Poetry, Assemblage, and Spaces of Appearance

deadline for submissions: 
September 30, 2017
full name / name of organization: 
NeMLA 2018, Pittsburgh, PA, April 12-15, 2018

CFP: NEMLA 2018 Poetry, Assemblage, and Spaces of Appearance

April 12-15, 2018
Pittsburgh, PA

Poetry enables us to be present with one another across space and time. What happens when we read contemporary poetry alongside political philosophy? This session invites reflections on how reading, writing, and sharing poetry--in isolation, in person, or in physical or virtual communities--creates or can create political assemblages. Judith Butler describes “assemblage” as a state of mutual acknowledgement of vulnerability and interdependence and claims it is a fundamental precondition of political action. Butler’s claims for the political necessity of vulnerability merges her career-long explorations of embodied experience with Hannah Arendt's theory of "spaces of appearance," the idea that politics emerges through speech and action. Like Butler, Arendt insists that we become fully human only when we approach one another as simultaneously unknowable and interdependent.

In addition to tracing poetic resonances in Butler's and Arendt’s philosophies, the session aims to situate current debates about the exclusivity/inclusivity of poetic communities and the relevance/irrelevance of poetry to contemporary political action. For example:

  • How might CA Conrad’s “somatic exercises” contribute to the formation of political assemblages?
  • How might the pauses and disjunctions of Ed Roberson’s poetry enable the production of collective entities like Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s “undercommons”?
  • How might reading Claudia Rankine and Terrence Hayes’s insistence of the particularity of poetic bodies enable us to engage with one another in Arendt’s spaces of appearance?

Submit 250-word abstracts and brief biographies to Nate Mickelson, Assistant Professor of English, Guttman Community College-CUNY, at https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/16857. 

 

April 15-18, 2018

Pittsburgh, PA

 

Poetry enables us to be present with one another across space and time. What happens when we read contemporary poetry alongside political philosophy? This session invites reflections on how reading, writing, and sharing poetry--in isolation, in person, or in physical or virtual communities--creates or can create political assemblages. Judith Butler describes “assemblage” as a state of mutual acknowledgement of vulnerability and interdependence and claims it is a fundamental precondition of political action. Butler’s claims for the political necessity of vulnerability merges her career-long explorations of embodied experience with Hannah Arendt's theory of "spaces of appearance," the idea that politics emerges through speech and action. Like Butler, Arendt insists that we become fully human only when we approach one another as simultaneously unknowable and interdependent.

 

In addition to tracing poetic resonances in Butler's and Arendt’s philosophies, the session aims to situate current debates about the exclusivity/inclusivity of poetic communities and the relevance/irrelevance of poetry to contemporary political action. For example, how might CA Conrad’s “somatic exercises” contribute to the formation of political assemblages? How might the pauses and disjunctions of Ed Roberson’s poetry enable the production of collective entities like Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s “undercommons”? How might reading Claudia Rankine and Terrence Hayes’s insistence of the particularity of poetic bodies enable us to engage with one another in Arendt’s spaces of appearance?

 

Submit 250-word abstracts and brief biographies to Nate Mickelson, Assistant Professor of English, Guttman Community College-CUNY, at https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/16857