ALTERNATIVE POLITICAL IMAGINARIES
The 2008-09 John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Seminar
Co-Convened by Michael Hardt and Robyn Wiegman
Project Description
The humanities have come to be characterized in recent decades by an overarching concern for politics, from the politics of cultural practices and knowledge production to political issues more traditionally conceived, such as state power, social movements, public policy, and law. As a result, almost all humanities scholarship is now considered political in one sense or another, whether it names its political intention or not. And yet, this decisive political turn in the humanities has not been accompanied by a thorough and nuanced investigation of the meaning and nature of politics. What precisely constitutes the political for the humanities and how is it situated in relation to politics more broadly conceived?
The seminar will explore the ways in which both people and things—ideas, documents, discourses, disciplines, theories, movements—turn toward and are transformed by their relation to the question of politics and to the political as a domain of social acts and ideals. We are interested specifically in the political imaginaries from the distant past to the contemporary present that reflect the ways people have sought to remake their everyday worlds and envision alternatives to the current governmental orders, cultural conventions, and identifications, along with the ideals of sociality and collectivity that attend them. Whether expressed through utopian social experiments, narrative discourse, artistic practice, democratic and socialist revolutionary processes, or the many grassroots initiatives that have formed social movements around the globe, alternative political imaginaries have always been and continue to be vital to historical transformation.
Although our investigation of alternative political imaginaries will be wide ranging, we have a specific investment in using this topic to rethink what we see as the predominant way in which humanities research approaches politics today, namely critique: the critique of commodity culture, representational practices, colonial thought, patriarchal structures, tyrannical regimes, racial hierarchies, sexual normativities, and so forth. Such critical practices generally seek to unmask domination and speak truth to power with the implicit belief that doing so will undermine and topple its control. When critical practices fail to overthrow the structures of domination, however, and when power unmasked nonetheless maintains its force, critique often begets melancholy and cynicism, two affects that we find widespread in the humanities. We sense, however, that a search is already underway within the humanities for alternative political imaginaries that will enable producing not just different affects but different itineraries for political scholarship and action.
Co-conveners
Michael Hardt, Professor, Literature
Robyn Wiegman, Professor, Women's Studies & Literature
Duke Arts and Sciences Faculty Fellows
Karla Holloway, Arts and Science Professor of English
Guo-Juin Hong, Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature and Culture
Ralph Litzinger, Associate Professor, Cultural Anthropology
Ellen McLarney, Assistant Professor, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
Gunther Peck, Fred W. Shaffer Associate Professor of History & Public Policy
Kathi Weeks, Associate Professor, Women's Studies
Duke Professional School Faculty Fellow
Douglas Campbell, Assistant Professor of New Testament, Divinity School
UNC-Chapel Hill Institute for the Arts & Humanities (IAH) Exchange Fellow
Gregory Flaxman, Assistant Professor, English and Comparative Literature
Duke Library Fellow
Holly Ackerman, PhD, Librarian for Latin America and Iberia, Duke University Libraries
Postdoctoral Fellows
Anna Curcio, Sociology and Political Science, University of Calabria, Italy
Ceren Özselçuk, Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Graduate Fellows
Kartina Amin, Romance Studies
Alvaro Reyes, Literature
Serhat Uyurkulak, Literature