This seminar explores the notion of “illegibility” in critical thought, popular culture, and activist media that respond to neocolonial-neoliberal regimes of minority recognition. In light of global tensions around ideologies of diversity and inclusion, we will highlight theories and practices of partially legible minority difference that resist fascist suppressions of democracy as well as the delimitation of the democratic by regimes of recognition. Our seminar takes seriously brute and subtle forms of capture/control as well as individual and collective desires for illegibility in media and cultural landscapes that make racial, ethnic, gendered, and Indigenous life available for capitalist abstraction.
Questioning the fantasies of certitude and transparency in representation, we will attend to the activist and aspirational shaping of a different network of signification and freedom positioned against the compulsion to legibility. This involves highlighting geopolitical particularities, fragmented subjectivities, and technological transformations. Our conversation hopes to bring into view approaches that undo the sharp binary opposition between “being visible”—deemed desirable and positive—and “being invisible”—deemed undesirable and negating—in new currencies of representation and practice.
We acknowledge the necessity of weighing the geopolitical contexts that give rise to demands for legibility, while representing non-normative or creative semiotic practices that may be in tension or in conflict with each other. As well, we are committed to participating in and/or reflecting on forms of dissidence and mediation that refuse to be contained within dominant regimes of legibility and capture, with or without recourse to the language of “rights” and “identity.” We are interested in examples and arguments of imbricated partiality that call for historical and speculative readings of individual or transindividual desires, kinships, and collectivities that wish to elude capture by regimes of racialized and colonial capitalism. Our conversation examines the rationales, means, and the political stakes of these distinct refusals of discursive legibility.
We invite papers that foreground (but aren’t limited to):
Anticolonial and psychoanalytic approaches to opacity that emphasize psychic and social fragmentation;
Transnational and/or postcolonial feminist and queer approaches to archival ephemera, environmental crisis, and textual erasure that engage in strategic recovery work;
Ethnographies and cultural criticism focused on postcolonial, non-heteronormative, and working-class positions/communities in the margins of the global rhetoric of LGBTQIA+ politics and activism;
The desire of nation-states/corporations to render populations controllable through media technologies of representation and datafication, and global/local protests against them;
Indigenous movements for control over how cultural artifacts and their images are circulated.
Questioning the fantasies of certitude and transparency in representation, we will attend to the activist and aspirational shaping of a different network of signification and freedom positioned against the compulsion to legibility. This involves highlighting geopolitical particularities, fragmented subjectivities, and technological transformations. Our conversation hopes to bring into view approaches that undo the sharp binary opposition between “being visible”—deemed desirable and positive—and “being invisible”—deemed undesirable and negating—in new currencies of representation and practice.
We acknowledge the necessity of weighing the geopolitical contexts that give rise to demands for legibility, while representing non-normative or creative semiotic practices that may be in tension or in conflict with each other. As well, we are committed to participating in and/or reflecting on forms of dissidence and mediation that refuse to be contained within dominant regimes of legibility and capture, with or without recourse to the language of “rights” and “identity.” We are interested in examples and arguments of imbricated partiality that call for historical and speculative readings of individual or transindividual desires, kinships, and collectivities that wish to elude capture by regimes of racialized and colonial capitalism. Our conversation examines the rationales, means, and the political stakes of these distinct refusals of discursive legibility.
We invite papers that foreground (but aren’t limited to):
Anticolonial and psychoanalytic approaches to opacity that emphasize psychic and social fragmentation;
Transnational and/or postcolonial feminist and queer approaches to archival ephemera, environmental crisis, and textual erasure that engage in strategic recovery work;
Ethnographies and cultural criticism focused on postcolonial, non-heteronormative, and working-class positions/communities in the margins of the global rhetoric of LGBTQIA+ politics and activism;
The desire of nation-states/corporations to render populations controllable through media technologies of representation and datafication, and global/local protests against them;
Indigenous movements for control over how cultural artifacts and their images are circulated.