Anonymous Comrade writes:

Out of Time: Theorizations of Culture and the Political

Michael Hardt and Mary Ann Doane, Keynote Speakers

October 20-22, 2005, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Organized by The Collective for Critical Practices, a group of graduate students in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature

This conference is concerned with what it might mean to be “out of time” and its implications and applications for our present moment. Our Collective approaches “out of time” as a sense of urgency, a potential that emerges out of “presentness,” and a transformation of earlier assumptions of temporality. Today, urgency and the potential of the present have been elevated by the presumed waning of modernist notions of history and complex shifts in the relations of production. We are out of time.This problematic is being taken up in a myriad of provocative ways within both academic and non-academic spheres of production from philosophy to literature to film to political activism. In The Emergence of Cinematic Time, Mary Ann Doane explores the intersections between temporality, modernity, the archive and cinema. Michael Hardt’s work conceptualizes the reorganization of production and temporality in the era of globalization.

The Collective for Critical Practices in conjunction with the Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature Film Society at the University of Minnesota invite submissions for our Fall 2005 conference dedicated to the theme “out of time.” Our first priority is to consider a multiplicity of viewpoints that explore, challenge, contest and engage in current theoretical debates on this issue. Further, we encourage collaborative works and cultural productions (e.g. photo-essays, web art, live art, and film/video pieces) in addition to traditional essay presentations. Our commitment is to open our collective to intellectual and creative producers that are critically and rigorously involved in the urgent task of thinking “out of time,” regardless of academic or artistic distinction.

Potential topics might include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Transformations of wage time

• Time and national memorialization

• The cinematic event

• Science fictions of empire

• Temporalities of technology

• Ontology and history

• Wasting and spending time

• Narrativizations of time

• Nostalgia and utopia

• Emergence and becoming

• Bodies in time

• Potential, hope, and the future

• Rest and inertia

• Trauma, memory, repetition

• Space(s) without time

• Time in exile

• Temporality and subjectivity

• Public/private time

Abstracts of 500 words and a brief c.v., as well as panel proposals (which should include individual abstracts), and any questions or comments should be submitted to: critprac@tc.umn.edu.

Abstracts due: July 31, 2005

For more information visit
here.