Please join us for a pluridisciplinary symposium on the Paris Commune on Thursday, October 10, 2019. Panel presentations will take place from 10-12pm and 2:30-4:30pm in the Hopkins Faculty Lounge. Kristin Ross (NYU) will deliver the keynote in Carpenter 013 at 5:30pm.
150 years on, in a context of environmental, economic, and socio-political crises spanning the planet, the legacy of the Paris Commune demands our attention as a model, a horizon, and perhaps an alternative to the on-going emergencies of everyday life in capitalist post-modernity, in the so-called aftermath of the "end of History." As historical episode, the Paris Commune perhaps figures indeed as a political and historical parenthesis, emerging from the breakdowns of national and local order of the Annee terrible (the Franco-Prussian War and subsequent collapse of the Second Empire) and lasting all of 73 days. But as revolutionary event, it leaves in its wake an enduring image of history as an incomplete struggle, and of politics as the immanent possibility of the autrement contained within the socio-political structures and hierarchies of the order of the present: other forms of community, daily life, solidarity and sociability; other modes of agency and of political
practices; other ways of being and of thinking (human) history. This event brings together scholars from across the world to discuss the afterlife of the Commune in US print and performance culture; the Commune and the politics of the Capitalocene; the Gilets jaunes movement and political poetics; visualizing the Commune and the rhetoric of bare life; and the historiography of the Commune in the 19th-21st centuries.
This event is generously sponsored by the Leslie Center for the Humanities.
