[Discussion] CFP: The New Politics of Time (3/1/05; MLA '05)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

Call for Papers: The New Politics of Time

Proposed Special Session
MLA December 27-30, 2005
Washington DC

This panel will explore new feminist and queer perspectives on what
Peter Osborne has called the =93politics of time.=94 For at least two
decades, conversations on the political significance of time seemed
fixed in a polarized debate between those insisting on the need for
teleological, historical time and those celebrating its perceived
demise. Yet the explosion of theoretical and literary critical interest
in time, evident in recent work by Elizabeth Grosz, Lee Edelman and
Wendy Brown, seems to offer the potential to expand or transform the
terms of this debate. If so, how then should we understand and
characterize the various positions constituting this reconfigured
conversation? If not, what long-standing approaches to political
temporalities persist in the contemporary turn to time? In what temporal
forms does new feminist and queer analysis locate the political values
of agency, hope, oppression, solidarity, activism? For instance,
spontaneity and emergence seem increasingly deployed as markers of
important activism in recent work, at the same time that melancholic
attachment has come to be viewed as a potent means of resistance to
teleological time. To what extent does the new politics of time build on
or diverge from earlier emphases on either the new or the traumatic past
as the site of political intervention?  What is the current role played
by temporalized categories such as being, becoming, recurrence, the
immediate, the instant, the surprise, the apocalypse, the fleeting, in
the feminist and queer imagination of political possibilities?  How does
contemporary feminist and queer work understand and respond to new
hegemonic, state-sponsored forms of =93chronopolitics,=94 in Johannes
Fabian=92s term?  Does the signal value of =93radicalism=94 take on a new
temporal character in the wake of these interventions?

I am especially interested in papers either undertaking new theoretic
investigations of time and politics or responding to recent feminist and
queer theorizations of time, though papers offering new literary
critical perspectives on time in literature and popular culture of
interest to feminist and queer studies will also be considered.

300-word abstracts and brief CV by March 1 to Jane Elliott
(Jane_Elliott@Brown.edu)

Jane Kathryn Elliott
Postdoctoral Fellow
Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women
Brown University
Box 1958
Providence, RI 02912
401-863-6117


 From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List