“Art and Power”
A one-day graduate conference
Leeds Humanities Research Institute, University of Leeds (UK)
27 September 2008
Abstracts Due: 1 May 2008
Joseph Conrad expressed apprehension about the political and moral utility of literature, W.H. Auden claimed that poetry makes nothing happen, and Theodor Adorno asserted that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz. Yet, in the postmodern era there is no shortage of art or of theories that speak to political realities, conflict and calamity. In the 21st century and in the 7th year of the official “War on Terror” we ask: is the pen mightier than the sword? Is art acting as a social corrective? Is it politically effective? Or conversely, how and when is it co-opted and/or appropriated, and to what ends?
This conference invites papers that speak to art’s politicisation, neutralisation, instrumentalisation, and its relationship(s) to power more generally. Our objective is to establish a dialogue that takes up the various intersections between art and power in contemporary capitalist, “globalised”, “postmodern”, and “post”-colonial societies. “Art and Power” is an interdisciplinary conference, and thus topics for papers are not restricted to literature.
The keynote speaker will be Prof. Derek Attridge (University of York). The conference will moreover include a session designed to advise emerging scholars on publishing their academic work. Prof. Shirley Chew (University of Leeds, general editor of Moving Worlds) and Dr. Mark Taylor-Batty (University of Leeds, European editor of The Pinter Review and co-editor of Performing Ethos) will give a talk on various aspects of academic publication.
Presentation topics for the conference may include but are not limited to the following:
- Art and totalitarianism
- Utopian/Dystopian visions in contemporary literature
- Paranoia and conspiracy theories
- The fluidity/rhetorical constructedness/abuses of the concept “democracy” and its ideological derivatives
- The role of the artist and the academic under capitalism
- Globalisation, cultural imperialism and forms of cultural resistance
- Models of inclusion and exclusion in democracy and multiculturalism
- Expressions of dissent
- The instrumentalisation of art and journalism in “democratic” societies
- Politics and aesthetics
- How ideology-focused critiques of art may or may not reduce art to ideology
- Art and religion, art and atheism
- Issues of epistemological “access” and perceptions and discursive constructions of “non-democratic” cultures and political crises through western art and the media
- Creating feminist art within patriarchal societies
Presentations will be twenty minutes. Abstracts should be 300 words, accompanied by a short CV and directed to Basil Chiasson and Natalie Diebschlag at: artandpower2008@googlemail.com by 1 May 2008.
