MCLC: Reimagining Capital in Postsocialism--cfp

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Jenny Lee <jennyautomatic at gmail.com>
Subject: Reimagining Capital in Postsocialism--cfp
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List members may be interested in this CFP for the forthcoming ACLA
conference at New York University, March 20-23, 2014.  This seminar
will not be restricted to discussion of China.

2014 ACLA Seminar Proposal
Reimagining Capital in Postsocialism

"A strange shadow hovers over the Chinese intelligentsia -- the shadow
of humanism."  In 1983, the philosopher Wang Ruoshui paid curious
homage to the Communist Manifesto in his "Defense of Humanism," cuing
readers to the immanency of reconceiving 'the human' after Mao.  Yet
Wang was neither the first nor the last to envision a capitalist idyll
in its absence.  He pointed to a concern shared throughout the
postsocialist -- arguably non-Western -- elite, a concern which
extended beyond political philosophy to the realm of aesthetics and
emerging modernisms.  We wish to ask: Is the capitalist ideal harbored
by so much of the global East merely the product of imagination?  What
is the relation between the imagined and the 'real' in this case?  And
how does this imaginary relate to historical experiences of socialism
and communism of the global East?  This panel proposes to investigate
the repetitions, reinventions, and resistances in the rebirth of
capital as well as the legacy or debt of revolution that is at stake
within this rebirth.

We invite papers taking a wide range of methodological approaches to
address the aesthetic, theoretical and philosophical prospects of 'the
human' in reimagining capital in postsocialism.  Used here, the
concept of postsocialism is both geographical and topological.  It
raises the specter of socialism while pushing beyond it.  We propose
that 'capital' offers precisely this imagined, possibly imaginary,
beyond; a beyond which must be explored atypically -- that is, from
the outside-in.

Seminar keywords: postsocialism, global east, human,
cultural/revolution, imaginary, rebirth, specter

Seminar Co-organizers: Jennifer Dorothy Lee (NYU), Jun Xie (NYU)

Please feel free to contact Jenny at jennyautomatic at gmail.com with any
questions.


ACLA conference website: http://acla.org/acla2014/
Submit a proposal: http://acla.org/acla2014/propose-a-paper/
The deadline for paper proposals has been extended to: 11/15
midnight, Pacific Standard Time.