Our final meeting of the fall semester will be held Monday, December 10, 2012 at 7:00, location forthcoming over email. We will be reading Michael Warner's Publics and Counterpublics (2002)--if you still haven't picked up your copy, email Devon. If you are pressed for time, please try and read the first chapter and the essay co-written with Lauren Berlant, "Sex in Public." We also look forward to workshopping a paper from Michael Benitez, who has agreed to present a piece in progress on Oscar Wilde and the public sphere entitled "Wilde
Perfection: (New) Aestheticism, Weaponized Discourse, and the Aesthetics of
Sexuality in The Picture of Dorian Gray." More details to follow over email.
At Monday's meeting, we will also go over plans for our Spring semester schedule--please think about possible dates that you would be willing to workshop a chapter or recent piece you have been working on. We will update the site with the spring semester syllabus in the next few weeks.
Visiting scholar: Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, November 26
Please note that the location has changed to Room 315 from the originally scheduled October meeting.
Please join us for our next Mellon Workshop meeting on Monday, November 26 at 12pm, at 70 Brown Street (The English Department), Room 315. We will be hosting Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, professor of English at Northeastern University, whose research interests include Early American literature and drama; feminist, political and aesthetic theory; transatlantic print culture; Atlantic colonialism; and the early novel. In her first book, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford UP, 2004), Dillon argues that narratives of citizenship and subjectivity within liberalism include - and, indeed, rely upon - depictions of women that encourage affective identification as an unspoken political act and thereby complicate the distinction between private and public spheres. Currently, Dillon is working on her manuscript for New World Drama: Theatre of the Atlantic, 1660-1850, as well as co-editing a volume of essays on early American culture and the Haitian Revolution.
For Monday's meeting, we will be reading selections from Dillon's The Gender of Freedom, a recent essay entitled "John Marrant Blows the French Horn," as well as a forthcoming essay from Professor Dillon. All readings are available here (log-in required). There are also additional, optional readings available for this week's discussion.
Meeting: November 5, 2012
Our next Mellon meeting will be held Monday, November 5, 2012 at 12pm in
Partridge Hall (Third World Center), Room 104. We will be reading selections from David Eng's The Feeling of Kinship (2010), Corey Brettschneider's "The Politics of the Personal: A Liberal Approach" (2007), Sharon Krause's "Lady Liberty's Allure: Political Agency, Citizenship and The Second Sex" (2000), and a chapter from Svetlana Boym's The Future of Nostalgia (2001). All readings are available for download here.
Our readings this week deal with questions about race, gender, sexuality, and the public/private sphere. We will think through how various identities are represented publicly while nevertheless facing political privitization.
Join us for lunch and discussion! We will also discuss the recent schedule changes and plan for the rest of the semester.
Our readings this week deal with questions about race, gender, sexuality, and the public/private sphere. We will think through how various identities are represented publicly while nevertheless facing political privitization.
Join us for lunch and discussion! We will also discuss the recent schedule changes and plan for the rest of the semester.
Visiting Scholar: Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, October 29, 2012
RESCHEDULED! Due to Hurricane Sandy, we will be rescheduling Professor Dillon's visit for later in the semester. Please check the syllabus for the schedule changes. Please join us for our next Mellon Workshop meeting on Monday, October 29 at 12pm, at 70 Brown Street (The English Department), Room 218. We will be hosting Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, professor of English at Northeastern University, whose research interests include Early American literature and drama; feminist, political and aesthetic theory; transatlantic print culture; Atlantic colonialism; and the early novel. In her first book, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford UP, 2004), Dillon argues that narratives of citizenship and subjectivity within liberalism include - and, indeed, rely upon - depictions of women that encourage affective identification as an unspoken political act and thereby complicate the distinction between private and public spheres. Currently, Dillon is working on her manuscript for New World Drama: Theatre of the Atlantic, 1660-1850, as well as co-editing a volume of essays on early American culture and the Haitian Revolution.
For Monday's meeting, we will be reading selections from Dillon's The Gender of Freedom, a recent essay entitled "John Marrant Blows the French Horn," as well as a forthcoming essay from Professor Dillon. All readings are available here (log-in required). There are also additional, optional readings available for this week's discussion.
Meeting: October 15, 2012
Professor Philip Gould, the Nicholas Brown Professor of Oratory and Belles Lettres (Department of English), will be joining our discussion of Dewey and Berlin. Professor Gould has recently taught a graduate seminar on American liberalism and is the faculty advisor for our Mellon workshop.
Our previous meeting, in which we discussed Rawls and Lippmann raised a number of stimulating questions about the potency of liberalism as a political philosophy, as well as its more aesthetic use of the imagination.
CFP: "Public Media, Private Media," May 2013
The MIT Comparative Media Studies (CMS) Program and Communications Forum have issued a call for papers and panels for their upcoming Media in Transition international conference, "Public Media, Private Media," to be held May 3-5, 2013, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA. This installment of the annual conference seeks to explore the tenuous and shifting definitions of public and private spheres in the context of digital media, unprecedented digital tracking, reality television and confessional journalism, and intellectual property debates - all as framed by a long history of public sphere theory.
From the CFP:
The distinction between public and private – where the line is drawn and how it is sometimes inverted, the ways that it is embraced or contested – says much about a culture. Media have been used to enable, define and police the shifting line between the two, so it is not surprising that the history of media change to some extent maps the history of these domains. Media in Transition 8 takes up the question of the shifting nature of the public and private at a moment of unparalleled connectivity, enabling new notions of the socially mediated public and unequalled levels of data extraction thanks to the quiet demands of our Kindles, iPhones, televisions and computers. While this forces us to think in new ways about these long established categories, in fact the underlying concerns are rooted in deep historical practice. MiT8 considers the ways in which specific media challenge or reinforce certain notions of the public or the private and especially the ways in which specific “texts” dramatize or imagine the public, the private and the boundary between them. It takes as its foci three broad domains: personal identity, the civic (the public sphere) and intellectual property.
Broad topics include: "the anxieties of the private" in film, television, literature, and the Internet; celebrity and the public persona; the history of private-public discourse; consumption and media spaces; virtual publics; surveillance, monitors, and media traces; internet privacy and piracy; the fate of public libraries in the era of digital services (among others).
Submissions can be emailed to mit8@mit.edu and will be accepted on a rolling basis until Friday, March 1, 2013 (evaluations begin in November. Further instructions can be found in the Media in Transition 8th Annual Call for Papers.
CFP: "I Live Here!: Redefining and Negotiating Notions of Public and Private,” February 2013
The North Carolina State Association of English Graduate Students has issued a call for papers for their graduate student conference in the humanities, to be held February 22-23, 2013 at Tompkins Hall in Raleigh, NC. The conference, "I Live Here: Redefining and Negotiating Notions of Public and Private," is broadly interested in the tenuous boundaries between public and private spheres.
From the CFP:
With the current election season in full force, debates over social, economic, and political issues seem to increasingly reflect a tension between the public/private binary, and the ongoing conflict that results when the personal becomes political. Scholars are encouraged to explore how their own research and interests in English & Humanities makes a significant contribution to our understanding of this binary, be it in its current iteration, the historical development, or a diachronic snapshot of another cultural moment.
We welcome submissions that re-frame existing and emerging research to interrogate the significance of the debate over public and private, as well as those that make strides toward understanding how our research might provide insight into our own current moment.
Broad topics include: the historical development of the public/private distinction; the changing boundaries in digital spaces; the relationship between the public/private distinction and literature, language, and film; the implications of the public/private debate for identity politics in general and/or specific populations.
Abstracts of 300 words are due by November 15, 2012. For more information visit the UPenn CFP post or email aegs.conference@gmail.com.
Second Meeting: September 24, 2012
The second meeting for "Publics and
Politics" will be held next Monday, September 24th, 2012 in J. Walter Wilson 302 at 7pm. Dinner
will be provided. We will be discussing selections from John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (original edition, 1971) and Walter Lippmann's The Phantom Public (1925). Readings are available over email and online here (log-in required).
Copies of John Dewey's The Public and Its Problems
(1927), our reading for October 8th, will be distributed. We also hope to secure some dissertation presenters for upcoming weeks and finalize our meeting schedule.
Last week's discussion of Locke and de Tocqueville raised some interesting questions about the origin of "feeling" or "desire" and the parameters of culture. We look forward, for next week, to a lively discussion of public opinion, intellect, and expectations of the individual for democratic political participation. Event: Chris Dixon, "Reinventing Radicalism"
Tomorrow, activist and scholar Chris Dixon will give a talk at Brown University about the convergence of social movements and grassroots organizing.
From the event facebook page:
"Reinventing Radicalism: Anti-Authoritarian Activism in North America" will discuss how the last decade has seen the exciting convergence of anti-authoritarian radicalism and broader-based movements in the U.S. and Canada. Coming out of this convergence, a growing cohort of activists are developing shared politics, practices, and sensibilities based in overlapping areas of work. This cohort is a political tendency, the anti-authoritarian current, which cuts across a range of left social movements. What distinguishes this current is its commitment to combining anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist politics with grassroots organizing among ordinary, non-activist people. Drawing on in-depth interviews with organizers across North America, this presentation will trace the strands that have led into the anti-authoritarian current, explore the defining principles of its politics, and the discuss questions it poses for all of us committed to social transformation.
Chris Dixon is a scholar and longtime activist who received his PhD from the History of Consciousness program at the University of California at Santa Cruz. His writing has appeared in numerous book collections as well as periodicals such as Anarchist Studies, Left Turn, Social Movement Studies, and Upping the Anti. He is currently completing a book, tentatively titled Against and Beyond, based on interviews with anti-authoritarian organizers across the U.S. and Canada involved in broader-based movements.
This event will take place at 5:30 p.m. in Smith-Buonanno room
201. This lecture is the first in a series entitled "Global Resistance
to Neoliberalism," and is sponsored by a Graduate International
Colloquium grant from Brown University's Office of International Affairs. Those of you unable to attend can find a video of this talk hosted on vimeo.
First meeting: September 10, 2012
The first meeting for "Publics and Politics" will be held next Monday, September 10, 2012 at 12 pm--lunch will be provided. We will be discussing selections from John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1689) and Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1835-40). Reading selections are available over email and online here (log in required).
Copies of the reading for the October 8 meeting, John Dewey's The Public and Its Problems (1927), will also be distributed. Readings for the September 24 meeting will be uploaded online. We also hope to finalize the schedule with the workshop during Monday's meeting, including participant presentations of dissertation work, as well as our visiting scholars to the workshop, so expect more information to be uploaded onto the site in the coming weeks.
Workshop Description
From John Locke to John Rawls, theories of liberal democracy have
long questioned the role of public opinion in the securing of individual
liberties. Such theories have depended upon the concept of a monolithic
democratic public, supposedly united under a singular national culture
committed to individual rights. This belief, however, has attracted more recent
critical scrutiny in the cultural turn towards diversity and identity politics
and emergent proposals of alternative publics. If cultural identifications have
generated new forms of collective solidarity, the triumph of what Theodore Lowi
called “interest group liberalism” has also led to accusations of political
lethargy and inaction. Theories of liberalism have also suffered from the
emergence and mobilization of aggressively privatized models of governance,
such as political libertarianism and economic neoliberalism. These movements,
which champion the importance of the individual, have commandeered political
action for private use rather than public good. The initial weeks of our Mellon
workshop will foreground these political theories of liberalism to situate
questions surrounding the relationship between public identification, political
action and cultural audiences.
Our workshop is prompted by a series of questions emerging from
tensions between private and public personas, individuals and collectives: how
do private individuals present themselves publicly? What constitutes a public
action? What constitutes a political action? We seek to engage with the critical
suggestion that as public action has transformed into nonparticipatory
identification, we have morphed from a political society into a society of consumers
and spectators. Our workshop will foreground a current and ongoing debate
between the belief that culture is a politics in itself, and the belief that a
politics of culture can only distract from real political action and activism. We
will consider how we might negotiate the sides of this debate, and how “culture,”
as cultural works, might animate a politics that is not only personal and
individual, but also public.
Since the general turn to identity politics in the twentieth
century, critics seem increasingly to respond to this debate by converting
consumption into political action. In fact, today, criticism motivated
by a political desire to render identitarian communities visible appears the most susceptible to a discourse that
expands and privileges the public sphere at the expense of identifiably active social movement. Given the often
invisible and “private” nature of sexual desire, queer theory offers one logical starting point for
a critique of identitarian politics that proclaim the personal to as a blanket
source for social recognition and political agency.
In recent decades, the rise of queer theory, and the subsequent
“affective turns” within the humanities and social sciences have highlighted
the emotional impact of cultural productions and invested texts and artworks
with the potential to shape political communities by appealing to “knowing”
audiences. The exemplary works of Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant describe,
respectively, “counterpublics” and “intimate publics” comprised of readers
whose individual engagements with cultural texts are politicized as a means of
identification with a community marked by difference. These theories, however,
rely upon a tautological framework in which readers come to identify with an
intimate community only by knowing how to read appropriately, that is, by
having the knowledge that comes from membership in the community. Such intimate
communities can have significant social effects, as when the “queer eye” that
converts culture into camp and kitsch comes into contact with the “straight
guy” who stands for a more general television audience. Yet this reliance on
knowledge, vision, and contact inevitably supplants social action with
proximity and social presence, as when Sara Ahmed identifies a queer politics
inherent in the discomfort and disorientation that emerge when queers
occupy hostile environments. How must we redefine the “political” when faced
with theoretical parameters that identify public visibility as political action
and private readers as communally bound? How might the conflation of visibility
with social action enable us to unearth unseen divisions within expansive
identity-based communities, when we consider the impacts on racial and ethnic,
gendered, and diasporic communities and counterpublics?
In the latter portion of our Mellon workshop, we
expect to approach the “public” formally, as a concept that enables certain
recognizable types of appeal to individuated audiences. If such appeals
manifest through “presence” and “visibility,” turning our attention toward
emergent theories of cosmopolitanism, globalism, and virtual networking will
allow us to complicate what it means to be “visible,” and politically readable,
beyond the limits of a national or spatial context. Alternately, thinking
locally by examining graffiti, architecture, public art and performance art, we
might reinvest the public sphere with political value in encounters between
cultural works and the unknowing, accidental “readers” that pass by.
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