CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT
MELANCHOLIC STATES

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
with PAPERS, EXHIBITIONS, PERFORMANCES

The concept of melancholia has assumed widespread and varied currency across numerous fields. Sometimes used to refer to a state of mind or to an affective state; sometimes used to speak of racialised, gendered, or queer subjectivity; other times used as a tool of analysis of political states or as a mobilising tool to convene constituencies of solidarity; yet other times, melancholia founds collective memory and associated artefactual practices, or describes the conditions of professional practice organised around a public service ethic. Positioned as a condition to be claimed, transcended, or negotiated, ‘melancholic states’ seemingly speaks to the contemporary zeitgeist – the post/neo-colonial era.

The provenance of the concept of melancholia in psychoanalysis and the proliferation of its use elsewhere, offer grounds for revisiting the potential and limits of the concept – this conference aims to explore the ways in which the idea of ‘melancholic states’ speaks to the complexity of the present.

We encourage papers from various inter-disciplinary backgrounds namely women studies, postcolonial, critical race, critical psychology, politics, international relations, sociology, anthropology, geography, art and design, queer studies, that address, among others, the following questions:

· what is the relationship between melancholia and the turn to questions of affect, emotion, and feeling within the social sciences and humanities?

· what new analytical avenues are potentially opened up or closed down by the mobilisation or deployment of the concept of melancholia?

· is its analytical traction geographically, temporally, and politically limited and limiting?

· is melancholia imbricated in the current preoccupation with borders and border identities, within academic debates and politics rhetorics?

· does melancholia provide the grounds for a critical and theoretically informed response to a political present increasingly organised around the axis of democracy/terror?

· in what ways might it offer the grounds for the formation of solidarities and constituencies of belonging ‘locally’ and/or transnationally, in which feeling is identified as a legitimate and central axis?

· what might the limitations of such solidarities be, especially in a context in which it is increasingly difficult to articulate clear political identities in the current conjunction of global/national political agendas?

· can melancholic states further or renew an understanding of identifications involved in responses to international calls for aid?

· to what extent is melancholia and/or hope the condition motivating NGO’s in their work on poverty and/or the environment?

· are the subjectivities of public sector professionals increasingly characterised by melancholia in the context of the demise of the public service ethic?

· in what ways is collective memory organised around melancholia and how might this impact on the selection, design and production of objects and practices of remembrance?

· is a melancholic state a productive site for artistic practices that interrogate forms of subjection and violence?

· are melancholic states and various forms of spiritual practice mutually imbricated or mutually exclusive?

· can it help grasp the complexities of historical and contemporary subjectivities as produced and lived at the intersection of numerous modalities of difference?

· to what extent are melancholic subjects produced by competing social imaginaries, and how are these played out in everyday life?

· is melancholia the condition of the desiring subject of the 21st century?

Abstracts of no more than 500 words to be submitted by 23 APRIL 2007. Please send to: Gail Lewis g.a.lewis@lancaster.ac.uk; or Nayanika Mookherjee n.mookherjee@lancaster.ac.uk