ACLA Panel 2023: Beyond Modernity as a Queer Aesthetic Project

What comes after modernity? Numerous thinkers ranging from Jürgen Habermas and Bruno Latour to Walter Mignolo and Rita Segato have explored this topic, illuminating the landscape of late capitalism, coloniality, postmodernity, and the crisis of modern narratives, among other ideas, often from Marxist positions. As these and other theoreticians circle around similar sets of canonical works of literature, philosophy, and economic and political theory—areas coded as “heavy,” “serious,” and normatively “masculine,” we are interested in approaching this topic from a different, underexplored perspective: queerness and queer aesthetics. What happens to our understanding of modernity and its aftermaths when we center queer aesthetics and styles? What can their levity, silliness, flamboyance, and absurdity contribute to these discussions? What new temporalities and historical timelines, subjectivities and community formations, forms of communication and poetic practices come to the fore? Is an aesthetic project of (post)modernity possible, and if so, what can queerness tell us about its potential and pitfalls? We invite papers that endeavor to answer these and related questions and topics from any linguistic, cultural, and medial context from the 1970s onwards.

The seminar will take place at the American Comparative Literature Association's Annual Conference in Chicago from March 16-19, 2022.

Please submit your abstracts via the ACLA website no later than October 31: https://www.acla.org/annual-meeting The ACLA's submission portal allows for an abstract to contain as many as 1500 charactes including spaces.

If you have any questions, please contact the seminar organizers Isabel von Holt (isabel.vonholt@northwestern.edu) and Domenic DeSocio (ddesocio@northwestern.edu).