Call for Papers: The Radical Sixties (28–29 June 2019, University of Brighton, UK)

Call for Papers: The Radical Sixties (28–29 June 2019, University of Brighton, UK)

Call for Papers: The Radical Sixties (28–29 June 2019, University of Brighton, UK)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

The Radical Sixties: Aesthetics, Politics and Histories of Solidarity 

28–29 June 2019, University of Brighton, UK 

An international interdisciplinary conference jointly organized by the University of Brighton’s Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics (CAPPE); Centre for Design History (CDH) and Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories (CMNH).

Deadline for abstracts: 28 September 2018 

“The Sixties” continue to engage scholars from many disciplines in debates over what exactly changed; and, indeed, whether the various protest movements were in fact radical at all in their political demands. Both nostalgically celebrated as a revolutionary heyday and lamented as a failed political project, the decade continues to haunt veterans and preoccupy scholars fifty years on.

However, these long-held evaluations remain parochially centred on European and North American experiences in a handful of cities in this tumultuous decade. Crucially, a Third Worldist perspective, despite its centrality for activists in the 1960s, is conspicuously marginalized in today’s scholarship. It has been argued—and demonstrated—that decolonisation struggles and anti-imperialist resistance spanning the three continents of the Global South, from Cuba to Algeria and all the way to Vietnam, both politically informed a new generation of contestation and offered a new radical horizon of Leftist internationalism. And yet “The Sixties” continues to be universalised on the basis of myopically “Western” speculations about what makes radical politics possible.

This conference thus seeks to decentre the established loci of “The Sixties”. It builds on recent efforts to expand and complicate the spatiality and temporality of the global sixties and calls for new analyses of this critical historical conjuncture from the standpoint of solidarity. For today we seem to know very little about how solidarity constituted a nodal theme for radical Leftist politics in the 1960s; its intellectual frameworks and transnational politics, associated aesthetics and cultures of circulation. How was solidarity conceived, imagined and radically enacted in the border-crossings, both spatial and intellectual, of revolutionaries in the “long” 1960s?

We invite contributions from any discipline that explore notions and manifestations of solidarity as articulated in the interstices that, more than 50 years ago, opened up shared spaces of political struggle and prefigured radical horizons of possibility. In particular, we seek explorations of solidarity as expressed in new aesthetic modes of transnational dissent and carried through the circulatory practices of radical cultures and associated flow of new revolutionary subjectivities.

Topics:

  • Theorisations of radical forms of New and/or Third World Left solidarity (politics/ aesthetics/ global scope/ tactics/subjectivities)
  • Histories of solidarity with, and within, the Third World (South–South and/or North-South linkages, networks and movements)
  • Arts, cultures and aesthetics of solidarity (design, film, print, literature, poetry, music, visual and material culture broadly construed)
  • Solidarity in circulation (objects, ideas and images on the move)
  • Mobility of activists, intellectuals and artists
  • Nodal cities/spaces of encounter
  • Solidarity in public spaces of protest
  • Memories, legacies and futures
  • Leftist internationalism, transnationalism, cosmopolitanism from below

Opening public roundtable on the evening of 27 June 2019 (Speakers to be confirmed)  

Conference keynote speakers:

Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental Institute for Social Research.
Cynthia Young, Pennsylvania State University.

Submission Guidelines

  • Please send proposals for individual papers/ and or panels by 28 September 2018 to: Radical60s@brighton.ac.uk
  • Individual paper proposals should include: name of presenter and contact information; proposed paper title; abstract (250 words); short biography (50 words).
  • Panel proposals should be pre-formed and include:  title and short rationale for the panel (100 words) with 3-4 corresponding individual paper proposals (as per above-guidelines).
  • Accepted proposals will be notified by November.
  • There is limited bursary support available for applicants: if you wish to apply, please send a paragraph explaining your need for support, together with your abstract. Decisions will be made on the basis of both abstract and need.

Organizing Committee

Zeina Maasri (convener); Cathy Bergin; Francesca Burke; Andrea Garcia Gonzalez; Garikoitz Gomez Alfaro; Megha Rajguru; Zoe Sutherland.

CAPPE http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/re/cappe
CDH http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/re/centre-for-design-history-research
CMNH http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/re/cmnh

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412