Disciplinary Affects: The Aesthetics of Systemic Injustices

This seminar examines how institutional practices of exclusion and marginalization shape cultural perceptions of the outcast and outlaw, appealing primarily to emotional responses rather than rational discourse. Cultural critics like Walter Benjamin, Edward Said, and Frantz Fanon among others, have analyzed the social acceptance of exclusionary and alienating mechanisms, expressed through aesthetic motifs and sensational imagery in language, literature, mass media, and popular culture. Meanwhile, intellectuals such as Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Karl Marx, and Zygmunt Bauman have focused on how legal, economic, and social structures produce marginalized subjects.   

Our aim is to explore modern and contemporary mechanisms of exclusion by concentrating on the aesthetic-affective dimensions that normalize the creation of outlawed and disposable groups, alongside the legitimation of force used against them. Consider, for instance, persons or groups that have been publicly labeled as aliens, rioters, displaced persons, disabled persons, queers, protestors, criminals, beasts, Indians, terrorists, picaros, proletarians, homines sacri, “angry feminists”, radicals, contagious or ill figures, and victims. While some of these instances are held to be pejoratives in any one discourse, some instances become pegged to negative connotations through the course of particular discursive events. Any enumeration is hence open to continuous critical revision.

We welcome contributions that engage with political, legal, economic, ethnic, metaphysical, epistemic, biological, or cultural practices of exclusion. Submissions should emphasize genre- and media-specific aesthetic conventions, dominant political stereotypes, or philosophical and cultural tropes that produce legitimacy while neutralizing or deflecting epistemic resistance and critical scrutiny of institutional techniques of exclusion. Additionally, we invite papers that explore political and social strategies resisting structural marginalization, whether through aesthetic or other means.