5-8 December 1996
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Call for Papers and Session Proposals
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.
Rethinking MARXISM intends 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 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, 5 December and ending in early afternoon on Sunday, 8 December. There will be concurrent sessions, art/cultural events, and plenaries throughout the conference. We invite the submission of sessions that follow nontraditional 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.
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.
SUBMISSION OF PROPOSALS: Send proposals to Stephen Cullenberg, Department of Economics, University of California, Riverside, CA 92521, USA. Fax: 909/787-5685. The deadline for submission of proposals is 15 August 1996.