Rethinking the Political: Narrative, Protest and Fiction in the 21st Century

conference program [PDF]

Monday, 9 Sep 2024

11.00 am
Welcome and Keynote Address
Chair: Mark Devenney (University of Brighton)

• German Primera (University of Brighton): Colonial Biopolitics and the Arc of Refusal: rethinking grammars of resistance

1.30 pm
Session 1

Panel 1: What do Novels Do?
Chair: Charlotte Woodford (University of Cambridge)

• Gerard Ronge (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań): Tadeusz Peiper and Rita Felski: Polish contributions to the debate about post-critique
• Ana Tomljenović (University of Zagreb): A Politics of the Death Drive in Ranko Marinković’s Never More
• Liam Connell (University of Brighton): Can the Novel Act?
• Tomasz Mizerkiewicz (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań): Novel, Joy, Politics. A Perspective on Children’s Games in Oksana Zabuzhko’s Museum of Abandoned Secrets and Brygida Helbig-Mischewski’s Niebko/Kleine Himmel

Panel 2: Thinking the Political Future in the Past Tense
Chair: Tanay Gandhi (University of Southhampton)

• Mikołaj Dalek (University of Wrocław): Obliteration: Contesting informational entropy in the digital public sphere
• Viktoria Huegel (University of Vienna): “Training for the future”: embodied action and radical politics
• Marina Protrka Štimec (University of Zagreb): Fidelity to our futures past. Miroslav Krleža as a writer of the revolution
• Karlo Drzaic (University of Zagreb): Political Education in the People’s Republic of Croatia

4.00 pm
Session 2

Panel 1: Remaking the Demos/Polis
Chair: Craig Jordan-Baker (University of Brighton)

• Wojciech Ufel (University of Wrocław): The “return of tragedy”? Challenging visions and narratives of rethinking democracy
• Clare Woodford (University of Brighton): Politics within or outside the polis? How to (re)turn to the city, or perhaps discover that we never left it
• Tim Christiaens (University of Tilburg): Cyberfascism in Italian Theory

Panel 2: Rebellious Fictions
Chair: Tara Talwar Windsor (University of Cambridge)

• Andrea Milanko (University of Zagreb): Models of Rebellion and Novel’s Grace
• Arianna Preite, Chiara Xausa (University of Bologna): New technologies of re/production and a world beyond the family: Tlotlo Tsamaase’s Womb City and Virtual Snapshots
• Patrick Eiden-Offe (ZfL): Is it (still) O.K. to be an anti-fascist? Looking back at Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow after 50 years

5.30 pm
Cheese and wine reception

The Politics of Publishing, Writing and Performance

• Independent Bookshops and the Politics of Writing. Carolynn Bain (Afrori Books) and Ivana Dražić (Booksa Zagreb) in conversation
  Chair: Vedrana Velickovic (University of Brighton)
• The Novel and the Poem: Award Winning Novelists and Poets read work in progress. With Alice O’Malley-Woods, Natasha Kennedy and Éloïse O’Dwyer-Armary
  Chair: Craig Jordan-Baker (University of Brighton)

Tuesday, 10 Sep 2024

9.30 am
Keynote lecture
Chair: Joanna Kellond (University of Brighton)

• Moya Lloyd (University of Essex): Radical corporeal politics: Flesh as a locus of political struggle

11.30 am
Session 3

Panel 1: The Politics of Capitalism in Question?
Chair: German Primera (University of Brighton)

• Sue Lucas (Area Dean Waltham Forest): The Paradoxical Practice of Politics against the Contradictions of Capitalism
• Ante Andabak (University of Zagreb): Towards a Marxist Conceptualisation of the Political
• Alexandra van Laeken (University of Ghent): Who’s Afraid of the Subject? On the emancipatory potential of aesthetic practices from Althusser to Badiou and Rancière
• Inka Maria Vilhelmiina Hiltunen (University of London): Exploring new modes of subsumption of labour under capital in financialization – and the battle against

Panel 2: Decolonial Narratives
Chair: Natasha Kennedy (University of Brighton)

• Tim Huzar (Kings College, London): Apprehending Wayward Lives: Rethinking the Temporality of Politics
• Chalo ũa Waya (University of Cambridge): Negotiating globality: critical Afropolitanism as epistemic self-assertion in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah
• Noirin MacNamara (Technological University Dublin): On the necessities of ceding ground: Bringing the work of Bracha Ettinger, Judith Butler and Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí into conversation
• Samuel Rua-Nimetz (University of Brighton): The Coloniality of Political Boundary Making

2.30 pm
Session 4

Panel 1: Queer Imaginaries 1
Chair: Vedrana Velickovic (University of Brighton)

• Roel Wolters (Radboud University): Ironizing the Witch-hunts and the Politics of Androcentrism
• Joanna Kellond (University of Brighton): The Church Fathers of Staten Island: Mobilising Speculative Fiction Against the Speculative Fictions of Male Supremacy in Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052–2072
• Błażej Warkocki (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań): Poland Politics, Protest and the Anthology of Polish Queer Literature
• Natasha Kennedy (University of Brighton): Hetero-lingualism as literary activism: resisting oppression through (e)strangement of language

Panel 2: Theorising Political Forms
Chair: Liam Connell (University of Brighton)

• Zrinka Božić (University of Zagreb): The politicisation of form: rethinking the political in literature
• Mark Devenney (University of Brighton): What ‘is’ the Political? The politics of the verb ‘to be’
• Zvonomir Glavaš (University of Zagreb): The protean eschaton: on the actuality, contradictions and limits of Bloch’s utopian Marxism
• Alice Romagnoli (Università degli Studi di Macerata): Politics in crisis: past, present and futures

5.00 pm
Session 5

Panel 1: The Politics of Anthropocentrism
Chair: Mark Devenney (University of Brighton)

• Luke Edmeads (University of Brighton): Democracy at the limits of subjectivity: Animals, Humans, Objects
• Sophia Hatzisavvidou (University of Bath): Finding the political in climate fiction: envisioning nature on a climate-changed planet
• Azucena Blanco (University of Granada): End(s) of the World, Temporality and New (Ec)ontologies in the Global Novel

Panel 2: Queer Imaginaries 2
Chair: Vedrana Velickovic (University of Brighton)

• Polina Whitehouse (University of Oxford): Utopia as Feminist Method
• Lucile Richard (University of Oxford): Towards a Coalition of the (Un-)Cared For? Feminist Care Politics, the “Care Crisis” and the (Under)theorization of Care Receiving
• Elena Betti (University of Bologna): Queer Form, Intertextuality and Political Reimagination in Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City

Wednesday, 11 Sep 2024

9.30 am
Chair: Mark Devenney (University of Brighton)

• Can we theorise ‘The Political’? Alan Finlayson, German Primera, Moya Lloyd, Zrinka Božić and Joanna Kellond in discussion

11.30 am
Session 6

Panel 1: Decolonial Politics 2
Chair: Joanna Kellond (University of Brighton)

• David Ventura (University of Newcastle): Time and the Middle Passage in Édouard Glissant’s Thought
• Chris Griffin (University of Brighton): Representation and Overrepresentation: Anticolonial Counternarratives in the Novel
• Eric Bergman (University of Zagreb): War, Race, and National Belonging as Politics in Veijo Baltzar’s Polttava tie
• Rumana Hashem (University of Brighton): Racialised sexism and gendered precarity: Untangling unlivablity for Im/migrant women of colour in 21st century Britain

Panel 2: Thinking the Politics of Fiction
Chair: Liam Connell (University of Brighton)

• Ivana Perica (ZfL): Politics and Literature: Novels from the New Century
• Adrián Viéitez Torrado (University of Granada): Don’t want to be free want to be with you: political contradictions within Anne Carson and Ursula K. LeGuin’s work
• Mirela Dakić (University of Zagreb): The life of genre: tracing the political in the political novel between literature and sociology
• Nenad Ivić (University of Zagreb): Coup d’état: The technique of the novel – Mario Vargas Llosa’s Tiempos Recios

2.15 pm
Conference Keynote and Closing Session
Chair: Liam Connell (University of Brighton)

• Alan Finlayson (University of East Anglia): A Hero’s Journey? Ideological Entrepreneurs and Reactionary Digital Politics