CfP: Cultures of Uneven and Combined Development

Call for Papers: Cultures of Uneven and Combined Development 
University of Warwick UK; June 13, 2014
 Confirmed speakers: Professor Justin Rosenberg (The University of Sussex) Neil Davidson (The University of Glasgow) Professor Neil Lazarus (The University of Warwick)

 "From the universal law of unevenness thus derives another law which . . . we may call the law of combined development – by which we mean a drawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combining of separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms" (Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution).

 In recent decades the concept of 'uneven and combined development' (U&CD) has come to occupy an increasingly significant position in academic assessments of society and culture. The rise of globalized capitalism, the aggressive expansion of economic neoliberalism, and the associated emergence of global modernity as key concerns of cultural theory have all contributed to a resurgence in the deployment of this term. Together these developments therefore constitute a crucial evolution of the concept from its original inception in the early twentieth century writing of Leon Trotsky. This resurgence is witnessed, for instance, by works such as Michael Löwy's The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development (1982), Franco Moretti's Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to Garciěa Maěrquez (1996), Fredric Jameson's A Singular Modernity (2002) and a recent series of articles by political scientist Justin Rosenberg.

 The aim of this conference is to bring together scholars from across a variety of disciplines to examine 'uneven and combined development' and the issues arising from it: its genesis and history, its theoretical structure, its material manifestations and the renewed importance that it holds today. This is with the wider intention of cultivating a formally interdisciplinary approach to the topic, aiming to expand its boundaries as a methodology and field of study. Building upon the concept's political and economic foundations, we wish to focus in particular on cultural expressions of and reactions to the reality of a combined and uneven world-system – exploring how the existence of that system has been manifested in terms of cultural and social experience. Conceptualizing 'culture' in Raymond Williams' 'ordinary' sense, which encompasses the broad experience of everyday life (see Williams, 'Culture is Ordinary' in Resources of Hope, 1989), we welcome papers from a wide range of disciplines including (but not limited to) history, sociology, politics, literature, film and philosophy.

Questions participants might wish to consider as starting points include: What are the new material forms that U&CD takes under neoliberalism, and how do they initiate changes in the forms of their representation? What are the theoretical possibilities and problems occasioned by extending U&CD from the coexistence of modern (capitalist) and premodern modes of production to the fully capitalist world-system? How might the tendential logic of U&CD be characterized during the era of globalised capital? Where are we heading? How does U&CD qualify or intervene within contemporary debates about the future of capitalism? How does the uneven and combined character of development result in the coexistence of different temporalities (on a global and urban scale), and to what extent does this 'non-simultaneity' affect the forms of their cultural registration? What is the 'world-ecological' implication of present-day U&CD? How do logics of contemporary cultural production such as 'world literature' reflect and respond to the U&CD of capitalist modernity or postmodernity? We invite abstracts of no more than 300 words for papers of 20 minutes in length, accompanied by a short biographical note.

 Please email all abstracts and inquiries to the convenors, Dr Nesrin Degirmencioglu and Dr James Christie, at unevenandcombineddevelopment@gmail.com. The deadline for the receipt of all abstracts is Sunday the 16th of March 2014. Further information is also available on the conference website: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/events/culturesofunevenandcombineddevelopmentconferencejune2013
This conference is funded by the Institute of Advanced Study, the Humanities Research Centre, The Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, and The Department of Politics and International Studies (P.A.I.S.)