Featuring a keynote dialogue between Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor in Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, and Gayatri Spivak, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University.

“Global States” seeks to explore the two terms, “global” and “state” with a particular emphasis on the global’s invocation of the logic and rhetoric of affect:states of mind, bodily states, emotional states, and states of identity. Our hope is to bring together diverse members of the UCI community as well as a number of visiting scholars to query how the “global” as a concept, ideology, and physical structure, is central and unavoidable in both contemporary and historical processes of state and individual identity-formation. The conference would be an occasion to probe the ways that interdisciplinary scholarship might elucidate the “global” as a concept that oscillates between openness and foreclosure, and examine the “global’s” recalibrating effect upon post-colonialism, multiculturalism, ethnic and area studies, discourses of knowledge and power, literary analysis, and theories of subjectivity. We hope to explore “global states” in literary, cultural, aesthetic, political, and affective registers.

This conference will delineate various "states" of sentiment, desire, or affect, and examine their deployment on--or relation to--the global scene of political and economic "states."  Within contemporary landscapes, the proliferating language of sentiment and feeling (memory, mourning, terror, cruelty, suffering, pleasure, paranoia, and nostalgia) appears encoded in political, economic, and legal processes.  Our intention is to shift the parameters of current debates on globalization onto new planes of experience and to interrogate the neutral terms under which the name of the global is invoked. 

What forms and relations of subjectivity are generated at the quilting point of states of sentiment and politico-economic states?

How might states of sentiment underscore the conditions constitutive of rational states, normative and ontological?

What resistant possibilities are enabled through states of sentiment?  Renewed forms of subjectivity, collectivity, globality?

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screening: experimental film shorts "global visions: memory-traces, libidinal imaginaries, and intercessory images"

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"global states"
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many thanks to our CONFERENCE SPONSORS:

UCI Department of Comparative Literature, UCI Humanities Center, International Center for Writing and Translation, UCI Critical Theory Emphasis, Critical Theory Institute, UC Humanities Research Institute, Department of Asian American Studies, Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies, Department of French and Italian, Department of German, Department of History, Department of English, Postmodern Culture, the Philosophy Graduate Students, and the Program in Women's Studies