About this conference
Keynote speakers: Sarah Schulman (College of Staten Island) and Jasbir Puar (Rutgers University), and Graduate Center, CUNY keynote panelists Siraj Ahmed, Jonathan W. Gray, Eric Lott, and Jessica Yood.
Join us for “Breaking Through: Textures and Aesthetics of Rupture” the annual English Student Association Graduate Student Conference. We posit that “rupture,” as a concept of breaking through, loses much of its value when it is fetishized and only figured as unidirectional, or universally positive, effective, and counter-hegemonic. This conference calls for a rigorous unthinking around the space-times of rupture to question these assumptions and ask, further: Who is licensed to disrupt? To what extent does that which consciously figures itself as disruption in fact create rupture? How do we conceive of a disruption that can be so effectively co-opted and redeployed in service of neoliberal agendas? What is it about the aesthetics of rupture that makes them so appealing? So satisfying?
PROGRAM:
8:00am-9:00am: Breakfast and Registration
9:00am-10:10am: Panel Session 1
- Noises, Aesthetics, and Temporalities of Political Resistance
Kelsey Chatlosh (The Graduate Center, CUNY): “Thinking through the Politics of Temporality: The Casting of Historical Ruptures in Chilean and United States Politics”
Forrest Deacon (New School for Social Research): “Subjection, Communication, and Epistemic Accessibility: The Use of Aesthetics to Foster Pluralistic Resistance”
Thayer Hastings (The Graduate Center, CUNY): “De-emphasizing Rupture, Recovering Nostalgia: The Afterlife of Rebellious Texts from the First Palestinian Intifada”
Gabriel Salomon Mindel (University of California, Santa Cruz) and Alexander J. Ullman (University of California, Berkeley): “A Tradition of Free and Odious Utterance: Free Speech and Sacred Noise in Steve Waters’ Temple”
- Revolution and Rupture in Theory
Chris Carpenter (The Graduate Center, CUNY): “Nostalgia and Continuity: A Critique of Neoliberalism (as Concept)”
Zachary Fruit (University of Pennsylvania): “Regular Disruption: Burke, Ruskin, and the Temporality of Order”
Kikuko Tanaka (The Graduate Center, CUNY): “Hidden Behind the Dialectic: The Case of Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster”
Alex Weisberg (New York University): “Topographies of Disruption: From Messianism and Theology to Textuality and Meaning in the Works of Emmanuel Levinas and Walter Benjamin”
- Disruptions of Form as Visual and Literary Ways of Knowing
Chris Campanioni (The Graduate Center, CUNY): “A & B & Also Nothing: Re-writing the American Hybrid”
Danyel Ferrari (Rutgers University): “Affecting Abandonments: Immediate Memorialization and Empathic Turn in Public Art”
Amanda Hickok (New York University): “Crisis, Rupture, & the Contemporary Epic: Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette”
Cody Musselman (Yale University): “An Imposter Amidst Ivory Towers”
10:20am-11:20am: Keynote 1 – Sarah Schulman
11:30am-12:40pm: Panel Session 2
- Representations and Erasures of Physical and Mental Difference
Tatiana Ades (Hunter College, CUNY): “Out of Their Minds: Decomposing Late 19th-Century Feminist Aesthetics”
Christian Lewis (The Graduate Center, CUNY): “‘Anxiety or . . . ?’: Disability and Representation in Dear Evan Hansen”
Kate Prendella (Rutgers University): “#ThemToo: How and Why Activists are Failing Individuals with Intellectual Disabilities”
Nelesi Rodriguez (University of Pittsburgh): “Making Space for Others: Disability, Subjectivity and Acknowledgement in Adrienne Asch and Fernand Deligny”
- Decolonial Poetics and Histories
Param Ajmera (The Graduate Center, CUNY): “Post-Atlantic Studies, or What do We Mean by Global?”
Marguerite Daisy Atterbury (The Graduate Center, CUNY): “Part-machine or part-ghost?: La Academia de La Nueva Raza and the University Now”
Kate Partridge (University of Southern California): “Stationing the Sight Lines: Perspective and Surveillance in Jena Osman’s Public Figures”
Alexandra Tatarsky and Ming Lin (Display Distribute): “The Shanzai Lyric: ow do you think i’dont”
- Ruptures of Place and Environment
Stefania Hernandez (Concordia University): “Regaining the Coastal Agency of Maracaibo”
Tenn Joe Lim (Sarah Lawrence College): "Focus on Yonkers: Agency of People, Capital and the Saw Mill River”
James Morone (University of Pennsylvania): “Paths of Lessened Resistance: The Power and Limits of Community Control Ideology”
Nancy Rakoczy (Long Island City Artists): “Climate Artists – Provocateurs and Disturbers of the Peace”
12:40pm-1:30pm: Lunch Break
1:30pm-2:40pm: Panel Session 3
- Identity, Violence, Disruption (?)
Xhuli Agolli (The Graduate Center, CUNY): “From Antigone to #MeToo: Disruption as Risking and Giving Offense”
Amber Chiacchieri (The Graduate Center, CUNY): “Deviant Discourse? Feminism, Foucault and Rape in the #MeToo Era”
Jessica Lugo (The Graduate Center, CUNY): “The maid will I frame and make fit’: A Pygmalionist Reading of Measure for Measure”
Veronica Sousa (Princeton University): “The Texture of Pain and the Art of Recognition: Ethnographic Considerations”
- The Deviant and Disruptive Body
Jacob Aplaca (The Graduate Center, CUNY): “‘All that they have invested in Langston Hughes’: Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston and the Performance and Reception of Black Sexualities”
Chad Frisbie (The Graduate Center, CUNY): “Chaucer’s Anus”
Gabriela Peralta (New York University): “Reggetón: a Site for Disruption”
Ryan Tracy (The Graduate Center, CUNY): “‘Help Me Hold My Hair Back’: Lady Gaga’s Feminist Ethics of Regurgitation”
- Modalities and Spaces of (Digital) Rupture
Karis Jones (New York University): “Navigation of Adolescent Identity in Fandom Spaces”
Hannah Redder (Midwestern State University): “Disrupting Anti-Feminist Rhetoric in the New Context of Twitter”
Clinton Wagoner (Midwestern State University): “Rooster Teeth: Pioneers of a New Age Using Old Tools”
Nicole Weber (Rutgers University): “‘Fitspiration’ for What?: Female Fitness Influencers and Resistance Narratives on Social Media”
2:50pm-4:10pm: Keynote 2 – Jasbir Puar
4:20pm-5:30pm: Keynote 3 – Graduate Center, CUNY Panel
Siraj Ahmed, Jonathan W. Gray, Eric Lott, and Jessica Yood
5:30pm-6:00pm: Breakout Session
** In this block of time, conference participants and guests will break into discussion groups to think through the conversations we have encountered throughout the day together.
5:30pm-6:30pm: Reception
For more information, visit the official conference website here.
Co-sponsored by The English Student Association; The Doctoral Students’ Council; The Center for the Humanities; The Futures Initiative; The Postcolonial Studies Group (PSG); The Twentieth Century Area Studies Group; The American Studies Area Group; The Composition and Rhetoric Community (Comp Comm); and The Poetics Group at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
