"La Commune n’est pas morte…! / Commune’s Not Dead! "
Darmouth College (USA), October 10, 2019
A Conference in Conjunction with Nineteenth-Century French Studies no 49.3-4
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Description :
150 years on, in a context of environmental, economic, and socio-political crises spanning the planet, the legacy of the Paris Commune demands our attention as a model, a horizon, and perhaps an alternative to the on-going emergencies of everyday life in capitalist post-modernity, in the so-called aftermath of the “end of History.” As historical episode, the Paris Commune perhaps figures indeed as a political and historical parenthesis, emerging from the breakdowns of national and local order of the Année terrible (the Franco-Prussian War and subsequent collapse fo the Second Empire) and lasting all of 73 days. But as revolutionary event, it leaves in its wake an enduring image of history as an incomplete struggle, and of politics as the immanent possibility of the autrement contained within the socio-political structures and hierarchies of the order of the present: other forms of community, daily life, solidarity and sociability; other modes of agency and of political practices; other ways of being and of thinking (human) history. This event brings together scholars from across the world to discuss the afterlife of the Commune in US print and performance culture; the Commune and the politics of the Capitalocene; the Gilets jaunes movement and political poetics; visualizing the Commune and the rhetoric of bare life; and the historiography of the Commune in the 19th-21st centuries.
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Programme :
9:30: Coffee/Pastries, Hopkins Centre Faculty Lounge
Opening Remarks: Seth WHIDDEN, Robert ST.CLAIR
Morning Panel: 10:00-12:00
Chair: Robert ST.CLAIR
Jessica TANNER, UNC, Chapel Hill (Department of Romance Studies)
The Commune in the Age of the Capitalocene
Denis SAINT-AMAND, Université de Namur (Faculté de philosophie et de lettres)
La Commune demeure: L’imaginaire des Gilets jaunes
J. Michelle COUGHLIN, University of Manchester, UK (English and American Studies)
Reliving the Commune: American Women Radicals and the Figure of Revolution
Afternoon Panel: 2:30-4:30
Chair: Darrin MCMAHON
Quentin DELUERMOZ, Université de Paris 13 (Histoire contemporaine)
Commune, 1871: Present, Past, and Reverse
William Clare ROBERTS, McGill University (Department of Political Science)
A Barricade, Not a Government: Contrasting Views of Association in the Paris Commune
Katie HORNSTEIN, Dartmouth College (Department of Art History)
The Lion of Belfort, Max Ernst’s Une semaine de bonté, and Revolutionary Time
John MERRIMAN, Yale University (Department of History)
Respondent
Keynote : 5:00-6:00 - Carpenter 013
Kristin ROSS, New York University (College of Arts and Science)
The Seventh Wonder of the Zad