Welcome to the symposium
“The Politics and Poetics of Community within the Anglophone Left.” Sorbonne University and Paris Nanterre University, Paris and Nanterre, France, March 21-23, 2024.
The program and abstracts can be browsed as a whole, by day, or by speaker.
Registrations will open on February 21 please sign up by clicking on the "Registration" tab and follow instructions.
For the poetry reading, seating will be limited so you can already register by sending an email to politics.poetics.conf@gmail.com
This conference is part of an ongoing project to unite scholars and practitioners on the theme of community building and leftwing social transformation. The conference will result in the publication of a collective work evaluated by a scientific committee.
The first line of inquiry involves political uses of community within the Anglophone left. Utopian experiments, for example, are intentional communities founded as laboratories for social empowerment. They are distinct from both social-democratic and Marxist approaches in that they generally shun party politics and adopt an interstitial strategy for social transformation (Wright, 2010). Community development initiatives, on the other hand, tend to take a more social-democratic approach by uniting elected officials and community leaders around municipal projects aimed at gradually improving the civil engagement and economic well-being of local communities (Defilippis & Saegert, 2012). Community wealth building combines aspects of both of these approaches to transform cities into experiments for a democratic economy (Brown & Jones, 2021; Guinan & O’Neill, 2020; Kelly & Howard, 2019). Community organizing mobilizes community members for leftwing political objectives at the grassroots level (Alinsky, 1946; Brady & O’Connor, 2014). Feminist and queer activists have developed new models of community building and organizing that make novel use of public space, vulnerability, and mutual aid (Butler, Gambetti & Sabsay, 2016; Erbaugh, 2002; Halberstam, 2011; Spade, 2020). Analyzing the diversity and circulation of these approaches within the Anglosphere will contribute to our understanding of the history and theory of the politics of community.
The second line of inquiry involves aesthetic uses of community within the Anglophone left. Writers, artists, filmmakers, etc. have found that a functioning community enables the fulfillment of material needs, while it also inspires the development and transmission of shared artistic projects and political horizons (Reynolds, 1988; Rogin, 1992; Ross, 1988, 2002, 2015). In the 20th century, Allen Ginsberg (1954) defined art as a “community effort.” The first half of that century offers many examples of the importance of community from a leftwing literary perspective, such as the magazines The Masses (1911-1917) and New Masses (1926-1948), or Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth (1906-1917). Art and literature are frequently at the forefront of the political imagination of communities founded on leftwing principles. One could think, for example, of Walt Whitman’s individual and collective lyric self, especially in connection to his representation of working-class life in Leaves of Grass (1855);or British poet Sean Bonney’s capacious “us,” which stretches from Thomas Münzer to Katarina Gogou and mobilizes trans-historical solidarity against a tangibly present adversary. Finally,the visual, literary, and performing arts all play a central role in the construction of community through shared cultural references, practices, and memories (Coghlan, 2016). One can think here of the Young British Artists (YBA) as well as Isadora Duncan’s dance schools for proletarian children founded in France and the Soviet Union. In order to illustrate the intimate relation between art, research, and community, the conference will include poetry readings and dance performances in addition to traditional conference papers, and we encourage participants to propose practice-based talks.
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