Conference Announcement:
Rethinking MARXISM announces an International Conference ....
POLITICS AND LANGUAGES OF CONTEMPORARY MARXISM
December 5--8 (Thursday--Sunday), 1996
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Call for Papers and Session Proposals
PURPOSE: The editors of Rethinking MARXISM announce the third in the series
of international conferences. The first two conferences, attended by over
one thousand persons each, brought together under a common tent many
different voices of the Left from around the world. "Marxism Now:
Traditions and Difference," held in 1989, created a forum where new,
heterogeneous directions in Marxism and the Left could be debated after the
end of orthodox uniformity. In 1992, the conference "Marxism in the New
World Order: Crises and Possibilities" confronted directly the
challenges--theoretical, organizational, and spiritual--which face the Left
and Marxism as the millennium nears.
The editors of Rethinking MARXISM intend this third conference on the
"Politics and Languages of Contemporary Marxism" to open new and creative
spaces for political, cultural and scholarly interventions. The global
restructuring of social relations now taking place (which some call a new
offensive of "capital"), and the accompanying new crises and forms of
resistance that, in a more or less systemic way, affect the lives of people
the world over, require a strategy of cooperative dialogue between and
among diverse Marxian and other communities of struggle. It is in the
dialectics of these varied notions and forms of community, and in the
struggles to wrestle them from the hegemony of bourgeois discourse, that
the future of Marxism lies. The purpose of "Politics and Languages of
Contemporary Marxism" is both to continue the ongoing dialogue among all
already existing Marxisms and to nurture the development of new visions of
community that will serve our shared hopes for a more ethical and
uncompromisingly humane world.
STRUCTURE: The conference will be held over four days, beginning at noon
on Thursday, December 5 and ending in early afternoon on Sunday, December
8. There will be concurrent sessions, art/cultural events, and plenaries
throughout the conference. We invite the submission of sessions that
follow non traditional formats and are open to dialogue among and between
presenters and audience, such as workshops and roundtables. We encourage
those working in areas which intersect with Marxism such as feminism,
cultural and literary studies, queer theory, postcolonial studies, and
around the issues of race and ethnicity, to submit proposals. We also
encourage the submission of sessions with all forms of artistic and
literary modes of meaning. The plenary sessions will be interspersed
throughout the conference and each plenary session will be limited to no
more than two speakers.
SPONSORSHIP: The conference is sponsored by Rethinking MARXISM: a
journal of economics, culture, and society.
LOGISTICS: The Conference will be held on the campus of the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst. Detailed information on hotel accommodations and
travel directions will be provided to all conference registrants.
PUBLICATIONS: Selected papers, poems, and other forms of presentation from
the conference will be published in Rethinking MARXISM and/or in a separate
edited volume of contributions.
REGISTRATION: Registration fees will be as follows. All conference
participants will be required to register.
Preregistration On Site
regular/low-income regular/low-income
Full conference $50/$30 $60/$40
two days $40/$25 $45/$30
one day $25/$15 $30/$15
SUBMISSION PROPOSALS: Send submission proposals to: Stephen Cullenberg,
Department of Economics, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521,
USA.
Fax: (909) 787-5685.
The deadline for submission proposals is August 15, 1996.