[Bilimsel Haber] CFP: Undoing Leviathan: Multidisciplinary Readings of the State

[Gonul Pultar]

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SECOND CALL FOR PROPOSALS
Undoing Leviathan: Multidisciplinary Readings of the State

Editors: Roopali Mukherjee (CUNY/Queens College) and Priya Jaikumar 
(University of Southern California).

This is a second call for contributions for a collection that brings 
together new scholarship that theorizes and reinterprets the idea of the 
state from a variety of academic disciplines.

Recent writings on the state, we suggest, have profoundly revised how we 
think, represent and/ or contest the state today. Over the course of the 
twentieth century, neo-Marxists, feminists, and poststructuralists 
dislodged definitions of the state founded on institutionally enshrined 
blocs of power to reveal its part in politicizing every aspect of social 
and cultural life, rendering the state a limitless object of study. 
Dramatic new relations between subjects, civil societies, and 
governments emerged, sparking revelations of a boundless state inscribed 
in our subjectivities, our language, knowledge systems and myths. These 
epistemological redefinitions of the state, moving apace in a range of 
academic fields, began to cast a new light on past and future struggles 
to constitute public spaces where individuals transform into subjects, 
citizens or stateless beings.

This dispersal of the state as an object of study paralleled predictions 
of the death of the state, confounding discussions of how an invisible 
range of state power or negotiated agency may accompany the manifest 
withering of state institutions. Competing arguments about whether the 
state is or is not a significant vector of power in contemporary 
geopolitics rarely pronounce how each of these dissenting positions 
continue to be founded on particular interpretations of the state, its 
locus and tools of operation, or its regimes of change. Moreover, 
conceptual innovations and analytic challenges uncovered by these 
scholarly advances have been muted because they have remained mutually 
isolated by disciplinary segregations.

We propose Undoing Leviathan, a collection of essays from a variety of 
disciplines that each illuminate state forms and/or state functions 
embedded within their particular, preoccupying questions to clarify what 
we are speaking of when we conjure up the “state.” Current debates over 
the state draw upon a range of intellectual legacies: Gramscian 
approaches to civil society and social movements, Foucauldian notions of 
power and governmentality, politico-economic institutional analyses, and 
textual and discursive investigations. We assume that any meaningful 
dialogue between these positions and any evaluation of the state’s 
utility or redundancy as an analytical construct depends on asking: how 
do we read the state? Given the depth and range of state scholarship 
ongoing within disciplinary fields, we argue that such dialogue can be 
uniquely fruitful when it draws upon a variety of such theorizations.

Our first call for proposals yielded a number of excellent proposals 
from scholars working in art history, literary studies, political 
science, history, geography, and women, gender and queer studies. These 
works address a significant range of topics including:

• affect, social bonds, and state-based communities,
• global civil society, mass labor, and the precarity movement,
• the post-national citizen-subject in the former East bloc,
• the post-liberal/neoliberal state,
• supranational state regimes, territory, and rights,
• new cultural histories of Mexican peasant anti-state insurgencies,
• torture and the liberal state,
• Mural art and contradictions within public works of the New Deal.

Despite the scholarly diversity across these proposals, a number of 
notable silences remain in the collection. Thus, we announce this second 
call seeking work on the concept of the state that engages dispersals of 
the state as an analytic object coincident with its operation as a 
significant vector of power. The following areas of research are of 
particular interest:

• Feminist and/or racial approaches to/histories of the state,
• Case studies of repressive or totalitarian state systems,
• Revolutionary and/ or “post-state” regimes,
• Stateless communities,
• Truth/conspiracy/fantasy in formations of state rationality,
• Tourism, migration, and diasporic bonds,
• War, human rights, and/or environmental and public health discourses,
• City spaces, ethnicity, and/or class.

Proposals on subjects outside these areas are welcome if they include 
work by scholars in anthropology, performance and visual studies, 
political economy, and/or architecture.

Proposals of up to 500 words, including a brief author bio and 
publishing history, and any inquiries should be sent to one or both of 
the listed editors, Professor Mukherjee at profmukherjee at earthlink.net 
or Professor Jaikumar at pjaikumar at cinema.usc.edu. We strongly encourage 
proposals be sent to us latest by December 31st, 2007. Completed papers 
of about 5,000 to 6,000 words will be due in July 2008.

	Professor Roopali Mukherjee
Department of Media Studies
City University of New York/Queens College
65-30 Kissena Boulevard
Flushing NY 11367 USA

Tel: 718-997-2975
Fax: 718-997-2960
Email: profmukherjee at earthlink.net <mailto:profmukherjee at earthlink.net>