In 1921, the literary critic Yuri Tynyanov observed that every poet and writer arranges similar objects in a hierarchical order and places dissimilar objects on an equal plane. In this sense, ‘every construction regroups the world’. In the post-revolutionary artistic and literary avant-gardes, the new groupings of words and things emerged to address how the experience of revolution penetrates subjects and object, creates new forces and environments, and shifts attention away from the obvious to what has been unseen and invisible. This affects the understanding of the notion of the proletariat, which, given the post-revolutionary motley composition of peasants, ethnic minorities and small urban working classes, receives a rather heterodox, anti-colonial and generally expanded understanding that differs radically from the Western Marxist version and context. For such author as Andrei Platonov, the notion of the proletariat embraces not only peasants and nomadic people, but also animals, plants and the earth. Conceptually, writers and artists close to Platonov focus on the politics of the new post-revolutionary sensibility, problematised as a rupture with the old systems of heliocentric and anthropocentric perspective. Sight, sense, and point of view become an important framework to address who and what could be seen as the subject of art and literature, and who and what articulates the experience of revolution. 

The paper considers from a decolonial perspective less-known concepts of proletarian sensibility, life-building and perspectival vision developed by the artistic and literary avant-gardes in the 1920s and 1930s. The first part of the paper outlines the theory of sensation in the avant-garde understood a complex relation of reciprocal mirroring and perspectivism, which constructs material forms and shapes composite structures. In the second part of the paper a conceptual relationship between the artistic theories and Alexander Bogdanov’s understanding of relational and environmental structures, perspectivism and perception, objectivity and social totality will be established by staging a discussion on the expanded definition of proletarian experience in works of Andrei Platonov and other authors. 

Maria CHEHONADSKIH is a Lecturer in Russian at Queen Mary University of London. She was a Max Hayward Visiting Fellow at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford (2019-2021). Maria Chehonadskih received her PhD in Philosophy from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University in 2017. Her research and work concentrate on the epistemologies of (post-)socialism across philosophy, science, literature, and art. She is the author of ‘Alexander Bogdanov and the Politics of Knowledge After the October Revolution’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).   

AMBER JAMILLA MUSSER

THINKING THE BODY-PLACE THROUGH KIYAN WILLIAMS

When Hortense Spillers describes the violence of the transatlantic slave trade, she borrows from Freud the term “oceanic” to indicate “an analogy for undifferentiated identity: removed from the indigenous land and culture, not-yet ‘American’ either, these captive persons, without names that their captors would recognize, were in movement across the Atlantic, but they were also nowhere at all.”[i] Working through Spillers’s spatial estrangement is important because it allows us to sense the ways that modernity itself produces a broader cleavage between “Man” and place. While Sylvia Wynter dwells most extensively on the production of different genres of the human, embedded in her argument is also a severing of people from place, which results in a discourse of the environmental (background) rather than understanding the depth of connection between living and non-living entities and processes held in proximity.[ii] This is one of the violences that Jacqui Alexander invokes in relation to “archaeologies of dominance,” which we can understand as the intertwining of capitalism and colonial.[iii]  
    As a mode of repair that favors the possibilities of multiplicity and expansion over individuation, I arrive at the body-place in my recent monograph, Between Shadows and Noise, which, I argue, allows us to feel for fuller modes of enfleshment, moving beyond subject-object divisions and the spatial, spiritual, and temporal cleavages that produce “Man.” These dispersals of being occur at multiple scales –“above” and “below” the individual – while acknowledging the impossibility of separating “my” movements from those of my extended kin and spiritual network, each relation producing conditions of possibility, forms of knowledge, as well as constraints and challenges. In this talk I will expand on the politics of the body-place by looking at the work of Ruins of Empire, a recent land sculpture by Kiyan Williams.  

[i] Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,” 72.
[ii] Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom.”
[iii] Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 6.

Amber Jamilla MUSSER is a professor of English and Africana studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. She writes and researches at the intersections of race, sexuality, and aesthetics. In addition to writing art reviews for The Brooklyn Rail, she has published widely in queer studies, black feminism, psychoanalysis, and critical theory. She is the author of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU Press, 2014), Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018), and Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined (Duke University Press, 2024). Her collaborative projects include co-editing Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (NYU Press, 2021) and co-hosting its accompanying podcast Feminist Keywords; special issues of Signs: A Journal of Feminist Theory on “Care and Its Complexities” and ASAP Journal on “Queer Form;” and the series Elements in Feminism and Critical Theory for Cambridge University Press. She was President of ASAP (Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present) from 2022-2023, when she co-chaired ASAP-14: Arts of Fugitivity in Seattle; and she is currently co-chairing ASAP-15: Not a Luxury in New York City in October 2024. She is also co-Editor of Social Text.

Expanding on the account I give of the aesthetic sociality of blackness in Experiments in Exile, I have been studying the way it, or something like it, operates within the context of the political and economic reconstruction of New York City in the 1970s.  My focus has been on the creative social and aesthetic practices through which those targeted for eviction from the new New York – queer hustlers, teenage gang members, and roving picketers, among others, whose deviant or dissident activities cannot be accommodated – remain and sustain one another.  
   Drawing on the research I have been doing, I will discuss the kinds of mutual aid and protection that structure the motley social formations that take shape in the interstices of the city.  Such formations are perhaps the offspring of what Jacob Riis once described as the “queer conglomerate mass of heterogeneous elements” that made up New York’s unruly and uncontained “other half” at the turn of the century.  They are akin to what Maria Lugones envisions as “hangouts” created by and for those who find themselves at odds with “home” or the “home-shelter-street-police station/jail/asylum-cemetery circle.”  Unsettled, and unenclosed, these formations are permeable, fluid, mobile fields composed of elements which themselves have “ill-defined” edges.  No discrete individual subject can be parsed out and privileged in these fields, no individual standpoint or point of view can be maintained.  There are only the difficulties and pleasures of companionship among those who work together to reconstruct the city in their own ways, for their own purposes.   
   Because films and videos have been my most important primary sources, I have also been studying what happens when film and video artists approach these kinds of fields. If film and video artworks are often understood to be determined by the points of view of their “auteurs,” I consider what can and can’t be registered when such points of view are assumed and how both the separations and the relations they seem to establish might be troubled by the aesthetic sociality of these fields.

Laura HARRIS is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies and Art & Public Policy at New York University. She is the author of Experiments in Exile:  C. L. R. James, Hélio Oiticica and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness (Fordham University Press, 2019).  Her writing has also been published in Social Text, Women & Performance, Criticism, The South Atlantic Quarterly, sx salon, The UnderCommons Collective Magazine, and other journals.

We could,  writes  Trinh Thi Minh-ha,  try to  see the blank spaces  in the archive  not  just as  evidence of  repression  but also  as  a source for a different imagination  in service of “a profound determination not to forget”.  Trinh proposes a reparative exercise  which centers archival gaps:  “Whether materially or immaterially manifested  the blank space remains alive with indefinite possibilities.” 
   I will present a  case study of  disappearance in the archive:  Since the  late  1960s,  about 2,300 South Korean children have been placed for adoption in West Germany, out of a total of 200,000 worldwide.  Part of this history of  Third and First World relations,  systemic neglect and imperial humanitarianism  are  inbuilt  blank spaces  in  the paperwork regarding the identities of the (Korean) parents.  On the basis of  archival research,  I  am  looking for ways to  write about this history  without  filling  in the gaps or  leaving  them to oblivion,  but  instead approaching  their “indefinite possibilities”.  In working with archival fragments,  I take note from the many academic and literary writers and artists  for  whom  the problem of the gaps  has  led to a different aesthetic in their own work.  What happens when we  rethink  archival research from its affective impact, “from the perspective of the fever, the acts of those whom it infects”  (Ariella  Azoulay),  when we take  narrative impasses  (Saidiya  Hartman)  and  the  intention to “write until they were real” (Bhanu Kapil)  seriously?  When the goal is not to uncover  hidden  injustices,  forms of  revenge, protection  and  resuscitation  emerge.

Anja Sunhyun MICHAELSEN is a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC Consolidator Grant Project “Tales of the Diasporic Ordinary. Aesthetics, Affects, Archives” at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her  research  focuses on migrant and diasporic  writing and art,  queer and  postcolonial archives, and reparative practices  after Eve Sedgwick.  She is currently  working on  an archive-based  manuscript about the placements of South Korean children with West German families from the 1960s to  the  1980s.

This paper proposes understanding decolonial mourning as an articulation of resistance of necropolitical social reproduction. Though the concept of necropolitical social reproduction might sound contradictory, it helps us to understand the negative dialectic constituting social reproduction. Thus, as we will see, it does not just rely on the production of life but is deeply entrenched in the systemic allowing to die and killing of feminized, gendered, sexualized, disabled, racialized, migrantized, impoverished and abandoned bodies. The politics of mourning, specifically decolonial mourning, as affective labor, I will argue, articulates the contradiction and continuum between life and death. As such, it speaks about necropolitical social reproduction. This argument will develop in four steps. First, I will engage with the analysis of feminicide in the Argentinean movement Ni Una Menos through its politics of mourning and relate it to a theoretical genealogy of Latin American feminist theory. Then I will approach necropolitical social reproduction and contrast it to Gladys Tzul Tzul’s proposal of communal resistance to genocidal and extractivist racial capitalism. Following this argument, I will consider Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s understanding of ontological relationality.

Encarnación GUTIÉRREZ RODRÍGUEZ is a Professor in Sociology with a focus on Culture and Migration at the Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main. Previously to this position, she was Professor in General Sociology at the Justus-Liebig-University Giessen. Moreover, she is a Adjunct Professor in Sociology at the University of Alberta, Canada, and a Visiting Professor at Nelson Mandela University, South Africa. Among her publications is the book Migration, Domestic Work and Affect, published by Routledge (2010). More recently she has published Decolonial Mourning and the Caring Commons. Migration-Coloniality Necropolitics and Conviviality Infrastructure (Anthem 2023), also with Shirley Anne Tate the Palgrave Handbook in Critical Race and Gender and with Rhoda Reddock Decolonial Perspectives on Entangled Inequalities: Europe and the Caribbean as well with Pınar Tuzcu Migrantischer Feminismus in der Deutschen Frauenbewegung, 1985-2000. Her work engages with affective labor, materialities, institutional racism, racial capitalism and the coloniality of migration.

Modern state formation has created, with much fanfare,
populations who claim to be sovereign and free by virtue of their national belonging. Over and over again, this process has also created, which much less fanfare, generally racialized peoples whom it attempts to deny political agency and to treat as effectively non-sovereign. These peoples are exposed, differentially, to unnatural death in its various forms: the sovereign power to take life, the sovereign prerogative to let die, slow violence, social death, etc. Though this logic—the creation of sovereign populations whose political and economic security appears to depend on the inverse creation of non-sovereign peoples—is paradigmatically colonial, it has become even more world-encompassing in recent decades than it was during the colonial era.
   Using the work of legal scholars, political theorists, and anthropologists, this talk offers three ways to think about how textual study has itself been implicated in the creation of sovereign and non-sovereign people, in this not merely colonial but ultimately genocidal dynamic. The conclusion to this talk points toward a critical method that would instead resist this logic. Such a method would no longer simply turn written texts, cultural traditions, and historical periods into the reified objects of scholarly knowledge, into things scholars may claim to know. As we shall see, that transformation is a distinctive feature of colonial modernity.

Siraj AHMED is Professor of English and a member of the Committee on Globalization and Social Change at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York. He is the author of The Stillbirth of Capital: Enlightenment Writing and Colonial India (Stanford University Press, 2012) and The Archaeology of Babel: The Colonial Foundation of the Humanities (Stanford University Press, 2018), which received MLA’s Scaglione Prize for best book in comparative literature. His work has appeared in Critical Inquiry, Representations, MLQ, Cultural Critique, Nineteenth-Century Literature, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere, South Asia, The Postcolonial Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, 2009) and A Companion to Literary Theory (Blackwell, 2018), among other publications. He has held multiple fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and others from the Mellon and the Whiting Foundations, the Huntington and the Clark Libraries, and the University of London Institutes of English and of Commonwealth Studies. He received his B.A. in English and Philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania and his Ph.D. in English & Comparative Literature from Columbia University

Schedule After Autonomy
Conference