Please save the date for our annual Poetics & Theory Graduate Student Conference.
Arguments about the value of community have animated the history of moral and political thought, while the loss of community and longing for possibilities of genuine community have been long-standing preoccupations of the literary imagination. The value of community and debates around sustainable forms of collective organization have energized the halls of deliberative governments and been trialed in ways transformative, ineffectual, unthinkable, and not-yet-thought. In recent years, the concept of community has been stretched over ever-shifting, contentious, ideological coordinates: Brexit, the US-Mexico border wall, Zadist interventions, the Rojava conflict, the persisting Israel-Palestine conflict, the recent Hong Kong riots, and the ongoing persecution of Muslims in Myanmar are just a few contexts in which the tenets of community are being violently negotiated.
This interdisciplinary conference asks: How have transformations in literary, theoretical, and poetic worlds impacted community’s lived possibilities? How can we think community anew despite or in light of the concept’s persisting pasts? How do communities emerge in alliance, out of resistance, through forms of engagement and disengagement? How have communities been forged through coercion, collective trauma, socio-political crises, environmental calamity, and shared history? What does it mean to appear for and among others, and how should we approach different vectors of visibility? How are communities unavowable, inoperable, minoritized, majoritized, constructed, mediated, and mobilized?
This conference will feature the work of P&T students as well as graduate students from beyond NYU. Our faculty panel will include Emily Apter (NYU), Stathis Gourgouris (Columbia), and S. Pearl Brilmyer (UPenn).
We hope to see many of you there! More details about the conference schedule and a poster will follow soon!