[Bilimsel Haber] CONF. CFP: Concentrationary Imaginaries/Imaginaries of Violence Conference, April 13-15, 2011, University of Leeds

[Gonul Pultar]

*Concentrationary Imaginaries/Imaginaries of Violence Conference*
*Location:* 	United Kingdom 
<http://www.h-net.org/announce/geography.cgi?geography=United%20Kingdom>

	

	

	

C e n t r e for Cultural Analysis, Theory & History
A Transdisciplinary Initiative @ the University of Leeds
Director: Professor Griselda Pollock

Concentrationary Imaginaries/Imaginaries of Violence
in Contemporary Cultures and Cultural Forms

Keynote Speakers:
Andrew Benjamin (Monash) Adriana Cavarero (Verona)
Paul Gilroy (LSE) Ian James (Cambridge)
Samuel Weber (Northwestern)Paul Willemen (Ulster)
With a plenary by Zygmunt Bauman (Leeds)

An international transdisciplinary conference
organized by the AHRC Research Project
Concentrationary Memories: The Politics of Representation
directed by
Griselda Pollock
(Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History)
and Max Silverman
(Centre for French and Francophone Cultural Studies)

April 13-15, 2011
University of Leeds

In 1946 French Trotskyist political deportee to Buchenwald coined the 
phrase 'concentrationary universe' to describe the terrifying 
sociological experiment in total destruction of humanity in which, 
according to Hannah Arendt, 'everything is possible'. Our question is : 
has anything of the concentrationary universe seeped into and been 
disseminated through contemporary culture? Going beyond the work of 
Agamben and Virilio who suggest that the camp and war are now the 
matrices of modern society, we want to enquire into cultural forms and 
subjectivities. Is there now a concentrationary imaginary? What would be 
its indices, symptoms, locations, tropes and affects? Where might we 
find it? Is the concentrationary a dimension of heightened violence, of 
fantasies of apocalyptic, end-of-time confrontations, of the manner in 
which 'others' are projected as both fascinating and deadly? Is it about 
thoughtlessness and amnesia? Has it been eroticised and stylized via 
fascist kitsch? Has it found a home or a counter-imaginary in science 
fiction? Is it linked with images of pestilence, viral contamination, 
deadly epidemics? What might resist its seepage and normalization?

Far from being contained as a one-off, geopolitically contained event, 
the Nazi-created concentrationary and its horrific extension, the 
exterminationary, initiated the political novelty that Arendt defined as 
totalitarianism. Totalitarianism was an experiment in the destruction of 
the human, which Arendt came to identify with spontaneity and plurality. 
Not confined to the Third Reich, the concentrationary was a feature of 
Stalin's Soviet Union but also in differing guises is typical of racist 
societies and dictatorships. If the political lessons of the 
concentrationary universe led Hannah Arendt to seek to refound a basis 
for social life in the human condition, is the concentrationary 
imaginary continuing to put humanity, or our humanity, at risk?

In this conference we wish to investigate the often oblique 
manifestations of the legacies of the concentrationary in diverse forms 
of contemporary culture from literature, to cinema, and video games. Can 
aspects of the increasing obsessions with violence in media culture be 
related to an unacknowledged concentrationary legacy? Where is the 
concentrationary most visible? Is it identifiable by a lack of conscious 
memory that might continuously warn of its menace? In what forms has the 
concentrationary continued in political realizations, but also in their 
underlying imaginations and in imaginary forms? Where might we locate 
its signs? What are its effects on the subjectivities such cultural 
manifestations help to shape?

We suggest the following areas for the study of the emergence, 
persistence and transmogrification of a concentrationary imaginary and 
for seeking to challenge the continuing menace of that which the 
concentrationary universe and gulags initiated in the heart of twentieth 
century Europe.

Post Holocaust Political Theory
Fascinating Fascism
Science Fiction and the Concentrationary Empire
Contemporary Apocalyptic Art :Images of Fear
Popular Culture, Racism and Others
Counter-concentrationary Imaginaries
Dark Times: Arendt's Legacies in Cultural Theory and Practice
Cinema and the Concentrationary Imaginary
Identifying Sites of Cruelty
Agamben and the Camp

To submit an abstract for a 20 minute paper please go to:

http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cath/cont_men2/cont_mem_2.html to download a 
proposal form or send directly to: conmem at leeds.ac.uk marked 
Concentrationary Imaginaries Conference 2011.

Deadline: 1 November 2010.

	Francesco Ventrella (assistant)
CentreCATH
School of Fine Art, Old Mining Building
University of Leeds
LEEDS
LS2 9JT, UK
E-mail: conmem at leeds.ac.uk
T: +44 [0]113 343 5267
F: +44 [0]113 245 1977


Email: conmem at leeds.ac.uk <mailto:conmem at leeds.ac.uk>
Visit the website at http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cath/index.html#

-------------- sonraki bölüm --------------
Bir HTML eklentisi temizlendi...
URL: <http://lists.kulturad.org/pipermail/bilimselhaber/attachments/20101003/46a055d1/attachment.htm>
-------------- sonraki bölüm --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: dot.gif
Type: image/gif
Size: 90 bytes
Desc: kullan?lam?yor
URL: <http://lists.kulturad.org/pipermail/bilimselhaber/attachments/20101003/46a055d1/attachment.gif>