MLG-ICS 2023: SURPLUS // STRUGGLE
UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS BOSTON
JUNE 12-16
All texts for reading groups, including a full copy of Capital, Volume I, are available here.
MONDAY, JUNE 12
8:30-9am: Coffee & Bagels
9am-10:30am: Surplus and Struggle in Marx’s Capital
Frederick Doyle, “‘Responsible for Relations whose Creature he Remains’: Art, Science, and the Commodity”
Thomas Carmichael, “Louis Althusser and Primitive Accumulation: ‘the real heart of Capital’
10:30-10:45am: Break
10:45-12:15pm: Surplus & Novel Form
Benjamin Crais, “‘Cloak and dagger and civil rights’: Espionage and Surplus Rebellion in The Spook Who Sat by the Door”
Farhana Islam, “Decolonization Through Proletariat Leisure: Flâneur, Ancharchonity, and Anticolonialism in Ousmane Sembène’s God’s Bits of Wood”
Kenneth Sunnerberg, “The Illusion of Freedom: or The Realism of Capitalist Social Relations in Percival Everett's Wounded”
12:15-1:30pm: Lunch
1:30-3pm: Value Theory for Humanists
Chris Nealon, “Alienation or Devaluation?”
Seb Boersma, “C.L.R. James’s Affect Theory”
Colleen Lye, “A Value Theory of the 60s ‘Cultural Turn’”
Jake Orbison, “Subsumption and Class Consciousness in the U.S. Labor Movement Today:
3-3:15pm: Break
3:15-4:45pm: Poets Reading Capital
Geordie Miller, “When You Hear People Say ‘Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free people…’”
Anthony O’Brien, “Burnt Capital, Fat Capital, Dead Capital, Surplus Capital, Zero Capital”
Ben Olguín, “From Fort Knox, Kentucky to Havana Cuba: Marx, Poetry and Concientización in the Barrio”
Zara Richter and Evan Reynolds, “Overcapacity and the crisis of disability: Labor past and future in Zukofsky and Gibson”
4:45-5pm: Break
5-6:15pm: Reading Group: Capital Volume I, CH. 1
Bret Benjamin, Paul Stasi, & Amie Zimmerman
TUESDAY, JUNE 13
8:30-9am: Coffee & Bagels
9am-10:30am: Crisis, Value Theory, and Critique
Will Berrington, “Robert Brenner’s ‘Long Downturn’ Meets Marxist Theories of Crisis”
Fintan Calpin, “‘Modest Magna Carta’: Value Theory & Class Struggle”
Fred Carter, “Poetry & Energy After 1973: An Aesthetics of Exhaustion”
Sean O’Brien, “Spectres of Superfluity: Precarity as Representational Problem”
10:30-10:45am: Break
10:45-12:15pm: Reading Group: Capital, Volume I, CH. 2–3
Bev Best, Chelsey Ancliffe, Charlie Bond, Fintan Calpin, & Carlos Velasqez
12:15-1:30pm: Lunch
1:30-3pm: Land, Law, and the Extraction of Surplus
Rob Jackson, “‘Contradictory Aspirations’: Settler Colonial Treaties and the Content of Form”
Nessie Nankivell, “Extractive Consultation and Framing Indigeneity: A Value-Theoretical Analysis”
Noah Hansen, “‘Waste Products of the System’: Sylvia Wynter on Plantation Society, Surplus, and Anti-Colonial Form”
Benjamin Stumpf, “Behind Bars in the Belly of the Beast: Red Dragon’s Revolutionary Internationalism”
3-3:15pm: Break
3:15-4:45pm: Du Bois, Reconstruction, and Struggles to Represent the US South
Rebecca Schein, “Reflections on Historical Analogizing and the Revival of Black Reconstruction”
Will Weihe, “Rethinking Revolution through Abolitionism: Marx, German Communist Emigres, and Unfree Black Labor in the Civil War”
Jamison Murphy, “Surplus Humanity and Literature of the Crisis of Sharecropping”
4:45-5pm: Break
5-6:15pm: Roundtable: Black Reconstruction
Kamika Bennett, Kristin Bergen, Curtis Browne, Kanishka Chowdhury, and Reuben Kadushin
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 14
8:30-9am: Coffee & Bagels
9am-10:30am: The Labor of Speculative Worlds
Max Haiven, "Worker-as-Futurist: Writing speculative fiction with Amazon workers"
Rafael Lubner, "After the Flood: Urban Form, Race and Surplus Population in Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring and Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140"
Mark Soderstom, “Matter and Motherhood: Feminist Speculative Fiction and the Politics of Social Reproduction.”
Carlos Varón González, “Work Hard, Play Hard: Video Games and the Boundaries of Labor”
10:30-10:45am: Break
10:45-12:15pm: Reading Group: Capital, Volume 1, CH. 7, 8; 14 sections 2 & 3; 15 sections 1 & 4; 26-33
Brent Bellamy, Sumaria Butt, Susan Comfort, and John Maerhofer
12:15-1:30pm: Lunch
1:30-3pm: The New Anti-Communism
Jennifer Wager, “Anti-Communism in the academy, Post WWII and current iterations: From DuBois to CUNY”
Soili Smith, “Case study: The Canadian government’s liberal ‘Heritage Minutes’ as a vehicle for anti-communist attacks on the Wet’suwet’en First Nation”
Pat Keeton, “Attacks on Critical Race Theory and liberal higher education policies as example of the new anti-communism”
3-3:15pm: Break
3:15-4:45pm: Richard Wright, Surplus, & Struggle
Donald Brown, “A Black Boy’s Struggle with Black Women: Richard Wright’s Lost Confessions of Surviving Abuse”
Joseph G. Ramsey, “Stripping Surplus of Shame: Richard Wright’s reflections on the contradictory possibilities of the ‘idle ones’”
A. Shahid Stover, “Richard Wright and the Underground of Modernity”
Kazembe Balagun, “The Stretch Marks of History: Marxism at either sides of Hunger in Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and Algeria Unveiled”
4:45-5pm: Break
5-6:15pm: Roundtable: Stuart Hall & Policing the Crisis
Shama Rangwala, W. Oliver Baker, and Nashwa Khan
THURSDAY, JUNE 15
8:30-9am: Coffee & Bagels
9am-10:30am: Struggles Over Spaces: Place, Labor, and Location
Kenyon Cavender, “Human Landscapes of Industrial Michigan”
Joel Woller, “Surplus, Philanthropy and Socialism in Progressive Era U.S. Literature and Culture”
Ryan Brooks, “Heartland PMC: Class Conflict and Aesthetic Form in Two ‘Popular Diagnostics about What’s the Matter with Kansas’”
10:30-10:45am: Break
10:45-12:15pm: Reading Group: Capital, Volume I, CH. 25
Ericka Beckman, Tavid Mulder, Jaime González, Pavel Andrade, Josue Chávez, & Lenin Lozano
12:15-1:30pm: Lunch
1:30-3pm: Gender & Social Reproduction
Viola Bao, “Transnational Adoption and Asian Family Abolition”
Steve Hajiyianni, “Golden Spindles: Automation and Gendered Abjection in the Chapter on Machinery”
Savannah Whaley, Surplus and Sex Worker Art: Feminisation, the Informal Wage, and Demands for Communal Luxury
Genevieve Wilson, “Stewards Serving Surplus: Rethinking Social Reproductive Labour through Unions”
3-3:15pm: Break
3:15-4:45pm: The Durability of Student Debt
Jeffrey J. Williams, “Pay-to-Play Degrees”
Mark James, “Post-Debt”
Sam Samore, “High School Drop Outs: From Juvenile Delinquents to the Lumpenproletariat”
4:45-5pm: Break
5-6:15pm: Roundtable: “Funding, Discipline, Governance: Considering the University Today”
Sarah D'Adamo, Shannan Hayes, Rithika Ramamturthy, & Dennis M. Hogan
FRIDAY, JUNE 16
8:30-9am: Coffee & Bagels
9am-10:45am: Excesses of the Novel Form
Alya Ansari, “In Excess of the Text: The Production of “Sense” and the Industrial Novel”
Paresh Chandra, “An Excess of Absence: Rangbhoomi and Mrs. Dalloway”
Jap-Nanak Makkar, “Enigma Theory: History and Form in Critique”
Marie Sanazaro, “Overreactions: What the Chartist crowd expressed in the English social novel”
Carson Welch, “No Accident: Lukács’ Sentences and the Narratives of Marxist Criticism”
10:45-11:00am: Break
11:00-12:15pm: Reading Group: Roberto Schwarz & Dialectical Criticism:
Thomas Waller, Oded Nir, and Neil Larsen
12:15-1:30pm: Lunch & Business Meeting
1:30-3pm: Periphery & Core: Art & Struggle
Alessandro Fornazzari, “Primitive Accumulation, Formal Subsumption, and the Unevenness of Capitalist Temporality”
Luiz Renato Martins, “Objective form, a territory of the critical struggle”
3-3:15pm: Break
3:15-4:45pm: Defining the Lines of Struggle
Miyoma Katayama, “The Surplus of Racialized Affect and Black Asian Solidarity”
Casey Caudwell, “Surplus Negativity: Death of the Proletarian Poet”
Charlie Bond, “Logic of Gender or Logic of Cisness: Normativity and the Commodity Fetish”
4:45-5pm: Break
5-6:15pm: Stealing Back Surplus? Anti-Work, Labor, Leisure
Martin Aagaard Jensen, “Andy Warhol’s Labor Journal”
Kevin King, “Karl Marx and Literary Capitalism’s Reserve Army of Writers”
Ben Papsun, “The Esoteric Du Bois: Reading W.E.B. Du Bois Against Work”
Clinton Williamson, “‘Because the People Here Are Always on Strike’: Stealing Time in the Factory Memoirs of Noel Ignatiev and David Ranney”
7:30pm: BBQ
At the Blarney Stone, 1505 Dorchester Avenue