CFP: Melancholic States
Posted on | August 11, 2006 |
MELANCHOLIC STATES
Institute for Women’s Studies, Lancaster University
27-29 September 2007
The concept of melancholia has assumed widespread and varied currency across numerous fields. Sometimes used to refer to a state of mind or to an affective state; sometimes used to speak of racialised, gendered, or queer subjectivity; other times used as a tool of analysis of political states or as a mobilising tool to convene constituencies of solidarity; yet other times, melancholia founds collective memory and associated artefactual practices, or describes the conditions of professional practice organised around a public service ethic. Positioned as a condition to be claimed, transcended, or negotiated, ‘melancholic states’ seemingly speaks to the contemporary zeitgeist - the post/neo-colonial era.
The provenance of the concept of melancholia in psychoanalysis and the proliferation of its use elsewhere, offer grounds for revisiting the potential and limits of the concept - this conference aims to explore the ways in which the idea of ‘melancholic states’ speaks to the complexity of the present.
We encourage papers from various inter-disciplinary backgrounds namely women studies, postcolonial, critical race, critical psychology, politics, international relations, sociology, anthropology, geography, art and design, queer studies, that address, among others, the following questions:
* what is the relationship between melancholia and the turn to questions of affect, emotion, and feeling within the social sciences and humanities?
* what new analytical avenues are potentially opened up or closed down by the mobilisation or deployment of the concept of melancholia?
* is its analytical traction geographically, temporally, and politically limited and limiting?
* is melancholia imbricated in the current preoccupation with borders and border identities, within academic debates and politics rhetorics?
* does melancholia provide the grounds for a critical and theoretically informed response to a political present increasingly organised around the axis of democracy/terror?
* in what ways might it offer the grounds for the formation of solidarities and constituencies of belonging ‘locally’ and/or transnationally, in which feeling is identified as a legitimate and central axis?
* what might the limitations of such solidarities be, especially in a context in which it is increasingly difficult to articulate clear political identities in the current conjunction of global/national political agendas?
* can melancholic states further or renew an understanding of identifications involved in responses to international calls for aid?
* to what extent is melancholia and/or hope the condition motivating NGO’s in their work on poverty and/or the environment?
* are the subjectivities of public sector professionals increasingly characterised by melancholia in the context of the demise of the public service ethic?
* in what ways is collective memory organised around melancholia and how might this impact on the selection, design and production of objects and practices of remembrance?
* is a melancholic state a productive site for artistic practices that interrogate forms of subjection and violence?
* are melancholic states and various forms of spiritual practice mutually imbricated or mutually exclusive?
* can it help grasp the complexities of historical and contemporary subjectivities as produced and lived at the intersection of numerous modalities of difference?
* to what extent are melancholic subjects produced by competing social imaginaries, and how are these played out in everyday life?
* is melancholia the condition of the desiring subject of the 21st century?
Abstracts of no more than 500 words to be submitted by 23 APRIL 2007. Please send to: Gail Lewis g.a.lewis@lancaster.ac.uk; or Nayanika Mookherjee n.mookherjee@lancaster.ac.uk
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