Events

International Conferences

The Subaltern & The Popular Conference

Faculty Workshop

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The Subaltern-Popular Workshop 3: November 3-5, 2007

Past Faculty Workshops

The Subaltern-Popular Faculty Workshop 2:

Space, State, and Statelessness

University of California, Santa Barbara
November 4-6, 2006

Venue: Garden Room, Upham Hotel, Santa Barbara

1404 De la Vina Street at Sola Street

Sponsored by the UC Office of the President, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor, UCSB

Workshop Schedule

Plenary Questions

The November 2006 Subaltern-Popular faculty workshop proposes to address the locational problem of subalternity. This is a continuation of the conversation among the group in the last two years, and also prompted by the political developments in the Middle-East this year.

One of the problems of the literature on subalternity is the indifference to the location/mobility of subaltern groups - both their physical location, and
cultural and political proximity to other communities. This is, at least, in
some measure responsible for the difficulties of thinking beyond the logic of
the state, and the state-capital-territory nexus. Unless the spatial geography
of subalternity is taken into consideration we risk missing out on crucial
conditions of access, movement, and territory that shape political identities.
These are some general questions we plan to address:

1. What is gained from retaining the notions of nation and state in imagining the political?
2. Can we imagine a non-statist form of political community? What would such a formation mean in terms of getting entry into an international political community? How would the subaltern and the popular relate to such non-statist formation?
3. What are the forms of spatial practice that reside beyond the domain of the state? Can we formulate a spatial vocabulary that describes such alternative spatial practices?

The Subaltern-Popular Faculty Workshop 1
May 14-15, 2006
Theme: “The Body”
Workshop Schedule

If the subaltern and the popular are two approaches to the social, the goal of this faculty workshop is to formulate ways of thinking the “body” at the conjunction of these terms.  Broadly speaking, issues may include sexuality, labor, law, representation, media, and social justice.

These are the opening questions for our discussion:

1. Subalternity is bodily marked -- encoded in gestures, dress-codes,
   skin-color, sexual identity, bodily proxemics. and labor.  If the body is also a mnemonic device to perpetuate cultural and political memory, how resilient are such markings?
2. What is the role of different regimes of description in encoding the body of the "citizen-subject," the "subaltern," the "damnés", and the "people?" When do these reach the limits of representation (in the sense of both depiction and political participation)?
3. If subaltern resistance is performative (not just locutory and/or amenable to textual reading), how does the body "figure" in such resistance?
4. How is the body "managed" in the switch/slide from subaltern to popular? Do we need to come up with a new framework for thinking about the body to understand this switch/slide?
5. "Where" does the subaltern body appear, and where is it made to
   disappear? How might we deploy social theory to demarcate the domains of the popular (popular media, education, justice, political action)?
6. What idioms of the disenfranchised subject's body can be found in
   popular culture? How might such idiom be translated in scholarship to address questions of social justice?