Seminar Series

21 to 22 June 2011, 9.30am-6pm

An international conference of the Instituto de Ciencias Sociais

Politics of Knowledge – the London-Brasilla Conference (Universidade de Brasilia Goldsmiths College, University of London)

Thursday 9th June 2011

Goldsmiths, University of London

Lecture Theatre ,  New Academic Building

10 AM-6:30 PM.  

Emerging Publics combines buzzwods of the day like “emerging nations”, “emerging markets” with the idea of the coming public.  It asks what will be the new publics as partly driven by the emerging world: China, India, Africa and Latin America.  It asks what can we hope for after the destruction of the classic public sphere – one framed by Keynes and Habermas.  This classic public has been largely decimated by some 2-3 decades of reigning neo-liberalism. There has been very little response to the global finance crisis, the bank and possible sovereign debt defaults in the wake of 2008. There probably is no going back now to the classic public sphere. Instead we need to ask what are the possibilities for new publics, perhaps more localized and more global (than the classical national public sphere) at the same time. These new publics may be driven by something like what Paul Krugman’s regional economies of scale.  But the new economies of scale that this event will address are also social and cultural and surely political. And they are increasingly driven by what is other to the West. These emerging publics are also a question of the ‘pirate modernity’ of spaces in say Lagos, Delhi or Mexico City in which software and politics is cycled and recycled, in which another urbanism is emerging in the context of grassroots politics, NGOs, the arts. Today’s emerging publics involve the context of massive Chinese foreign primary goods purchase and infrastructure investment. They are a question of Chinese (and German) ‘sovereign surplus’ overload. And where there is sovereign surplus, there is Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain.  These emerging publics – from the BRICs, Africa and the Middle East have massive implications for what we in the West and the UK are encountering. What kind of community, what kind of public can be constructed in Britain in the wake of thirty years of neo-liberalism? What kind of art, what kind of media are at stake in this pirate modernity of also the battles between neo-liberalism’s monopoly copyright and the new public goods of a networked ‘copyleft’? What new kind of political economy is at stake in this?  What sort of new critique of political economy? What kind of urbanism?  Indeed what kind of the political we need for the XXI Centurty?

Programme:

10 -11:30 AM Emerging Modernities
Chair: Chris Berry
Speaker: Wang Hui (Tsinghua University)
Discussant: Michael Dutton

11:30-11:45 AM Break

11:45AM-1:15 PM Emerging Geo-Politics
Chair: Les Back
Speaker: Achille Mbembe (WISER Institute/Duke University)
Discussant: Irit Rogoff

1:15-2:30 catered lunch for participants 

2:30-4:15 Emerging Media
Chair: Sanjay Seth
Speaker: Ravi Sundaram (Sarai-CSDS Delhi)
Discussant: Scott Lash

4:15-4:45 PM break

4:45-6:15 Emerging Urbanisms
Chair: Michael Keith (Oxford)
Speaker: Saskia Sassen (LSE)
Discussant: Abdoumaliq Simone

Free and open to the “publics”

If you want further information or reserved a place contact the organiser:

Francisco Carballo: cup01fc@gold.ac.uk

This event is organised by the Centre for Postcolonial Studies, Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths and The Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, University of Oxford. Additional support comes from the Economic and Social Research Council, Goldsmiths' Graduate School and the following departments: Sociology, Visual Cultures, Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Thursday, 5th May, 5-7pm, RHB 308

Presenter: Tejaswini Niranjana (Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore)

Title: “WHY CULTURE MATTERS: The Changing Language of Feminist Politics in India”  

ALL WELCOME

The gender-culture conjuncture has been central to how we in India and more broadly in Asia have thought about social change over the last hundred years. The larger framework was provided by nationalism and the anti-colonial struggle in the case of India, and the alignment of women with national culture. Today questions of culture as well as gender are being newly foregrounded as economic reforms and globalization take root. The lecture will discuss three key recent debates that have animated feminist politics in India - around the Miss World Beauty Contest in 1994, the film "Fire" in 1998, and the Pink Underwear Campaign of 2009 - to argue that we should rethink the gender-culture conjuncture to be able to better account for and intervene in our social reality.

TEJASWINI NIRANJANA  is Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore, India, and is currently Visiting Fellow at the Institut d’Etudes Avancees de Nantes. Tejaswini has been awarded the Homi Bhabha Fellowship, the Sephis Fellowship, the Prince Claus Fund award (twice), the Rockefeller Fellowship, and the Sawyer Fellowship. She has been a Visiting Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2007). Her publications include the recent Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration between India and Trinidad (Durham, 2006) and Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context (Berkeley, 1992). She has co-edited Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India (Kolkata, 1993). In addition to her academic work, Tejaswini heads the Higher Education Cell at CSCS, with the mandate of creating, fundraising for, and implementing programmes for the positive transformation of the higher education sector in India.

Monday, 11 April, 4pm, RHB 137 (please note location and time is different from Senior Common Room) 

Presenter: Chris Gill (Art journalist & Shanghai resident artist) http://www.shanghaieye.net/english/about

Title: "China's Art Model"

What specifically differentiates Chinese art, apart from the obvious regional specification? A major factor was Chairman Mao’s decision that “Art should serve the people,” made at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art in the 1940s, which was fully implemented once the Communist Party had taken over leadership of the country. By means of this directive, Soviet style realism dominated, and those artists who had been more integrated into the world art scene prior to this, had to disregard western art practice, which was considered bourgeois. Many artists were denounced, and this became worse during the cultural revolution. Also after the Communist take over of China artists had very little exposure to anything except Soviet style work, and soviet style art education still dominates in art schools to this day. Once the reform process started by the early 80s Chinese artists gradually became aware of the various art movements and ideas that were prevalent outside the Soviet sphere. Currently artists who want to can keep close contact with the art world outside of China, mostly via the internet, and also there are numerous exchanges and travel opportunities available for Chinese artists today. As the institutional, academic, critical and political situation is quite different to ‘the west’ a new emerging way of doing things is emerging in China, loosely referred to as “The Chinese Model.” What is the Chinese model? It is a rough, and often unspoken, collection of strategies for dealing with issues- such as lack of funding- more specifically state funding, censorship, under the table financial dealings, problems with institutions and cultural organizations, who have political directives and agendas that the artists may not want to be associated with. Also art criticism in China has many detractors- mostly due to the perceived idea that art critics now only write about artists for payment. Similarly auctions in China have become a very grey area with a lot of talk of manipulations. What this means in effect that there is a blurring of the lines, as the contemporary art scene rapidly evolves, and the government mechanisms of control also evolve in parallel, so we have a very sophisticated escalation on both sides, which will create a very complex and in some way unscalable monolithic structure, which we call “Chinese Contemporary Art.”

Monday, March 28, 5pm, NAB 3.26 (please note location is different from Senior Common Room)

Presenter: Bernadette Buckley (Goldsmiths, Politics)

Title: "Is justice a sausage? Art, Artists and the Bismark Principle."

Abstract: To be added.

Monday, March 7, 5pm, NAB 3.26 (please note location is different from Senior Common Room)

Presenter: Kristin Surak (University of Duisburg-Essen / European University Institute)

Kristin Surak is an assistant professor of comparative sociology at the University of Duisburg-Essen and a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute.  Her forthcoming book, Nation-Work: Making Tea Japanese, examines the intersection of nationalism and culture in the Japanese tea   ceremony.  She has published articles in the European Journal of Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies, the International Migration Review, and the New Left Review.

Title: “Nation-Work: Towards a Praxeology of Cultural Nationalism”

Abstract: In the past two decades, a lively literature focusing on 'nationness' the daily sense of belonging to a nation has developed alongside the well-established studies of nationalism engaged with formal ideologies and political movements. Yet there is little dialogue between the analyses of power politics and accounts of quotidian experience, though both are concerned with the subjective pratices and agencies that give objective reality to the nation. In this talk, I will suggest that we can connect these literatures by examining what I term “nation-work,” or the social labor of people who at once attribute national meanings to cultural practices, and act with and through such practices to generate national meanings. Drawing on ethnographic and historical research on the Japanese tea ceremony, I look at the way agents use cultural practices both to define and to embody national identities.  I argue that we can clarify how they apply national “visions and divisions” of the world if we consider the inter-relations between three modes of ethnonational categorization: distinction, specification, and differentiation.

Monday, February 21, 5pm, RHB 150 (please note location is different from Senior Common Room)

Presenter: Ewa Domanska (Adam Mickiewicz University at Poznań, Poland)

Ewa Domanska is an associate professor of theory and history of historiography at the Department of History, Adam Mickiewicz University at Poznań, Poland and since 2002  visiting associate professor at the Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, USA. She is working on comparative theory of the human sciences, contemporary theory and history of historiography. She is also interested in topics related to the problem of dead bodies as represented in archaeology, anthropology, history and art and related to genocides and crimes against humanity. She is the author of Unconventional Histories. Reflections on the Past in the New Humanities (2006, in Polish); Microhistories: Encounters In-between Worlds (1999, revised edition, 2005 in Polish); editor of several books including: Encounters: Philosophy of History After Postmodernism (Virginia University Press, 1998); (with Frank Ankersmit and Hans Kellner) Re-Figuring Hayden White (Stanford University Press, 2009); History, Memory, Ethics (2002, in Polish) and French Theory in Poland (with Miroslaw Loba, 2010, in Polish).

Title: “Hiroshima “Shadows” and Ontology of the Human Remains”

Abstract: The purpose of this presentation is to indicate the importance of discussion on the various problems related to the dead bodies and human remains and to address the problem of the materiality of the dead body, its concrete, undeniable presence, its thingnes. The idea is to bring back the subject of dead bodies and human remains to our concerns and put it out of the context of abjection, horror and necrophiliac desires on the one hand, and out of context of sublimation, romanticisation of the dead and necroaesthetics, on the other. In my presentation I am going to focus on nuclear holocaust and the case of the “Human shadow etched in stone” that was imprinted on the stairs of the Sumitomo Bank in Hiroshima during the explosion of the atomic bomb in 1945 (exhibited in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum). I would call this phenomenon a “signature of annihilation” and indicate the differences between humanistic interpretations concentrated on the phenomenon as a “shadow” versus analyses developed by biochemists and physicists who consider the material aspect of the “spot” as human ashes which, having been reduced to atoms, have been implanted into stone. How can historical theory deal with the issue of this specific post-mortem status of the dead body that has been annihilated without any possibility of identification? Is this shadow/spot to be considered as a specific trace of the past (a vestige)? and does its uncanny and traumatic presence detach us from the past or rather bring us closer to it? What is the “essence” of this trace that allows us to talk about the past in terms of contradiction (i.e. as non-absent past) rather than as opposition (the past as absent or present)?

Tuesday, February 8, 5pm

Presenter: Sam O. Opondo (University of Hawai’i at Manoa)

Sam Okoth Opondo is a Phd candidate in Political Science at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa and is currently a visiting postgraduate researcher at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University. His research centres on the poetics of mediating estrangement, politics of aesthetics and cultural translation in post/colonial societies. His publications include : ‘Genre and the African City: The Politics and Poetics of Urban Rhythms’ in Journal for Cultural Research, Volume 12 Issue 1 2008 , p59 – 79 , ‘Decolonising Diplomacy: Reflections on African Estrangement and Exclusion’ in Costas M. Costantinou and James Der Derian Eds., Sustainable Diplomacies and Global Securities (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010 ) and  is Co-editor with Michael J. Shapiro of ‘The New Violent Cartography :Geo-Analysis After the Aesthetic Turn’, (Routledge , Forthcoming)

Title: “The Postcolonial Subject of Violence: Explorations in Ethics and the Politics of Aesthetics”

Abstract: In this paper, I examine how current discourses on human rights in Africa [and elsewhere] equip modern politics with an ontology that configures the world as a stable distribution of places, times, identities, functions and competencies. More specifically, I examine the forms of violence or disavowal of violence enabled by a rights discourse that acts as a site for the reconfirmation and protection of ‘our’ present knowledge, beliefs and values. In order to circumvent the vision of ethical and political life elaborated and deployed by the purveyors of human rights discourses, I treat a number of aesthetic events and encounters that interrupt the regimes of intelligibility that it establishes and the idea of the postcolonial subject of violence that it maintains. My primary encouragement for turning to an aesthetic mode of apprehension is that it adds voices and perspectives to a domain of postcolonial thought or experience that has generated silences and narrowed the scope of “the political.” As such, this exploration in ‘fugitive realities’ allows for the possibility of a different thought, a different ethics and different political subjects to emerge. It historicizes human rights and the postcolonial subject of violence in Africa and adds something ontologically different to existing conceptualizations of the familiar “problem of African violence.”

Tuesday, January 25, 5.30 pm

Presenter: David Martin (Goldsmiths, Politics)

Title: “Pious Subjects / Sacred Geometries: Postcolonialism and the politics of Western Modernity”

Abstract:  If postcolonial analysis has done much to correct the singular vision that modernity was a purely Western phenomenon, it has been less successful in dismantling the notion that rationality constitutes the essence of what it is to be modern in the West. In doing so, it has tended to inadvertently re-inscribe the non-West as a site of multiplicity in the face of a robust and coherent Enlightenment rationality: with vision as its guarantor it is the sciences of the *West* which are unquestionably *rational*. This paper takes a different tack. Exploring the visual technologies used to render Western rationality as scientific, it sets in play a series of political ‘visions’ to help shed light on the so-called rational  nature of Western modernity. These visions tell of a European Enlightenment built as much on the appropriation of *sacred* technologies for the production of modern ways of knowing and being, as it was on the repeated denial and repression of this sacred order. Far from heralding the disenchantment of the world, then, what these visions show us is the way the Enlightenment conjured forth a visually pious subject forever doomed to searching for that privileged celestial vantage-point which would make sense of the repression from which it was struck, thereby once again rendering the world knowable and ordered. This we can see in its incessant cartographies and colonial wanderings.

Tuesday, December 14, 5pm

Presenter: Branwen Gruffydd Jones (Goldsmiths, Politics)

Title: “Assembling Financial Subjects in the Slum”

Abstract: Across Asia, Africa and Latin America over the past two decades grassroots urban organisations have formed to struggle for solutions to problems of inadequate housing, sanitation and infrastructure. In 1996 Slum/Shack Dwellers International was formed as an umbrella organisation for this global network of urban ‘people’s organisations’. Many scholars have analysed Slum Dwellers International as a novel form of transnational social movement, an instance of global civil society or grass-roots democratic politics. This paper draws on Foucault’s writings on governmentality to suggest a different understanding of the current role and practice of Slum Dwellers International (SDI). The paper situates SDI within a global complex of organisations and initiatives which promote a neoliberal agenda of ‘slum upgrading’, with financialisation at its core. Using a Foucauldian understanding of neoliberal governmentality, the paper makes sense of SDI’s practices in terms of efforts to construct and assemble social configurations and forms of subjectivity which are required for the financialisation of slums. The activities of SDI can be understood as seeking actively, alongside other agencies, to render slums both governable and ‘bankable’. The analysis is developed with reference to a specific housing project in Ghana.

Thursday, December 9, 6pm

Presenter: Renate Holub (University of California at Berkeley)

Renate Holub works at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the Director of Interdisciplinary Studies and teaches courses in Social Theory and European Studies. For many years, she has been inspired by the conceptual architecture of Antonio Gramsci. She is at present completing a 3 volume study on: Variable Geographies: Intellectuals, Rights, and States. The first volume is entitled Human Rights before the State: On Vico’s Theory of Global Justice. 

Title: “Elements for a Critical Theory of Intellectuals under Conditions of Informational Capitalism”

Abstract: When Marx developed his theory of intellectuals, he did so in the context of an economic and political analysis in which intellectuals, located in the ‘superstructure,’ critiqued or legitimated the inequalities and injustices promoted by the controllers of material production processes under conditions of industrial capitalism. Antonio Gramsci, located in a later stage of transatlantic industrial capitalism, attempted to analytically grasp the function of intellectuals under conditions in which a plurality of capitalist state apparatuses reproduced the hegemonies of the political economy. All manner of intellectual strata fulfilled functions in that reproduction. The organizers of new hegemonies were thus required to equally make use of all manner of intellectual strata in the formation of new hegemonies bent towards justice, liberty and equality. In the post-1989 era, critical intellectuals everywhere are faced with extraordinary transformations of the global economies and polities as informational capitalisms increase their share in economic value generation. The new conditions under which critical intellectuals now function require us to search for elements for a critical theory of intellectuals with the capacities to analytically grasp commonality of purpose on a local, regional, and global level. This is particularly important today since over the past 20 to 30 years, large segments of the transatlantic intellectual elites from within the human sciences have either subscribed to the postmodernist dictum of the unpurviewability of social evolutions, or, qua ‘experts’ emerging from within mainstream social sciences,  have conveniently participated in the further fragmentation of social science knowledge by adhering to outdated institutionalized and bureaucratized  principles of mono-disciplinarity. Both positions have ultimately only furthered an increase of poverty and environmental destruction.  I propose in this article that it is by linking the predominant features of informational capitalism to its embeddedness in larger processes of social evolutions in the information age that we can together engage in the development of new forms of norms and values in relation to global justice and democracy. Industrial and financial capitalisms relied on a set of anthropological legitimations which ultimately generated ecological unsustainability, erosion of biodiversity, and existential insecurity. Purporters to informational capitalism adhere to similar legitimations. The historical limits of these norms are clear, particular in the area of economic and jurisprudential theory. Only new anthropological norms and practices in relation to economic jurisprudence and jurisprudential economics  will generate new processes towards global justice and democracy in the organization of production, trade, and culture.

Tuesday, November 23, 5pm, RHB 307 (please note location is different from Senior Common Room)

Presenter: Anca Pusca (Goldsmiths, Politics)

Title: “The 'Roma Problem' in the EU: Nomadism, (In)visible Architectures and Violence”

Abstract: This paper argues that the 'Roma problem' in the EU is often translated into a 'space problem'. The targeting of Roma spaces - camps, right to movement, Roma homes and palaces - ultimately challenges the Roma's right to settlement and insures their invisibility. By turning its attention to the recent politics of Roma expulsions in France, this paper seeks to better understand their implications by looking at: a) the relationship between the Roma's sedentary vs. nomadic lifestyle; b) the Roma's use of space to secure both visibility and invisibility; and c) the state's problematic use of legal violence in order to control and police the Roma. The paper strongly suggests that the Roma 'space problem' cannot be solved by attempts to either construct (settlement) or constrict (expulsion) Roma spaces by an outside authority, but rather through an acceptance of Roma's temporary presence - even if it involves a long-term temporality - in camps 'abroad' and continued support for Roma communities 'at home'.

For more information please contact Sanjay Seth (s.seth@gold.ac.uk) or Elaine Webb (e.webb@gold.ac.uk). For information on how to reach Goldsmiths, please see: http://www.gold.ac.uk/find-us/.

Politics web page: http://www.gold.ac.uk/politics/

Centre for Postcolonial Studies: http://www.gold.ac.uk/postcolonial-studies/