After Autonomy: Toward a Decolonial Aesthetics and the Question of Minor Relationalities
The conference, organized by Katja Diefenbach, Çiğdem Inan, Ruth Sonderegger and Pablo Valdivia Orozco, is dedicated to the question of what social and political potential lies in aesthetic practices to resist the manifold violence of racial capitalism.
This conference is devoted to the reconsideration and reinvention of the social and political potentials of aesthetic practices that resist racial capitalism's manifold structures of power. We are well aware of the ambivalent — if not downright violent — role that the discourse of Western aesthetics played in the constitution and justification of colonial-capitalist nation-states and their dynamics of subjectivation, whose core values are based on possessive universalisms as well as racial, class, and gender hierarchies.
Nevertheless, we believe that any philosophical reflection that aspires to formulate radical alternatives to racial capitalism and colonial modernity needs to be based upon a reconsideration of the an/aesthetic, the un/sensible, and the im/perceptible. In focusing on these concepts, we not only wish to explore the oppressive grammar of Western aesthetics that excluded myriads of aesthetic practitioners and deemed their practices as unaesthetic or insensible.
We also suggest reinventing aesthetic relationality as a broader and thoroughly political issue, which in turn demands a reframing of the concept of politics by including non-autonomous, disseminated, or fugitive practices, the excess of affects and percepts, the invention of minoritarian archives, and the world’s multiple temporalities and spatialities.
The aim of our conference is to discuss articulations of a minor aesthetic that draws on poststructuralist Marxisms and affect theories as well as queer feminist, decolonial, and Black radicalisms, and connects them in ever singular constellations that defy totalizing closures or universalizations from above.
The conference program can be found here: https://accumulation-race-aesthetics.org/after-autonomy/
Speakers: Siraj Ahmed (CUNY Graduate Center, New York), Maria Chehonadskih (Queen Mary University of London), Encarnación Gutiérrez-Rodríguez (Goethe University, Frankfurt/M.), Laura Harris (Tisch School of the Arts, New York), Anja Sunhyun Michaelsen (Humboldt University Berlin), Amber Musser (CUNY Graduate Center, New York).
Organized by: Katja Diefenbach, Çiğdem Inan, Pablo Valdivia Orozco, Ruth Sonderegger (IKW)
Research project: Perception, Jurisdiction, and Valorization in Colonial Modernity. On the Nexus of Accumulation, Race, and Aesthetics.
Schedule:
Thursday
11:15 - 11:45 h
Welcome with tea and coffee
11:45-12 h
Introduction to the conference by Katja Diefenbach, Çiğdem Inan, Ruth Sonderegger, and Pablo Valdivia
12-13:30 h
Encarnacion Gutierrez Rodriguez
Countering Necropolitical Social Reproduction: Decolonial mourning and relational ontology
Moderated by Çiğdem Inan
13:30-14:30 h
Lunch break/Mensa
14:30-16 h
Siraj Ahmed
Textuality, Genocide, Liberation
Moderated by Pablo Valdivia
16-16:30 h
Coffee break
16:30-18 h
Laura Harris
What Remains and Sustains: In the Interstices of New York City in the 1970s
Moderated by Ruth Sonderegger
Friday
10 h
Welcome with tea and coffee
10:30-12 h
Anja Sunhyun Michaelsen
Rethinking the Archive from Affect: A case study
Moderated by Ruth Sonderegger
12-12:15 h
Coffee break
12:15-13:45 h
Amber Jamilla Musser
Thinking the Body-Place Through Kiyan Williams
Moderated by Çiğdem Inan
13:45–15 h
Lunch break in Mensa
15–16:30 h
Maria Chehonadskih
‘Every Construction Regroups the World’: Sight, Sense, Point of view, and the decolonial notions of class in the Soviet Avant-Garde
Moderated by Katja Diefenbach