theory

Insistence, Repetition, Difference: Insist3nc3, R3p3tition, Diff3r3nc3

ACLA 2017

Organizer: Angeles Donoso Macaya
Co-Organizer: Cesar Barros A.

From Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly through Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables, a long tradition of antebellum American fiction concerns itself with the “prehistory” of American capitalism. While many critics have drawn attention to these formative years of a distinct American literature and their relation to the national imaginary, few if any have emphasized that these narratives underscore both the importance of land appropriation and the institution of economic contract to the transition between this “prehistory” and capitalist social relations.

This ACLA panel invites proposals on the uses of biographical forms in contemporary fiction. The point of departure of our conversation is the idea of approaching biography as a "dwelling of human experience", to borrow the expression put forth by the German author and filmmaker Alexander Kluge. Kluge characterizes writing as "the only form of preserving human experience independently of time", in a manner that does not leave it "imprisoned in individual biographies". How does contemporary fiction that employs biographical forms approach literary writing as imaginative mediation of the historicity of experience?

This seminar builds on the premise that modernist movement in arts, media and culture was at some level geographical, and that in certain geographies there were complex reactions to the European modernism. Culturally and politically very turbulent—because of earth-shattering events at the time like the demise of two old empires, WWI and WW2—at the inception, height and aftermath of the modernist movement, Southeast Europe is one such area where one sees a range of reactions from extreme avant-garde attitudes to failed aspirations.

Animism has been making something of a comeback. While animism remains an umbrella term for a range of local practices which invest non-human matter with spirit, recent work (Garuba, Harvey, Rooney, Taussig, Vivieros de Castro) has emphasised this investment as a relational way of being with “other-than-human persons.” In light of our growing—if continually disavowed—awareness of ecological crisis, the purpose of this panel is to suggest that “new animism” has an insistently “planetary” (Spivak, Wenzel) or “cosmopolitical” (Stengers) bearing.