What is the legacy and current potential of the Cultural Left to ‘perform the possibility that the world can be otherwise’?

This workshop is part of the British Academy funded International Partnership and Mobility project between the University of Warwick and JNU. It is interested in comparative cross-national and cross-disciplinary understandings of what constitutes a Left cultural practice in opposition to capitalist ideology and the rise of the right, and also as a means of critique within the Left itself, in the past and in the present.

The term ‘Left’ is an umbrella term for a range of progressive cultural practices, ways of living and political positions. The manifestation and performance aspect of the project highlights our aim to consider cultural practices which are performative, but not necessarily actual performing arts.

Within this framework we seek to explore scenarios that have been unfolding through interplay between radical political thought and performative manifestations of Leftist cultures as embodied political, social, cultural and art practices.

Schedule

10.00 am – 10.15 Gathering/ Coffee

10.15- 10.30– Introduction of the project (Dr Silvija Jestrovic)

10.30 – 11.45 Panel I Affective Legacies of the Left

Chair: Dr Wallace McDowell (Theatre Studies, University of Warwick)

Dr Illan rua Wall (School of Law, University of Warwick): Our Revolting Mood

Dr Anna Hajkova (History, University of Warwick): Oranges, Donkeys, Communism: The transnational legacies of the Czechoslovak Interbrigadists

Break

11:45 – 13.15 Panel II Spaces of Dissent

Chair: Dr Susan Haedicke (Theatre Studies, University of Warwick)

Dr Swati Arora (Theatre Studies, University of Exeter): Scarred Geographies: Jana Natya Manch at ‘biyaasi number’ in Delhi

Dr Benjamin Smith (History, University of Warwick): From Choirboy to Guerrilla: Mario Menéndez and the Rise of Radical Journalism in Mexico, 1960-1974

13.15 – 14.00 Lunch

14.00 -15.30 Discussion: Between Theory and Practice: How to ‘perform the possibility that the world could be otherwise?

Chair: Prof. Shirin Rai (PAIS) & Dr Milija Gluhovic (Theatre) –Politics and Performance Network

Two pieces of reading will be circulated—Susan Buck-Morss essay ‘The Second Time as Farce…Historical Pragmatics and the Untimely Present’ and a brief interview with philosopher Srecko Horvat— to serve as our common point of departure to discus and link theories of the Left, our own research, and historical Leftist practices to the current political moment.

Anna Hajkova is an assistant professor of Modern European Continental History at the University of Warwick. Her dissertation Prisoner Society in the Terezín Ghetto, 1941-1945  was awarded the Irma Rosenberg Prize. She also received the Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship 2013. Her next project examines the histories of Central European leftist intellectuals in between 1930-1970.

Silvija Jestrovic is Reader in Theatre and Performance studies. She is author of Theatre of Estrangement: Theory, Practice Ideology and Performance, Space Utopia: Cities of War, Cities of Exile and PI on the Cultures of the Left project.

Wallace McDowell is Senior Teaching Fellow in the School of Theatre and Performance Studies at Warwick. His primary research is in Irish Theatre and the performance of gender and masculinities. Recent publications include Within These Walls: The Beaux Stratagem, the City of Derry and the 'Only Loyalist Theatre Producer in Ireland', in N. Holdsworth’s Theatre and National Identity: Re-Imagining Conceptions of Nation (Routledge, 2014), 'Overcoming Working-Class Ulster Loyalism's Restance to Theatricality after the Peace Process', Contemporary Theatre Review, 2013, ‘Staging the Debate: Loyalist-Britishness and Masculinities in the Plays of Gary Mitchell’, Studies in Ethnicities and Nationalism, 2009.

Shirin M. Rai is Professor in the department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick. She has written extensively on issues of gender, governance and development in journals such as Signs, Hypatia, New Political Economy, International Feminist Journal of Politics and Political Studies. She has consulted with the United Nations’ Division for the Advancement of Women and UNDP. She is a founder member of the South Asia Research Network on Gender, Law and Governance, and she was Director of the Leverhulme Trust programme on Gendered Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament (2007-2011). Her latest books include New Frontiers in Feminist Political Economy (with Georgina Waylen), Democracy in Practice: Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament (ed. Palgrave, 2014) and The Grammar of Politics and Performance (eds. with Janelle Reinelt, Routledge, 2015). Prof Rai is the co-Lead of the University of Warwick's Global Research Priority Programme on International Development.

Benjamin Smith is Reader of Latin American History University of Warwick. He is the author of The Roots of Conservatism in Mexico: Catholicism, Society, and Politics in the Mixteca Baja, 1750-1962 andPistoleros and Popular Movements: The Politics of State Formation in Postrevolutionary Oaxaca. His edited monograph (with Paul Gillingham) is Dictalanda: Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico, 1938-1968.

Illan rua Wall is an Associate Professor at the Wariwck Law School. He is author of Human rights and Constituent Power, founding editor of the blog criticallegalthinking.com. He is currently working on a book entitled Crowded Sovereignty.