Keynote Speakers/Invités d’honneur:
Dina Al-Kassim (University of British Columbia)
Dr. Dina Al-Kassim is a critical theorist working in Arabic, English and French with a special emphasis on the public sphere in colonial and postcolonial cultures. Specifically, she works on contemporary political subjectivation, sexuality and aesthetics in the EU, USA, Middle East and Africa. Global and interdisciplinary in approach, she studies politics and literature in Africa, Europe and the Middle East.
Her recent book is called On Pain of Speech: Fantasies of the First Order and the Literary Rant (University of California Press, 2010). On Pain of Speech examines ranting as a waste product of modern subjectivity.
A Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies Associate and Associate Faculty at Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice, Dr. Al-Kassim teaches in the English Department at University of British Columbia. Previously, Al-Kassim has been a Mellon Postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, Senior Seminar Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute, and Sawyer Seminar Residency Fellow at the University of California, Humanities Research Institute. A much invited speaker here and abroad, Al-Kassim has been invited as resident fellow at Pusan National University, Busan, Korea, the Research Group on Gender and Race at the UNAC, Bogota, Columbia and the Institute for Gender at the American University, Cairo.
Her numerous publications appear in Grey Room, International Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Public Culture, Cultural Dynamics, and the volume Islamicate Sexualities. Her current project is entitled “Exposures: Biopolitics and New Precarity under Globalization.” Here is a brief description of the project:
Studies of biopolitics today credit Foucault with inaugurating the field in his analysis of governmentality. Less often is it recalled that his theory of biopolitics owes as much to his understanding of sexuality and specifically of feminist and queer militancy. Examining this lineage as a forgotten source for biopolitical philosophy, Al-Kassim’s work excavates the persistence of a figure of “exposure” which accompanies literatures of precarity in the contemporary moment. Working with literary texts, ethnographies, autobiography, policy documents, theory and philosophy of our political moment, Al-Kassim’s current writing addresses the repetitions of themes of exposure understood as vulnerability, risk, revelation and offense in scenes of precarity. From the “spiritual insecurity” of post-apartheid Soweto to the diagnosis of HIV status in New York in the 1980’s, exposure enables critique, reveals the contours of social panics, and perhaps provides us a way of thinking our connectedness today.
“Digging Joy: Affirmation on Anti-Colonial Terrain”
Recent trends in postcolonial criticism have unearthed the necropolitical shadow of biopolitics and registered grim and truncated accounts of diminished life. What then might postcolonial studies have to reply to the demands of “joy”? Excavating the genealogy of revolutionary joy, we will follow Georges Bataille’s critique of nihilistic euphoria expressed as a struggle between flora and fauna in his early work and follow the blockage that suspends a choice between “the love given to the community” and the experience of radical negativity in the “joy before death.” In contrast, Jean Genet’s “adherence” to the Palestinian people as set forth in Un Captif Amoureux, betrays a solidarity for which Genet had been prepared since youth and which is traversed by submerged souvenirs retrieved through his attempts to describe a revolutionary people among whom he was “at home.” If Genet and Bataille represent the twin poles of communion and inner experience, both attest to a love for or joy in the other that in Genet takes on its anti-colonial contours. Passing through the meditations of Gayatri Spivak and Frantz Fanon, we will dwell on Genet’s account as witness of the joy of the other.
Vivasvan Soni (Northwestern University)
Vivasvan Soni (Ph.D. Duke University, 2000) studies and teaches eighteenth-century British literature, as well as critical and literary theory. His book, Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity, was published by Cornell University Press in 2010 and was the recipient of the Modern Language Association’s eighteenth annual Prize for a First Book. In it, he traces the narrative transformations in the eighteenth-century which produce a modern conception of happiness, arguing that these transformations result in the erasure of happiness as a guiding idea in politics. He discovers in classical ideas of happiness, particularly Solon’s proverb “Call no man happy until he is dead,” the outlines of a concept of happiness that might sustain a utopian politics. In their citation for Soni’s book, the MLA prize committee noted that “Mourning Happiness powerfully transcends the usual field limitations of academic scholarship, making a compelling case for how an ancient Greek construal of happiness could reawaken the radical force of that denuded concept in our own present.… This provocative study affirms the importance of narrative form to one of our most upheld and yet least examined ideals.”
Soni’s areas of interest include the rise of the novel, moral and political theory, narratology, theories of tragedy, utopian writing and theories of modernity. He is currently at work on two new projects. The first diagnoses a “crisis of judgment” in the eighteenth-century whose legacy is still with us. Read in this context, the novels of Fielding and Austen offer an exemplary pedagogy of judgment. Soni has edited a special issue of the journal ECTI (51.3) on The Crisis of Judgment. His second new project, tentatively titled, The Utopian Imagination: Fiction and the Possibilities of Action, will examine the fate of utopian writing and thinking in modernity.
Soni has also taught at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and at Yale University where he held a Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellowship (2000-2002). He has been awarded an American Philosophical Society Fellowship for 2010-11 to work on The Crisis of Judgment.
“How (Not) to Make Happiness a Political Idea: The Abandonment of a Politics of Happiness in the Eighteenth Century”
Veronika Ambros (University of Toronto)
Born in Prague, Dr. Veronika Ambros obtained her PhD at the Free University of Berlin. She is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and at the Centre of Comparative Literature, at the University of Toronto. Her research includes the theories of the Prague linguistic circle, their precursors the Russian formalists and their successors, most prominently the Tartu School around Yuri Lotman. The conference Structuralism(s) Today. Paris, Prague, Tartu organized by the Center, as well as the eponymous volume published in 2009, confirm their relevance and versatility. Her main subject of inquiry however is semiotics in general and semiotics of drama and theatre in particular. Another part of her research is connected with the cityscape of Prague as the place that used to be an important center of Czech as well as German literature, and Russian émigré culture. Prague serves as a base to explore the relationship between urban space and fiction, between multiculturalism and nationalism, between center and margins. Authors such as Jan Neruda, Rainer Maria Rilke, Guillaume Apollinaire, Franz Kafka, Karel Čapek, Bohumil Hrabal, Milan Kundera and Philip Roth illuminate a number of concepts explored by contemporary urban studies. Furthermore, imaginary creatures such as robots and golems, which appear on stage and screen, inform her enquiry about the functions of intermediality, especially of the relationship of fine arts and architecture with cinema and theatre.
“The Joy of Comparison”
The joy of comparison, I wish to share with you today emerges mostly from silent, solitary engagement with ambiguous and seemingly hermetic literary texts, illuminated by what Wilhelm von Humboldt calls the zig-zag method by which “concepts of a theory are tested in textual analysis, and the analysis, in turn, inspires new developments on the theoretical level.” (Lubomír Doležel, Heterocosmica, XI). My intention today is much more modest and hopefully somewhat joyful.
In the spirit of the zig zag method let me invite you to join me on a meandering voyage, which as Mikhail Bakhtin teaches us about the chronotope of the journey, motivates a number of chance encounters with various scribes, whimsical narrators, an unlikely collector of art, before facing the absence of joy and finally the joy of absence. The selected theoretical aspects include the skaz, which denotes a specific first person narrator that emulates oral speech; the grotesque, the parody and postmodernism, the travesty, the so-called minor literature, surrealist collages, socialist realism and kitsch, as well as visual impulse and finally “minus –Stalin”.