MLG-ICS 2024 // CAPITAL, IMPERIALISM, & RACISM // JUNE 11–15
SAINT JAMES UNITED CHURCH, MONTREAL (1435 City Councillors Street)
TUESDAY, JUNE 11
8:30–9 Coffee & Croissants
9–10:30 // The More Effective Evil: Liberal Counterinsurgency as Fascism
Soili Smith, "What We Already Know: Canadian Liberal Nationalism, the Underground Railroad, and the News"
Josh Ingram and Matthew Glover, "Agent Orwell: How Liberal Counterinsurgency Produces Fascism"
Erin R. Santana, "Sia Berhan and the Liberal Double-bind of Free Speech, Anti-Black, and Anti-Jewish Racisms"
Jason Boehm, "Teaching the Revolution: Against the Pedagogy of U.S. Liberal Fascism"
10:30–10:45 Break
10:45–12:15 // Reading Group: Politics of Race, Class, and Gender: Reading Claudia Jones and Angela Davis
Somak Mukherjee, Calla Winchell, Isabel Bartholomew
12:15–1:30 Lunch
1:30–3 // Fictions of Underdevelopment: Empire, Capital, and the Post/Colonial Novel
Alya Ansari, “From Company to Colony"
Carson Welch, “Novelist as Historian: Achebe, Conrad, and the Uses of the Colonial Past”
Chris Cañete Rodriguez Kelly, “Philippine Historical Consciousness and the Global Crisis of Authoritarian Nostalgia”
Liam Kruger, “On Late Colonial Style”
3–3:15 Break
3:15–4:45 // Reading Group: Imperialism and Reproduction
Viola Bao, Christine Okoth, Savannah Whaley
4:45–5 Break
5–6:30 // Commodities and Cargo, Slavery and Global Capital
Tom Laughlin, “Capitalist Slavery and Other Tributaries to World Accumulation”
Anisha Sankar, “On Abstractions: Marx, History, and Racial Slavery”
Camille Crichlow, “Theorising Racial Capitalism and Surveillance Capitalism from London’s Royal Dockyards: 1796-1807”
Rafael Lubner, “On Shipping Commodified Life: Captivity, Race, Value”
Stefan Yong, “Third World Shipping and the Bandung Era’s Maritime Horizon”
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 12
8:30–9 Coffee & Croissants
9–10:30 // Marxism and Zionism; Value and Mobility
Charles Finn, “The Roots of Zionism: A Marxist Analysis of the Imperialist Underpinnings of Zionist Settler Colonialism”
Jack Davies, “Superfluous Labor: The Settler Colonial ‘Turn’ in the Study of Palestine”
Jake Orbison, “So-called ‘Anti-Anti-Zionism’ and the Critique of Value”
Lewis Barnes, "Computation, Mobility, Value, Speed"
10:30-10:45 Break
10:45–12:15 // Reading Group: Fanon
David Austin, Carlos Velásquez, Matthew King, Nabiha Yahiaoui
12:15–1:30 Lunch
1:30–3 // Aesthetic Forms/Radical Forms
Joshua Harold Wiebe, “Rabble, Proletariat, Mass Ornament: three figures in conversation”
Savannah Whaley, “Performing Objecthood: Adrian Piper’s Catalysis”
Thomas Waller, “The Peripheral Avant-Garde: Neo-Concretism and the Time of Revolution”
Fredrick Doyle, “Racial Imagination in Brechtian and Method Acting”
Leo Deng, “Negative Marxist Artistry: Sartre, Adorno, & Althusser from Artistic Practice to Aesthetic Theory”
3–3:15 Break
3:15–4:45 // Reading Group: Torn Halves: Adorno, Political Economy and the Aesthetics of Race
Thomas Waller, Andy Peluzzo, Seb Boersma, Fintan Calpin, Josh Jewell, Rafael Lubner, Ed Graham, Sean O'Brien, Ali Suriel
4:45–5 Break
5–6:30 // Race, Class and Literary Form
Ryan M. Brooks, "Historical Fiction and Contemporary Exploitation: George Saunders’s ‘Liberation Day’"
Martin Aagaard Jensen, "Literature and the Testimonio"
Jap-Nanak Makkar, "Coetzee, Gordimer and the Other"
Brenda Tan, "Impersonality and Literary Form in Ngugu wa Thiong'O's Petals of Blood"
Andy John Haas, “Between Two Green Worlds: Claude McKay and the Problem-Romance of Black Marxism”
7:30–9:30 Book Launch, The Automatic Fetish
Neil Larsen, Colleen Lye, Chris Nealon, Bev Best
THURSDAY, JUNE 13
8:30–9 Coffee & Croissants
9–10:30 // Racialization, Valorization, Mediation
Paul Nadal, “Automation, Management Theory, and the Asian American Office Novel”
Shaoling Ma, “Surplus Military Labor and Indigenous Brides: Taiwan’s Double Displacement”
Seb Franklin, “Mechanical Slavery”
Christine Okoth, “Economic Planning and the Genres of African Socialism”
Sean O’Brien, “Racialized Foreclosure and the New Black Science Fiction”
10:30–10:45 Break
10:45–12:15 // Reading Group: Imperialism I: Imperialism of Our Time
Barbara Foley, Modhumita Roy, Kanishka Chowdhury
12:15–1:30 Lunch
1:30–3 // Imperialism II: Anti-Imperialism Today: State, Movement, or Party?
Tony O’Brien, “‘A Movement of Movements’ from the World Social Forum to Black Lives Matter”
Stuart Davis, “The ‘New Bandung’ Model: Multipolarity as Anti-Imperialist Strategy”
Pat Keeton, “Lenin’s ‘Organization of Revolutionaries’ and a New Kind of International Communist Party”
Respondent: Jean-Bernard Jean Louis
3–3:15 Break
3:15–4:45 // Reading group: Is Anti-Imperialism Dialectical? Reading Mao Reading Lenin Reading Hegel
Colleen Lye, Chris Nealon, G.S. Sahota
4:45–5 Break
5–6:30 // Inter(nationalism)
Tapji Garba, “On Che Guevara’s theories of International order and socialist transition”
Sydney To, “Vietnamese Existentialism and the Nation-state”
Thiti Jamkajornkeiat, “Left Third-Worldism from the “Peoples’ Bandung”: Afro-Asian Solidarity against Colonial-Capitalist Oppression”
Henry Schwartz, “Ethnofascism, racism and neocolonialism: India/ Israel”
FRIDAY, JUNE 14
8:30–9 Coffee & Croissants
9–10:30 // Grounding the Floating Signifier: Race, Place, and Capital
Rachel Goffe, David Austin, Beverly Mullings, Bryan Mukandi, FTC Manning
10:30–10:45 Break
10:45-12:15 // Reading Group: Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism
Stacy Douglas, Sarah Brouillette, Rebecca Schein, Justin Paulson, William Paris, Philip Kaisary
12:15–1:30 Lunch
1:30–3 // Capitalism and Racial Form in Contemporary Literature and Film
Sarika Chandra, Chris Chen, Amy De’Ath, Brian Whitener
3–3:15 Break
3:15–4:45 // Reading Group: Himani Bannerji
Brett Benjamin, Paul Stasi, Amie Zimmerman, Julian Mostachetti, Atrayee Guha, Robert Williams-Taylor
4:45–5 Break
5–6:30 // The Poetics of Intransigence
Ed Graham, “Far Hinterland Social Reproduction in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing”
Elena Gómez, “Resisting Colonial Water Poetics in Jazz Money and dg nanouk okpik”
Eleri Fowler, “Demands and Refusal in How to Wash a Heart”
Richie Daly, “A Blackened Saltwater Poethics - Strandings, the Sea and Trinidad and Tobago”
6:30–7:30 BUSINESS MEETING
SATURDAY, JUNE 15
8:30–9 Coffee & Croissants
9–10:30 // Roundtable: Subsumption, Infrastructure and Environmental Politics
Jordan B. Kinder, Thomas Lamarre, Darin Barney, Burç Köstem, Hannah Tollefson, Ingrid Diran
10:30–10:45 Break
10:45–12:15 // Reading Group: Infrastructure
Fred Carter, Jordan Kinder, Hannah Tollefson, Rob Jackson, Cassandra Troyan, Nessie Nankivell
12:15–1:30 Lunch
1:30–3 // Migration and Mobility in Fiction
Khadeeja Farooqui, “The Story in the Country, the Country in the Story: Reading Permanent Temporariness and Temporary Permanence in Short Stories from the GCC”
Joseph Sweetnam, “Form in Season of Migration to the North: Between Delinking and Dependency”
Josh Jewell, Violence, “Separation, and Figuration in Southern African Fiction”
Ian Maxton, “Toward a Fiction of Solidarity: Methodologies for the Novel Against Imperialism from G. to Diego Garcia”
Jette Gindner,
3–3:15 Break
3:15–4:45 // Marx in a World on Fire: Original Accumulation, Green Capital, and the Politics of Degrowth
John Maerhofer, Peter LaVenia, Jessica Hawkes, Shaun Gilbert
4:45–5 Break
5–6:30 // Congeal, Render, Slick, and Surplus
Naima Karczmar, “Encyclopedic Raciality: Geo-ethnographic articulation in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick”
Mark Soderstrom, “The City in the Colonial Cosmos: Imperialism and Urban Resistance in Recent Global Sf”
Abby Scribner, “‘All that is Meat Melts into Bone’: Marx, Meat Jelly, and Imperial Exchange in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend”
Yipu Su, “Surplus Labor on the Slave Ship in Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative”
7–9 BBQ United Church sanctuary (and parking lot)