MLG-ICS 2019: Intelligent Idealisms
University of Illinois Chicago
June 21 - 26, 2019
Friday, June 21st
8:30 - 9 am: Coffee & Bagels
9 - 10:15 am: Althusser Panel
Alexander Gorman, “Aleatory Materialism: A Philosophy for Marxism?”
Thomas Carmichael, “‘Déviation-rencontre-prise’: Althusser, Struggle, and the Genealogy of Aleatory Materialism”
Evan Buswell, “Epistemic Justice: Towards an Understanding of Nonindexical Truth Content”
10:15 - 10:30 am: Break
10:30 am - 12 pm: New Solidarities, ‘No Borders!’ And the Dream of a New International Roundtable
Pat Keeton, “Mass media megaphone vs. The material reality and revolutionary potential of international border solidarity”
Tony O’Brien, “Two governments, one system; Many countries, one movement”
Jorge Mujica, “Labor and immigration solidarity: Strike the maquiladoras”
Stuart Davis, “Border Imperialism: A new frame for linking activists abroad with those in the U.S”
12 - 1:30 pm: Lunch
1:30 - 3 pm: Reading Group: Social Reproduction Then and Now
Led by Jaime Acosta Gonzalez, Brendan Higgins, and Shannan Lee Hayes
Required Texts:
Melinda Cooper, “The Moral Crisis of Inflation: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and the Demise of theFamily Wage,” from Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism
Nancy Fraser, “Crisis of Care? On the Social-Reproductive Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism”
Michel Feher, “Self-Appreciation; or, The Aspirations of Human Capital”
Karl Marx, “The Buying and Selling of Labour Power,” from Capital Vol. 1.
Optional Texts:
Kathi Weeks, “Working Demands: From Wages for Housework to Basic Income” from The Problem with Work
3 - 3:15 pm: Break
3:15 - 4:45 pm: Cultural Studies and Marxism Roundtable
Participants: Jaafar Aksikas, Sean Andrews, Paul Smith, and Preston Stone
4:45 - 5 pm: Break
5 - 6:15 pm: Todd Cronan, “Relentlessness: Eisenstein’s Modernism”
Saturday, June 22nd
8:30 - 9 am: Coffee & Bagels
9 - 10:15 am: History Panel
Grover Furr, “The Definitive Bankruptcy of Anti-Stalinism”
Anthony Dawahare, "Tillie Olsen & the Dialectical Philosophy of Proletarian Literature"
Lindsey Macdonald, “On the National Question: Revisiting Lenin and Luxemburg in the Age of Trump”
10:15 - 10:30 am: Break
10:30 am - 12 pm: Reading Group: Marx, Hegel, Lenin (Location: TBD)
Led by: Bret Benjamin, Steven Delmagori, Pooya Jamaly, Ashley Manning, Jessica Manry, Samantha Rider, Paul Stasi, and Sepideh Yasrebi
Required Texts:
Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism selections 19-39, 98-107, 122-131,138-143,153-169
Marx, Critique of Hegel's Dialectic from the 1844 manuscripts
Lenin, Notebooks on Hegel
Recommended Text:
Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism selection 250-268
12 - 1:30 pm: Lunch
1:30 - 3 pm: Literature Panel
Joe Ramsey, “Richard Wright, Bigger Thomas, and the Problem of Revolutionary Belief”
Noah Hansen, Exorcising the “ ‘Spectres of 1919’?: ‘If We Must Die’ and New Negro Politics from WWI to WWII”
Chris Carpenter, “Securitizing Realism: John Lanchester’s Capital and the relations of risk”
Garrett Waugh, “The Presence of Narrative as Protest: Agnes Grey’s Rebellion Against Reification”
3 - 3:15 pm: Break
3:15 - 4:45 pm: Realism Plenary
Participants: Davis Smith-Brechesien, Ericka Beckman, Nicholas Brown, Anna Kornbluh, and Thomas Laughlin
4:45 - 5 pm: Break
5 - 6:30 pm: Panel on the Work of Kevin Floyd
Participants: Rosemary Hennessey, Neil Larsen, and Jen Phillis
7 - 11 pm: Gathering at Dugan’s on Halstead
Sunday, June 23rd
8:30 - 9 am: Coffee & Bagels
9 - 10:30 am: Postone and Value Theory Panel
Pauline Fu, “Notes Toward a Postcapitalist Lifeworld, I”
Ross Hernández, “Moishe Postone’s Conception of Modern Antisemitism and Leyb Rochman’s The Pit and the Trap”
Neil Larsen, “‘Race’ as Specific to the Commodity Fetish?: Possible Implications of Moishe Postone’s Theory of Anti-Semitism for a Critical Race Theory”
Bev Best, "Philosophizing Begins at Home": Social Reproduction, Value and Utopia”
10:30 - 10:45 am: Break
10:45 am - 11:45 pm: Marx Panel
Ariane Fischer, “On The German Ideology”
Kyle Baasch, “Rending the Mystical Nebelschleier: Semblance and Substance in Capital”
11:45 am - 1:15 pm: Lunch
1:15 - 2:45 pm: Reading Group: The Dialectic of Literary Form and Social Process: Roberto Schwarz
Led by Emilio Sauri, Ericka Beckman, and Oded Nir
Required Texts:
Roberto Schwarz, “Brecht’s Relevance—Highs and Lows”
Roberto Schwarz, “Misplaced Ideas: Literature and Society in Late-Nineteenth-Century Brazil”
Roberto Schwarz, “Objective Form: Reflections on the Dialectic of Roguery”
Recommended Texts:
Antonio Candido, “Dialectic of Malandroism”
Maria Elisa Cevasco, “Two Girls and a Master: The Potency of Cultural Criticism”
Neil Larsen, “Roberto Schwarz: A Quiet (Brazilian) Revolution in Critical Theory”
2:45 - 3 pm: Break
3 - 4:30 pm: Plenary
Fabio Durão, "A spatial curse: Carolina Maria de Jesus and the favela"
Sharae Deckard, “‘Other hurricane happening’: The Ecology of Revolution and World Literature”
4:30 - 4:45 pm: Break
4:45 - 6 pm: Elise Archias, "Melvin Edwards Between Culture and Art”
Monday, June 24th
8:30 - 9 am: Coffee & Bagels
9 - 10:30 am: The Rightward Movement of Leftist Discourses: Rematerializing the Academy Panel
Juan Rodriguez, "The Anti-Marxist Paradigm in American Studies"
Jason Myers, "Beyond the Beyond of Critical University Studies: a Materialist Critique of the Undercommons"
Gregory Meyersen, TBA
Richard Simpson, “Urbanization, Enclave, and Counter-Hegemony”
10:30 - 10:45 am: Break
10:45 am - 12:15 pm: Reading Group: New Old Materialisms and Literary Criticism
Led by: Meghan Gorman-DaRif and Anne Stewart
Required Texts:
David Alworth, “The Site of the Social” from Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form
Harry Garuba, "Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing African Literature, Culture, and Society”
Kim TallBear, “Beyond the Life/Not-Life Binary: A Feminist-Indigenous Reading of Cryopreservation, Interspecies Thinking, and the New Materialism”
Myka Tucker-Abramson, “Make Literary Criticism Great Again (Review of David Alworth’s Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form)”
Recommended Texts:
Terry Eagleton, “Materialisms” from Materialism
Alexander R. Galloway, “History Is What Hurts: On Old Materialism”
12:15 - 1:45 pm: Lunch
1:45 - 3 pm: Work in Literature, Film, and TV Panel
Ryan Brooks, “‘Always Working’: Old Realism and Labor Politics in the Age of the New Formalism”
Devin Daniels, "Kill the Head and the Body Will Die: Realism, Capitalism, and the Financier"
Melissa Macero, “All Work and No Play: Property, Poltergeists, and the Proletariat”
3 - 3:15 pm: Break
3:15 - 4:45 pm: 1960s Plenary
Participants: Cedric Johnson, Colleen Lye, Blake Stimson, and Daniel Zamora
4:45 - 5 pm: Break
5 - 6:15 pm: Walter Benn Michaels, “Reedian Politics, Friedian Aesthetics: A (Belated) Polemic”
Tuesday, June 25th
8:30 - 9 am: Coffee & Bagels
9 - 10:15 am: Postcolonial and Latin America Panel
Priscila Figueiredo, “Kafka and Fatigue Materialism”
Jap-Nanak Makkar, “Little Doubt: Conrad, Wiener, & Cliff”
Sibyl Gallus-Price, “From the Neoreal to the Neoliberal: Cuarón’s Aesthetic Still-born and the Labor of the Frame”
10:15 - 10:30 am: Break
10:30 am - 12 pm: Agency, Autonomy, and Speculation Panel
Louise McCune, "This Spectre Has Today Been Forgotten: Herbert Marcuse’s 1930s"
Thomas Moore, “Reframing Duchamp in the Neoliberal Era: A Left Politics of Autonomy and Impersonality”
Josh Robinson, “Intelligent Speculation”
Craig Strensrud, “Irony, Hypocrisy, Ideology: The Historical-Materialist Aesthetics of U.S. Abolitionist Fiction”
12 - 1:30 pm: Lunch
1:30 - 3 pm: Reading Group: Theories of the Social
Led by: Sarah Brouillette, Annie McClanahan, Myka Tucker-Abramson
Required Texts:
Pierre Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed”
Emile Durkheim, selection from The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Bruno Latour, selection from Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory
James Scott, selection from Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance
3 - 3:15 pm: Break
3:15 - 4:45 pm: Ecocriticism Panel
Ed Graham, “Dialectic of Enlightenment’s Figures of Mutilated Nature: Critical Theory, Ecology and the Question of Narrative”
Andrew Rowcroft, “Kim Stanley Robinson: Ecology, Work, Form”
Natalie Suzelis, "Historicizing and Re-politicizing the Commons."
Madison Mayhew, “Social Practice as Political Praxis: Participatory Art’s Interventions in the Oka Crisis”
4:45 - 5 pm: Break
5 - 6:15 pm: Myka Tucker-Abramson, "Notes Towards a Theory of the Road Novel"
Wednesday, June 26th
8:30 - 9 am: Coffee & Bagels
9 - 10:30 am: At Work: Representation, Form, and World Literature Panel
Pavel Andrade, “Nothing But Workers: Punctuating Labor in Diamela Eltit’s Mano de obra”
Alexandra Brown, “Ink and idea: reimagining economies of exchange in Cuban science fiction through Ángel Arango’s Transparencia, Coyuntura, and Sider“
Alex Millen, “The Social Problem of Genre in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton”
Daniella Sánchez Russo, “Relationships of servitude and social reproduction in José Donoso's The Obscene Bird of the Night"
10:30 - 10:45 am: Break
10:45 am - 12:15 pm: Reading Group: What Is To Be Done With Non-Identity?
Led by: Tavid Mulder and Matt Gannon
Required Texts:
T. W. Adorno, “The Experiential Content of Hegel's Philosophy"
Bruno Bosteels, "The Jargon of Finitude”
Recommended Text:
Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination, pp. 104-120; pp. 326-366
12:15 - 1:45 pm: Business Meeting and Lunch
1:45 - 3 pm: Drama and Tragedy Panel
Don Hedrick, “A brief history of enclosure, Part 2: Pleasure Enclosure”
Aylin Bademsaoy, Title TBA
Kay Gabriel, "'Electra speaking to the capitals of the world': Tragedy and Transition in Heiner Müller's Hamletmachine"
3 - 3:15 pm: Break
3:15 - 4:45 pm: Utopia and Revolutionary Dreaming Panel
Kanishka Chowdhury, “Revolutionary Dreaming and the Withering of the State in Lenin’s State and Revolution”
Barbara Foley, "Compensatory and Anticipatory Utopias"
Mark Soderstrom, “A Commonwealth With Roses: Speculative Debates on the Utopian Imaginary”
Biltonn Bosse, Title TBA
4:45 - 5 pm: Break
5 - 6:15 pm: Marx’s critique of Proudhon as a Basis for Intelligent Idealism Panel
Maria Fanis, “Reading Philosophie de la misère”
Christopher Brown, “Reading Misère de la philosophie”
Kailash Srinivasan, “Pashukanis and the critique of law as a speculative category”
7 pm - 10 pm: BBQ