[Vwoolf] 4/5 Oct: Online Keynotes Rosi Braidotti and Jessica Berman on Transnational Modernist Women's Writing

[Eret Talviste]

Dear Woolfians,

I’m pleased to present the programme for ‘Borders, Margins, Cartographies:
Transnational Modernist Women’s Writing’, a two-day conference 4-5 October
at the University of Tartu, Estonia, co-organised with Ruth Alison Clemens.
Please drop by if you’re in Estonia.
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://maailmakeeled.ut.ee/en/content/borders-margins-cartographies-transnational-modernist-womens-writing__;!!KGKeukY!1LeFqv2qxJGM3NVdoWDv7D149TZYve_mFkXhkyjfO0P060IOEo91ivyabKxvXfPzeMwTuiVZSHsHJyoBqmHBlYa6FqY$ 

The keynote presentations by Rosi Braidotti and Jessica Berman may be of
interest especially to international members, and you can attend these via
Zoom. Please find the details and Zoom links below - do share with people
in your network, but not publicly.

Rosi Braidotti, Utrecht University
*The Modernist Legacy of the Posthuman Predicament*

Friday 4 October 09:30-11.00 EEST (GMT+3)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://urldefense.com/v3/__Https://ut-ee.zoom.us/j/97884357661?pwd=bJtZMP55RAyFi1uxMrGK9efjVYdcHO.1__;!!KGKeukY!1LeFqv2qxJGM3NVdoWDv7D149TZYve_mFkXhkyjfO0P060IOEo91ivyabKxvXfPzeMwTuiVZSHsHJyoBqmHBdOCvydo$ 
Meeting ID: 978 8435 7661
Passcode: 525670

This lecture explores the modernist legacy of the posthuman convergence,
defined as the interconnected occurrence of technological changes,
environmental devastation and structural social injustices. It outlines
both the points of continuity and the discontinuities between the two
moments and movements of thoughts. On the one hand it argues that the
acceleration of the technological incursions into living bodies and matter,
undoes the dualistic opposition between humans and technological others,
which was central to modernism. On the other hand, it shows that the
vitality of the contemporary technological artefacts is grounded in the
material roots and environmental components that compose them. This results
in the simultaneous strategic re-naturalization of the technological
artifact and the critical de-naturalization of the environmental factors.
The paper outlines these flows of naturecultural interrelations and
explores their implications for bodies, sexuality, Eros and trans-corporeal
relational practices. On all these scores, the legacy of modernism casts a
generative light on the contemporary predicament.

*Bio:* Rosi Braidotti is a feminist Continental philosopher and
Distinguished University Professor Emerita at Utrecht University in the
Netherlands. She holds degrees in philosophy from the ANU and the Sorbonne
and Honorary Degrees from Helsinki (2007) and Linkoping (2013). She is an
Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA) and also
a Member of the Academia Europaea. In 2022 she received the Humboldt
Research Award for life-long contribution to scholarship. Her main
publications include Nomadic Subjects (2011) and Nomadic Theory (2011),
both published by Columbia University Press, and The Posthuman (2013),
Posthuman Knowledge (2019), and Posthuman Feminism (2022), published by
Polity Press. As editor, her publications include The Posthuman Glossary
(2018) and More Posthuman Glossary (2022), both by Bloomsbury Academic. The
life and work of Virginia Woolf has influenced her conception of writing as
a nomadic subject (2014), and her work has been translated in more than 20
languages. Following Virginia Woolf's advice to think about it through our
mothers, Braidotti’s forthcoming memoir Il ricordo di un sogno (Rizzoli,
2024) tells the story of political dissidence, radicalism, and fascism
through transnational and transgenerational family movements of the
twentieth century.

Jessica Berman, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
*Transing Modernism in Argentina*

Saturday 5 October 10:30-12.00 EEST (GMT+3)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://urldefense.com/v3/__Https://ut-ee.zoom.us/j/97381932818?pwd=WUzBw6cKwDuPcDo6Is1BMcpX9kKx2d.1__;!!KGKeukY!1LeFqv2qxJGM3NVdoWDv7D149TZYve_mFkXhkyjfO0P060IOEo91ivyabKxvXfPzeMwTuiVZSHsHJyoBqmHB9jQdhbQ$ 
Meeting ID: 973 8193 2818
Passcode: 041214

This talk argues for a feminist approach to modernism that acknowledges the
multiple ways that texts and authors are situated in the world and the
manner in which texts, by people of all genders, races, ethnicities, and
abilities, engage with what Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean
Moore call the “striated, cross-hatched” space of identity. It deploys a
critical practice I call “transing,” following historian Jen Manion, which
uses transnational, transgender, transmedial, and other trans attitudes to
understand the feminist dimensions of modernism. If, as I have elsewhere
claimed, we recognize modernism to be the variety of aesthetic responses to
the crisis of modernity as it unfolds in multiple locations and guises
around the world, rather than a specific canon of authors or set of formal
devises, then a transing critical practice or perspective allows us to see
how engagement with and mediation of regimes of embodiment and nation are
central to those responses.
In particular, this talk considers gendered embodiment in Argentine
modernism from the 1930’s/40’s, the heyday of early radio. It explores the
challenge posed by a cohort of cross-dressing women tango singers who took
to the airwaves as a means of defying gender expectations. It then turns to
the literary sisters Victoria and Silvina Ocampo, who are at the center of
modernist artistic circles in those same years. Victoria Ocampo is rightly
celebrated as the founder of Sur, the foremost Argentine literary magazine
of its era, an outspoken feminist writer, and a friend of Jorge Luis Borges
and Virginia Woolf. But the writings of her much younger sister, Silvina
Ocampo, only now being recognized as one of the most significant writers of
Argentine modernism, engage with the complexity of embodied gender in even
more profound ways. Reading Silvina Ocampo with a transing perspective
allows us to see not only the transmedial connections between her writing
and the tango-modernism that was on the radio but also the transnational
circuit that allows her, along with her sister, to engage with, translate,
transpose, and extend the feminist modernism of Virginia Woolf. In this
way, I hope to both situate Argentine women writers (and singers) in
transnational relation to Woolf’s work, but also “provincialize” it by
showing how it takes on new shapes and guises when seen from the Global
South.

*Bio:* Jessica Berman, Professor of English, is also Affiliate Professor of
Gender + Women’s Studies and Affiliate Professor of Language, Literacy and
Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Her
teaching and research interests include comparative literature, modernism
from a transnational perspective, literature and culture, and feminist and
literary theory. She also has a special interest in questions of politics
in connection to twentieth- and twenty-first century world literature. Her
book, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics and Transnational Modernism
(2011), examined the connection between ethics and politics in early
twentieth-century writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys,
Mulk Raj Anand, Cornelia Sorabji, Iqbalunnisa Hussain, Max Aub and Meridel
Le Sueur, and argued for an expansive, transnational approach to the
definition of literary modernism. https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.jessicaberman.net/__;!!KGKeukY!1LeFqv2qxJGM3NVdoWDv7D149TZYve_mFkXhkyjfO0P060IOEo91ivyabKxvXfPzeMwTuiVZSHsHJyoBqmHBig942pg$ 

We hope to see you there!
All best wishes,
Eret Talviste
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