MLG-ICS 2022: TRANSITION
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
JUNE 13-17
All events will take place in the Hall of Flags, Houston Hall
MONDAY, JUNE 13
8:30-9am: Coffee & Bagels
9am-10:30am: “Racial Capitalism, Anti-colonialism, and Aesthetics” Panel
MODERATOR: SEB BOERSMA
Martin Aagard Jensen, “Literary Genre and Racial Capitalism”
Eric Vázquez, “Roberto Lovato’s Unforgetting as Historiography of Botched Revolution Transition”
Viola Bao, “Black Experimentalism: The Black Arts Movement and the Cultural Revolution of the 60s”
Benjamin Wilson, “Decolonization as Linguistic Transition: The English Language Novels of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o”
10:30-10:45am: Break
10:45-12:15pm: “The Working Dead: Capitalism, Mortality, and their Discontents” Panel
Moderator: Devin William Daniels
James Fitzgerald, “Soul-Starvation and Living Death: The Political Economy of Health in Harding Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills”
Justin Allen, “The Power to Make Live: Benjamin Bratton’s ‘Revenge of the Real’ and Marxism after COVID-19”
12:15-1:30pm: Lunch
1:30-3pm: “sexual difference and Trans Moral Panic” Panel
Moderator: Josue chavez
Amy De’Ath, “Sex and Social Form”
Kay Gabriel, “Trans Moral Panics and the War of Position”
Emma Heaney, “The Race and Class Politics of Cisness in the Twentieth Century”
Max Fox, “sexual difference and Sexual Hegemony”
3-3:15pm: Break
3:15-4:45pm: “Marxist dependency theory: dialectics of dependency” Reading Group
Led by tavid mulder, ericka beckman, and pavel andrade
REQUIRED READINg:
Ruy Mauro Marini, Dialectics of Dependency
suggested READINgs:
Jaime Osorio, “Dialectics, Superexploitation, and Dependency: Notes on the Dialectics of Dependency”
Adrián Sotelo Valencia, The Future of Work: Super-Exploitation and Social Precariousness in the 21st Century (Chapter 4: Surplus-Value and the Super-Exploitation of Labour)
4:45-5pm: Break
5-6:15pm: Michael Denning, “Tax Forms”
TUESDAY, JUNE 14
8:30-9am: Coffee & Bagels
9-10:30am: “Ecology, Land, and the Commons” Panel
Moderator: Alex Millen
Ethan Plaue, “By Means Other Than Life: Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Economies of Life”
Elena Gomez, “Networks in Marxist Ecopoetics”
Marcia Klotz, “Future Fictions and Fictional Futures: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Climate Utopianism”
10:30-10:45am: Break
10:45am-12:15pm: “Lukács and Aesthetics” Reading Group
Led by Nicholas Brown, Davis Smith-Brecheisen, and Emilio Sauri
REQUIRED READINGS:
Lukács, “On Schiller’s Aesthetics”
SUGGESTED READINGS:
Lukacs, “Goethe and His Age”
Lukacs, “Young Hegel,” part III
Hegel, Selections from Aesthetics
12:15-1:30pm: Lunch
1:30-3pm: “Ambivalence and Subsumption: The Dialectic Doublings of Production and Reproduction” Panel
Moderator: Anna Einarsdottir
Pedro Hurtado, “Narratives of Modernization: Vanishing Mediators in Borges, Carpentier, and García Márquez”
Katryn Evinson, “Is There Such a Thing as a Sense-Producing Strike? A Study on Artstrike – Huelga de arte (2000-01) and the Ambiguity of Artistic Labor”
Carlos Varón González, “The Carcass of the Leopard: Marxism and Real Subsumption after the Spanish Transition”
3-3:15pm: Break
3:15-4:45pm: “Periodization, Marxism, Colonialism” Panel
Moderator: Josh Robinson
Oded Nir, “Theorizing the Renewal of Historicity”
Matt Ruben, “Everything and Nothing: Trying to Make Dialectical and Materialist Sense of David Graeber's and David Wengrow's the Dawn of Everything”
Alys Moody, “Hunger in the Decolonial Transition”
4:45-5pm: Break
5-6:15pm: Sophie Lewis, “Antiwork Anthrogenesis: Gestators Against Capitalist Pregnancy”
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 15
8:30-9am: Coffee & Bagels
9-10:30am: “The Poetics of Transition” Panel
Moderator: Michael Martin Shea
Sayan Bhattacharya, “Temporal Transitions in Bishnu Dey’s 1947 and 1953 ‘Cassandra’ Poems”
Fintan Calpin, “Capital’s Arrhythmia: Contemporary Lyric and the Critical Theory of Society”
Erich Von Klosst-Dohna, “Understanding Not Understanding: Elegy, Trauma, and Politics in Susan Howe’s That This”
Tobias Huttner, “The Love Elegy and the Land Question: The Poetics of Transition in June Jordan’s 1970s Poetry”
10:30-10:45am: Break
10:45am-12:15pm: “Writing Transition” Panel
Moderator: Oded Nir
Jap-Nanak Makkar, “Singularity and ‘Language’: Coetzee’s Novels of the 1980s”
Thomas Laughlin, “The City in the Age of Revolution: Engels’ Topographoria”
Alya Ansari, “Inverted Realities: Representation and the Value Form”
Liam Kruger, “The World-Class and the Tragicomic: Triomf, Johannesburg, 1994”
12:15-1:30pm: Lunch
1:30-3pm: “Shifting Black Red Radical Horizons: Charting Transitions on the mid-20th Century African American Left” Panel
Moderator: Joseph G. Ramsey
Joseph G. Ramsey (moderator and panelist), “Beyond Utopian Skylines: Richard Wright and the Contradictions of Oppressed Subjectivity”
Jacob Sloan, “Lutie Johnson, Racist Naturalist? Ann Petry, Realist Novelist: Rereading The Street”
Juan J. Rodriguez Barrera, “From the Sublime to the Grotesque: Red Langston Reconsidered”
Konstantina Karageorgos, “The Looking Back Mode; Wright, Baldwin, and the Politics of the Post-Ferguson Conjuncture”
3-3:15pm: Break
3:15-4:45pm: “‘Periodization Without Transition’: Reading Transition in Benjamin and Adorno” Reading Group
Led by Matthew Gannon, Ed Graham, and Josh Robinson
REQUIRED READINGS:
Theodor W. Adorno, “Progress”
Adorno, “Detemporalization of Time”; “Dialectics Cut Short by Hegel”; “Nihilism” from Negative Dialectics
SUGGESTED READINGS:
Adorno “Parataxis: On Holderlin’s Late Poetry”, “On Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop: A Lecture”
Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”; “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire”;
Steven Helmling, “Constellation and Critique: Adorno’s Constellation, Benjamin’s Dialectical Image”
Jewel Spears Brooker, T. S. Eliot's Dialectical Imagination
Fredric Jameson, The Benjamin Files
4:45-5pm: Break
5-6:15pm: Andrew B. Liu, “The 'Capitalist Epoch' in the Rest of the World: Asia, History, and Levels of Abstraction”
THURSDAY, JUNE 16
8:30-9am: Coffee & Bagels
9am-10:30am: “Peripheral Realisms/Modernisms” Panel
Moderator: Jap-Nanak Makkar
Anna Björk Einarsdottir, “Exit Stage Left: Radical Transitions and Cold War Modernism/Realism”
Lenin Lozano, “Realism and Myth: Capitalist Transition in José María Arguedas’ Todas las sangres
Christopher Geary, “Abstraction in Transition: Peripheral Realism in Early Anglo-Irish Fiction”
10:30-10:45am: Break
10:45am-12:15pm: “race and capitalism” Reading Group
Led by Sarika Chandra and Leerom Medovoi
REQUIRED READINGS:
Nancy Fraser, “Expropriation and Exploitation in Racialized Capitalism: A Reply to Michael Dawson”
Robert Nichols, Theft is Property!: Dispossession and Critical Theory (“Chapter 2: Marx after the Feast”)
Charisse Burden-Stelley, “Modern U.S. Racial Capitalism”
Hylton White, “How is Capitalism Racial? Fanon, Critical Theory, and the Fetish of Antiblackness”
12:15-1:30pm: Lunch
1:30-3:00pm: “The Origins of Capitalist Development: Readings in the Transition Debates” Reading Group
Led by Paul Stasi, Bret Benjamin, Amie Zimmerman, Pooya Jamaly, and Farhana Islam
REQUIRED READINGS:
Robert Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development”
SUGGESTED READINGS:
Utsa Patnaik, Agrarian Relations and Accumulation: The ‘Mode of Production’ Debate in India
Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System”
3:00-3:15pm: Break
3:15-4:45pm: “Marx and Transition” Panel
Moderator: Pavel Andrade
Bev Best, “Value and Slavery”
Carlos Velásquez, “Marx’s Utopian Impulse: The Importance of the Negative”
Carl Martin, “Vandana Singh’s Epistemological Break”
Mike Opal, “Trade, Secret: Measure for Measure and the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism”
4:45-5:00pm: Break
5:00-6:30pm: “The Long Downturn Reconsidered” Roundtable
Moderated by Devin William Daniels and Michael Martin Shea
Participants: Sarah Brouillette, matthew ellis, Colleen Lye, Emilio Sauri, and Anna Zalokostas
FRIDAY, JUNE 17
8:30-9am: Coffee & Bagels
9-10:30am: “Deindustrialization, Stagnation, and Aesthetics” Panel
Moderator: Sarah Brouillette
Sean O’Brien, “After Growth: Secular Stagnation and the Work of Genre”
Benjamin Crais, “Time and Metal: Rachel Kushner’s Historical Novel of Deindustrialization”
Melissa Macero, “Putting the Grave in the Graveyard Shift: Proletarian Horror Literature”
Josue Chavez, “Disavowal in Transit”
10:30-10:45am: Break
10:45am-12:15pm: “dialectics of Transition” Panel
Moderator: bret benjamin
Kanishka Chowdhury “Transitions: The State, Abolition, and the Realm of Freedom”
Barbara Foley “Back and Forth Between Liberalism and Fascism: Capitalism and the Dialectics of Transition”
Kamika Bennett (respondent)
Grover Furr, “The Fraud of the ‘Testament of Lenin’”
12:15-1:30pm: Lunch
1:30-3pm: “Transition to Fascism” Reading Group
Led by Susan Comfort, Pat Keeton, John Maerhofer, and Anthony O’Brien
REQUIRED READINGS:
R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution (1934): Chapter XII, pp. 290-309.
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950): The U.S. Anti-Fascism Reader, pp. 193-201.
Andreas Malm, “Towards Fossil Fascism?” (2021): White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism, pp. 223-253.
Kali Akuno, “Some Thoughts on What Can be Done to Withstand the Neo-Confederate, Neo-Fascist Conquest of Power” (2022), 10 pp.
SUGGESTED READINGS:
Clara Zetkin, Comintern Resolution on Fascism (1923), 4 pp.
Georgi Dimitrov, The United Front: The Struggle against Fascism and War (1938): pp. 19-27, 77-88.
Black Panther Party, “Call for a United front against Fascism” (1969), 2 pp.