ASSAULT: Radicalism in Aesthetics and Politics
A conference at Duke University
March 22nd-24th 1996
"ASSAULT" will focus on radical aesthetics and politics in an international frame since World War II, though recognizing earlier models and genealogies. Particularly, we intend to look at radicalism as a confrontation with the problematics of *violence* and *representation*.
On the one hand, we invite analyses, theorizations (and performances) of specific aesthetic practices that enact a radical politics through disruption of representational containment. On the other hand, we encourage papers on social and cultural movements that seek to challenge representational or "formal" political systems by asserting "real" participation and the immanence of autonomous self-constituency.
Throughout we wish to maintain our dual emphasis on both aesthetic and political radicalisms, in so far as they engage with the question of violence and the "crisis" of representation--without taking such a crisis for granted, and without assuming that the question of violence is not perhaps suffused with a nostalgia for the material.
Topics might include: the possibility of desirability of the avant-garde; the legacy of the New Left and movements of '68: *autonomia*, situationism... ; representation, violence and self-determination in the Third World or Postcolonialism; the possibility of disturbance in late-capitalist cultural absorption; aesthetic terrorism and anarchist aesthetics; transgressive sexuality, gender, and radical political action; postmodern avant-garde shock and cyberspace, surrealism, dada... ; terrorism and civil rights; the power of non-violence...
We welcome suggestions for alternative areas of interest and for individual panel topics. We encourage interdisciplinary approaches and proposals from comparative literature, languages, gender studies, postcolonial and ethnic studies, political science, literature, philosophy, history, anthropology, the social sciences, media and communication studies, cultural studies...
We are further interested in proposals for performances or other experimental presentations (video, hypertext and so on).
Possible speakers include: Kathy Acker, Franco Beradi, Hakim Bey, Judith Butler, Harry Cleaver, Jim Fleming, Donna Haraway, bell hooks, Sylvere Lotringer, Sadie Plant, Avital Ronell, Michael Ryan, Richard Slotkin, Werner Sollers, Gayatri Spivak, Ronald Sukenick, Susan Suleiman...
Please send one page abstracts by November 15th, 1995.
For further information, please contact
Jon Beasley-Murray or Svetlana Mintcheva
The Literature Program
Art Museum 104
Box 90670
Duke University
Durham, NC 27708-0670
USA
(919) 688 5059
jpb8@acpub.duke.edu