The Politics and Poetics of Community within the Anglophone Left

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.

Download the program at the bottom of the page.

Organization

• Tom Allen, Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen
• Adeline Chevrier-Bosseau, lecturer in American literature (poetry) and dance studies, Sorbonne Université
• Laurence Gervais, University Professor of American Studies, Université Paris Nanterre
• Nicolas Jara-Joly, PhD student, Université Paris Nanterre
• Bradley Smith, lecturer in English studies, Université Paris Nanterre

Speakers

• Tom Allen, Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen
• Eleanor Careless, Northumbria University
• Phoebe Chetwynd, Royal Holloway, University of London
• Adeline Chevrier-Bosseau, Sorbonne Université
• Jodie Childers, Tulane University
• Maurice Cronin, Université Paris Dauphine
• François Cusset, Université Paris Nanterre
• Sean DeMoranville, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
• Mathieu Duplay, Université Paris Cité
• Erik Ellis, Stanford University
• Claire Finch, Université Paris 8 Vincennes - Saint-Denis
• Jack Halberstam, Columbia University
• Ben Hickman, University of Kent
• Lizzie Homersham, University of Westminster
• Laurence Gervais, Université Paris Nanterre
• Tim Gibbs, Université Paris Nanterre
• Charlotte Gould, Université Paris Nanterre
• David Grundy, University of Warwick
• Nicolas Jara-Joly, Université Paris Nanterre
• Christos Kalli, University of Pennsylvania
• Françoise Kral, Université Paris Nanterre
• Joe Luna, University of Sussex
• Louise Lurcin, Université Paris 8 Vincennes - Saint-Denis et Université Paris Nanterre
• Félix Megret, Université Paris Nanterre
• Agathe Mikaeloff Janssen, Université Paris Nanterre
• Abioseh Porter, Drexel University
• Jean-Paul Rocchi, Université Paris-Est Marne La Vallée
• Bradley Smith, Université Paris Nanterre
• Vicky Sparrow, University of Nottingham
• Keston Sutherland, University of Sussex
• Stacey Sutton, University of Illinois Chicago
• Naomi Toth, Université Paris Nanterre
• Juliette Utard, Sorbonne Université

Event partners

This event is organized in collaboration with the Université Paris Nanterre, the Institut des Amériques, the Institut universitaire de France and the Centre de Recherches Anglophones (CREA) of the Université Paris Nanterre.