CFP: [General] Sifting Through Lies: Toward an Aesthetic Impunity

full name / name of organization: 
Emily Churilla
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Sifting Through Lies: Toward an Aesthetic Impunity

James Baldwin, in a letter to his nephew, wrote the famous lines “It is not
permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is
the innocence which constitutes the crime.” Writing at the 100th
anniversary of U.S. Emancipation, Baldwin was telling a tale of a history
entrapped, but it is this same notion of innocence and history that
research methodologies, disciplinary factions, and a damagingly naïve
Western critical framework of academia must confront in order to stop the
perpetuation of lies almost intrinsic to our scholarly practices. In
writing today, is there impunity to be found in acts of addressing, sifting
and re-writing through lies? Is there the knowledge of possible impunity
from the consequent knowledge of this entrapment in which weâ€"academics,
intellectuals, artistsâ€"are willingly initiated, caught and imputed? What
are the risks and hopes of such engagements?

Sifting Through Lies: Toward an Aesthetic Impunity, the 20th Annual Stony
Brook Manhattan Graduate Conference to be held February 15th and 16th,
seeks to focus on the fault lines of what can be accounted for and what new
breaks must be made in order to redress the violent past archaeologies of
thought and practice committed by our predecessors.

The questions that this conference sets out to address include: How can we
as junior scholars critique the legacy that has been left to us while
resisting the attempt to “fix” historyâ€"i.e., howâ€"with which
methodologiesâ€"to sift through the fragments of a narrative that has been
ripped apart while defying the urge to build a new narrative based
potentially on our own naiveté and criminal innocence? What knowledge is
accessible, and just who can access it? In what languages can we
communicate knowledge and what idioms, truths, and lies are privileged in
this communication? What kinds of demands can we make on the work of those
archaeologists of knowledge who have come before us as we confront the
limitations of our own appropriations, paradoxes, and self-reflexivity?
What can we really hope for or demand from interdisciplinary scholarship?
For some, interdisciplinarity signals a breakdown of knowledge
dissemination, for others the work is seemingly the only way to overcome or
theorize the recycling of past mistakes: do the inherent conflicts and
contradictions of interdisciplinarity stymie possible new movements toward
academic accountability and what can an extended engagement with
traditional disciplinary boundaries offer to the fight for this
accountability? Is it possible that the mere rhetoric of the fragment, the
fraction, and the rupture, paradoxically reinforce linguistic, bodily,
disciplinary, and national boundaries?
 
To those interested in submissions, the abstract length is 250 words, due
December 1. Abstracts can be sent to liesconf_at_ic.sunysb.edu. Note that
paper length is to be delivered within 15 minutes.

This symposium, the longest running graduate conference in the United
States, invites but does not limit papers on the following topics:
Theories of the Nation and Global Capital
Citizenship and Subjectivity
Detention, Torture, Definitions of Life
Archival Constructions and Deconstructions
Archaeologies of Knowledge
Depression, Pain, Violence and the Literary Text
Poetic Theories
Musical Theory and Literature
Aesthetics of Historical Narratives
Epistemologies (nuanced databases/technologies of knowledge…)
Investigations into Literatures of Young Writers and New Narratives of
‘third worldness’,
the postcolony, the nation, the multitude which question tensions and
debates between locality and globalization
(Market) Boundaries of Languages, Disciplines, Bodies and Nations
 New/Contemporary Forms of The Griot
Ethnographies and Anthropologies of the Live/Living Text
Mainstreaming Queerness
Queerness and Race
Race Theory
What happened to the Womanist Movement?
Sociology of the Body
Dance and Bodies in Motion
Visual, Performance and Installation Arts
Science, Technology and Aesthetics
Media Representations of Blackness (BET, TVOne, The Imus and Isaiah Thomas
Scenarios and Language, Current Debates in Hip-Hop)
Media Representations of Latinidad (Univision, Miami as mediatic capital of
Latin
America, Current Immigration Debates)
Technological Advances in the Humanities Classroom
Reality TV and Digital Culture
YouTube and Online Social Networks
Forms and Functions of Online Museums
 

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Received on Mon Oct 15 2007 - 11:57:59 EDT