Temporality: Stasis, Repetition, Transformation

Fall 2012

At a moment of economic, social, and political crisis this center theme asks after time: its organization and its social and political effects.  Concepts dependent on a theory of temporality stasis, change, life stages, eras, periodization, progression and regression, order, linearity, diachrony and synchrony, repetition, reiteration, duration, and rhythm are the building blocks of our contemporary social and cultural theory; time underpins our epistemological frameworks.  And, as scholars across the humanities, social sciences, and the natural sciences have demonstrated, time and temporality are intricately connected to space, to affect, to the body, to subjectivity, and to politics.  This theme brings together scholars in performance studies, feminist studies, media and film studies, queer studies, ethnic studies, anthropology, literary criticism, history, philosophy, art history, sociology, and cultural studies, and their overlapping yet distinct approaches to the critical study of time.  Within the broader field, we will focus on stasis, repetition, and transformation, examining the logics of stasis and repetition in relation to recent conceptions of subject formations and transformations.

 

Lectures

All lectures begin at 6 p.m. unless otherwise noted, and are held in Russell House, which is located at the corner of Washington and High streets.

 

Globalization and Time

September 10

Lynn Hunt, University of California, Los Angeles

 

Chronopolitics of 19th-Century Displays of Difference

September 17

Lucian Gomoll, Andrew W Mellon Post-doctoral fellow, Wesleyan

 

Cultural Trauma, National Memory:
BDSM Play with Slavery and Fascism

September 24

Margot Weiss, Wesleyan

 

Saving the City

October 1

Elijah Huge, Wesleyan

 

The Times We’re In

October 8

Robyn Wiegman, Duke University

 

Remembering the Future

October 22

Karen Barad, University of California, Santa Cruz

 

Temporality and Normativity

October 29

Joe Rouse, Wesleyan

 

Racial Trauma and Triangulation in Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student

November 5

Amy Tang, Wesleyan

 

“Minerals Alone Escape It”: Mourning Time

November 12

Lisa Cohen, Wesleyan

 

Latency as Origin of Our Present.
Conjectures about a New Social Construction of Time

November 19

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford University

 

Ten Digital Preludes

November 26

Tom Boellstorff, University of California, Irvine

 

Law, Ornament, and the Quotidian Body

December 3

Anne Cheng, Princeton University