2007 CFP

The 9th Annual Conference of the Marxist Reading Group

"Moments of Futurity: From Present Conditions to Material(izing) Horizons"

Keynote speaker: Fredric Jameson

March 29-31 at the University of Florida

Underwritten as it is by narratives of progress, rhetorics of novelty, and the logic of speculation, capitalism asserts a monopoly on futurity, both as a semantic category and a material horizon. While globalization ideologues insist that history has ended and trumpet the present as the future (or, as Thomas Friedman and Merrill Lynch put it in 1999, "The World is Ten Years Old"), Marxism proposes a radically different narrative. The Ninth Annual Conference of the Marxist Reading Group investigates the future from a Marxist perspective and challenges Marxist scholars and activists to reclaim the category of futurity.

Marxist theory and criticism are saturated by a rhetoric of the historical: historical materialism, history as class conflict, the imperative to historicize. But what is the history of the future in Marxism - that is, how is the category of the future configured in various Marxisms? In what ways could an engagement with futurity, as a semantic, temporal, and material category, lead beyond the notorious theory/practice impasse? How do we look beyond the material conditions of the present to find material horizons? Answers to such questions can be located in a host of fields spanning the humanities and the social sciences, and they can be informed by a variety of theoretical dimensions: Can one historicize the future? Can dialectics reveal horizons? Can totalized mappings of the present also grasp at the future? Do utopian projects lead the way? Ultimately, this conference seeks papers that think the future via Marxist theory.

Fredric Jameson will provide the keynote address for this conference. The William A. Lane Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University, Jameson has been among the leading voices of Marxist theory for decades, and his contributions to literary and cultural theory have impacted the fields of literature and theory indelibly. He is the author of The Political Unconscious, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, and recently Archaeologies of the Future.

Possible topics include but are not limited to the following:

Historicizing futurity
Representations of futurity
The future and the literary
Rhetorics of futurity
Utopia
Science Fiction
The future of capitalism
The future of activism
The revolutionary class
Communism
The "end of history"
Globalization
Future(s) Markets
Marxism and New Media
The future as nostalgia
Nostalgia for the future
Resisting futurity