropolitan France excluded Guadelouepan workers, thereby creating and reinforcing unequal forms of citizenship in the colonies in the period just prior to WWI.  These early twentieth-century exclusions also shed some light on the contours of marginality in contemporary France.  Dorith Geva’s paper focuses on how exemptions for “men with dependents” wove their way into the French and American conscription systems around the First World War.  Fathers, and sometimes husbands and sons, were constructed as rendering an obligation equivalent to the male-citizen soldier obligation, and could therefore be exempt from service.  These exclusions were thereby inclusions.  By showing the extent to which family-based exemptions could eclipse security needs and the republican citizen-soldier ideal, these conscription exemptions lay bare the power of paternal ideologies.  Andrew Dilt’s paper focuses on disenfranchisement provisions in Maryland before and after the Civil War, examining the constitutional history of voting rights exclusions.  The paper argues that race and citizenship categories are negotiated through these franchise restrictions, constructing political membership as white and innocent (and, arguably, constructing whiteness as innocence). The paper thus explores the role that punishment plays in citizenship discourses, and the way in which those boundaries of exclusion are also drawn through forms of punitive inclusion.  Taken as a whole, the cross-disciplinary and cross-national scope of the panel’s papers reveal the extent to which modern boundary-making cannot be understood outside the categories of race and gender.  * * * PANEL V Worlds Undone Participants: Nitzan Shoshan, Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences Christopher Warren, Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Humanities Greg Beckett, Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences Noa Vaisman, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Human Rights Program Respondent: Olga Sezneva, Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences and Conference Co-Organizer The intimate articulation between creation and destruction has played a fundamental role not only in the thought of its most famously overt proponent, Friedrich Nietzsche, but also in the works of virtually all those who have reflected upon questions of world making, broadly conceived. Unraveling appears to form a constitutive dimension of the processes through which worlds are made. This panel aims to explore the place of loss and vanishing within the problematic of world making through a consideration of historical, ethnographic, philosophical, or literary perspectives. Especially in view of the accelerated pace of economic and social transmutations that has marked the age of late capitalism, this panel will conceive of the negation of worlds as a salient question of our times. Questions that might fall within the purview of this panel include, but are not limited to:  How is loss incorporated into cultural idioms and forms of expression? In what ways do people and societies experience, imagine, and cope with the vanishing of worlds? Through what discourses and practices—cultural, economic, political, etc.—might we evaluate the lingering effects of the passing away of worlds? What spaces do such practices occupy within the social terrain, and what possibilities do they generate for acts of creation? RETURN to Conference Main Page HOME to Society of Fellows Website