Rethinking the Political:
Narrative, Protest
and Fiction in the 21st Century
The conference programme and abstract booklet can be found here
Date: Monday 9th – Wednesday 11th of September 2024
Location: Room M2 and G4
58-76 Grand Parade, University of Brighton, BN2 OJY
City Campus maps and directions
The first decades of the 21st century have witnessed a fundamental rethinking of politics and of the political. Rather than begin with universal theories of the polis in the abstract, contemporary theorists focus on how dominant notions of the political depended upon racist and gender based violence, the destruction of the planet and of those lives that do not conform the proper bounds of the polis. For many decolonial and black pessimist theorists any common ontology of the political fails to recognise the coloniality of Being (Wynter 2015) constitutive of life in the polis, and the human. Likewise, for queer critics of identity politics, bodies and selves are ‘fragmented, unfinished, broken beyond-repair forms’ (Halberstam 2018) that resist any common ontology. Despite their radically different starting points these accounts all view politics as a contested and contingent space that concerns both the drawing of borders, and the contestation of the borders drawn. They point to the moments of rhetorical and sometimes violent excess that betray the contingency, and the inequalities, of political orders. At this conference we aim to think the political from a starting point outside the long history of ‘the polis’ and its various declensions. Instead we think politics in terms of care, practice, and the enactment of an equality that is never finally realised.
Keynote Speakers: Professor Moya Lloyd; Professor Alan Finlayson; Dr German Primera
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Moya Lloyd: Radical corporeal politics: Flesh as a locus of political struggle
Moya Lloyd is Professor of Politics in the Department of Government, University of Essex. Her research focuses on the politics of the body, gender, radical democracy, the human/human rights, vulnerability, and questions of agency and resistance, particularly in respect of marginalized or precaritized populations. Her many publications include articles in Hypatia, Theory, Culture and Society, Contemporary Political Theory, the Women’s Philosophy Review, Economy and Society, Constellations alongside seven books. In this lecture she shows how specific forms of corporeal politics challenge theories that ground political action in speech and language.
Alan Finlayson: A Hero’s Journey? Ideological Entrepreneurs
and Reactionary Digital Politics
Alan Finlayson is Professor of Politics at the University of East Anglia. His research combines contributions to the development of democratic political and cultural theory with the theoretical, historical and interpretive analyses of the ideologies that shape political culture, political economy and ‘governmentality’. He has particular expertise in the theoretical and practical study of rhetoric, having developed “Rhetorical Political Analysis” which he has applied variously to the study of policy, political performance and protest songs. He is currently co-authoring a book which analyses the rhetoric and ideology of ‘Reactionary Digital Politics’.. He has published widely in political and social thought, including in Political Studies, Soundings, and Theory, Culture and Society. In this lecture he will discuss how digital platforms and their uses are changing how we encounter and experience politics, in ways which are advantageous to conservative, right-wing and far-right politics.
German Primera Villamizar: Colonial Biopolitics and the Arc of Refusal: rethinking grammars of resistance
German Primera lectures Philosophy and Politics at the University of Brighton. He serves as the deputy director of the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics, and Ethics (CAPPE) and is an editor for the journals Contemporary Political Theory (CPT) and the Journal of Italian Philosophy. His research focuses on French and Italian contemporary philosophy and thought, Black studies, and Biopolitics. He probes the limits of political theories that deny their implication in histories of coloniality and racism, while reworking theories of relational ontology. His book The political Ontology of Giorgio Agamben interrogates the relation between political ontology and violence. He is collaborating with Mark Devenney on a forthcoming book titled Troubling Democracy: On Practices of Care, Fugitivity, and Refusal. In this lecture he rethinks biopolitics in light of coloniality.
If you would like to give any feedback about this event, please email cappe@brighton.ac.uk
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CFP: NOW CLOSED
Please send abstracts of 250 words before the 15th of June to cappe@brighton.ac.uk.
Rethinking the Political Call for Papers
Topics might include but are not limited to:
- The ongoing remaking of politics and democracy;
- Rethinking the Political Novel in the 21st Century;
- Democratic politics after coloniality, patriarchy and anthropocentrism;
- Democracy after the fictions of nation, citizen, sovereignty and the human;
- The novel and radical politics;
- Digital Politics and AI in the era of Populism;
- Decentring the West and Europe as central to narratives of the political;
- The novel as a form that aesthetically remakes the political;
- The political novel as a critical component of Europe’s political, social, cultural and colonial heritage;
- The politics of precarity and unlivability;
- Inoperativity, fugitivity, refusal, care and stewardship as democratic politics.
The Conference will be held in-person at the University of Brighton. There is no attendance fees. Lunches and conference dinner will be provided for all participants.
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