Beyond Assimilation/Revolution? Collectivity, Solidarity, and the Future

This seminar hopes to engage with forms of social and political organizing that do not conform to binary understandings of the imperative towards assimilation or revolution. While reflecting on formulations of this double bind in queer studies and postcolonial paradigms, we are interested in copious ways of being that elide these alternatives and their underlying conceptions of agency. This seminar builds on questions and insights that may range from Foucault’s controversial support for the Iranian revolution to Julietta Singh’s calls for a decolonial rejection of mastery amid and after revolution. We are further interested in the role of mediation in modes of organizing, narrative, or art-making, such as Tina Campt’s attention to sonic vibrations that belie the dehumanization of black subjects in ID photographs. We seek to pay attention to collectives and solidarities that might not be legible at first, not being bound by such definitions as the nation or even species.

How do we understand seemingly illegible modes of resistance that lay the groundwork for revolutionary imaginaries? At a moment when life on Earth seems to be drowning in literal as well as discursive trash, it is essential to think of new ways to maintain the creativity and vitality of everyday life. We thus call for paying attention to the ways in which queer orientations to life and narrative open up new opportunities of world-making and imagining the future. As the climate catastrophe unfolds, and even those considered worthy of a good life face an existential threat to their way of life, it is this very good life that threatens human and non-human life on the planet. Engaging with alternate forms of community, sociality, and joy that flourish in spaces beyond the biopolitical protection and surveillance of the state is an essential part of imagining not just the possibility of a future, but of new ways of living and being in that future. 

Papers might address topics ranging from, but not limited to, everyday, insurgent politics; collectivity in literature, film, and other arts; climate activism and ecocriticism; and social and political groupings of all sorts.