Chair: Gretchen Murphy, University of Texas at Austin Ashley Moser, University of Konstanz Atelotopia: Kim Stanley Robinson and Flawed Futures Worth Fighting For Iria Gómez del Castillo Dávila, Instituto de Historia/Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas “A Kind of Queer Doing”: Exploring Postutopianism Through the Chicanx Borderlands Julian Rome, University of Michigan Trans Utopian Temporality
Dora Alcocer Walbey, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos Utopian Practices of Dwell by Walking K. Allison Hammer, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale Exuberant Embodiment: A Trans Utopia for an Unbearable Present Ian McIntosh, Indiana University, Indianapolis The Very First Pilgrimage, An Inspired Trajectory Out of Africa to Australia
Václav Zheng, he/his/him, Johns Hopkins University When did Utopianism and Historical Thinking Meet? Tracy Rutler, Penn State University Of Brains and Bodies: Enlightenment Medical Utopias Juan Pro, EEHA/IH, CSIC, Seville New Worlds for Fourierist Utopia: The Spanish-Mexican Connection / Nuevos mundos para la utopía fourierista: la conexión hispano-mexicana”
Juan Pro is coordinator of the Spanish research team HISTOPIA, director of the Revista de Estudios Utópicos [Journal of Utopian Studies] and coordinator of the Transatlantic Network for the Study of Utopias. He currently directs the UtopiAtlantica project (Transatlantic Utopias... Read More →
Friday October 18, 2024 8:30am - 10:00am EDT
Tulum C
Chair: Daniel Conway, Texas A&M University Francisco Pizarro Obaid, Universidad Diego Portales La Ciudad de los Césares: la utopía en las versiones literarias chilenas de Manuel Rojas, Luis Enrique Délano y Hugo Silva Christopher Irving, Beacon College The Elsewhere and Elsewhen of Le Guin's “Hainish Cycle” Csaba Toth, Carlow University B. Traven, Chiapas, and Utopian Longing
Professor of Philosophy and Humanities, Texas A&M University
My current research involves the use of films in the genre of science fiction to account for the factors that contribute to the normalization of genocide.People should talk to me about philosophy, politics, film, literature, genocide, and the global importance of the Fulbright mission... Read More →
Chair: Ashley Moser, University of Konstanz Kyle Rubini, Toronto Metropolitan University Rewriting the Utopian Gaybourhood Gretchen Murphy, University of Texas at Austin Charlie Jane Anders and the Queer Trans Postapocalyptic Utopia Amrita Chakraborty, Cornell University “Do You Really Want to Know?”: Mapping Queer, Trans, and Femme South Asian Futures and Counter-Histories
Chair: Elizabeth Schreiber-Byers, Library of Congress
Mark Allison, Ohio Wesleyan University Socialism after the 1848 (Non)Event: The Case of The Leader Arun Prakash Raj, Ambedkar University Delhi Articulating Utopia in Print: The Case of Dravida Nadu (1938-1963) John Barberet, Polk State College The “Mundus Inversus” as Critical Utopianism in Erasmus and Fourier
Donald Zarate, University of California at Riverside Here and Now: Black Perspectives on Antituopianism Claire Corbeaux, University of Rochester Decolonizing Utopia in Toni Morrison's Paradise andre carrington, University of California, Riverside Reveries of the Black Fantastic L. Lamar Wilson, Florida State University "The Autonomy of My Black Mind"/"Take Me Back, Burden Hill": Hybrid Essay & Poetic Response to James Baldwin's "Letter from a Region in My Mind" and The Evidence of Things Not Seen
PhD Student, University of California at Riverside
Donald Zárate is a second-year Ph.D. student in Political Science at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), specializing in Political Theory. His research centers on utopianism and social dreaming, examining how these ideas shape societal structures and individual aspirations... Read More →
Daniel Nunes, University of Ottawa Reading Engels’ Critique of Utopian Socialism Through the Lens of Miguel Abensour Matthew Hodgetts, Case Western Reserve University Fear and the “Uncritical” Utopias of the Alt-Right New Media Olivia Conway, Duke University The (Dystopian) Future is Female: Radical Optimism and Apocalyptic Literature
Daniel Nunes has recently started his PhD in philosophy at the University of Ottawa. His research focuses on utopian literature as a mode of political philosophy.
Francisco José Martínez Mesa, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, ¿El utopismo colonizado? El fin del futuro en un mundo acelerado
Guillem Compte Nunes, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), El futuro tecnológico según un colectivo hacktivista de la Ciudad de México: entre la utopía sociotecnológica y la desafección utópica
Araceli Mondragón, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Tiempo y alteridad en la cosmovisión del Mexico indígena
Francia Aguilar Salazar, Independent Scholar, Ghost in the Shell y El Dualismo de la Realidad: Technologia y Virtualidad
“Otherworldly Archives: Disability and the Paranormal in the Mexican Fin de Siècle” Susan Antebi is Professor of Latin American literature in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of Toronto. Her research and writing focus on disability and corporeality, especially in the contexts of contemporary and twentieth-century Mexican cultural production. She is the author of Embodied Archive: Disability in Post-Revolutionary Mexican Cultural Production (U of Michigan Press, 2021), which was awarded the 2021 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities and the 2022 LASA Mexico Section Prize for the Best Book in the Humanities. She is also the author of Carnal Inscriptions: Spanish American Narratives of Corporeal Difference and Disability (Palgrave-Macmillan 2009). Her co-edited volumes include The Matter of Disability: Materiality, Biopolitics, Crip Affect, with David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder (U of Michigan Press, 2019). Her work has been funded by a Social Sciences and the Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Grant and a Chancellor Jackman Faculty Research Fellowship. Her current research projects center on eugenic legacies in contemporary Mexico and the Americas, and on para-abnormal agency in literature and spectacle.
In her keynote, Dr. Antebi explores the unique function of archival documents or literary texts, which appear to offer themselves to the reader as objects, the embodiment of another world, or as a conduit to that world, one that is out of reach or possibly non-existent. In the moment of archival encounter, bodies and texts affect one another, inscribe each other with meaning, and emerge in relation to multiple objects and worlds within and beyond their immediate horizons. Immersion in this archive is sometimes akin to an otherworldly experience, one that might be cultivated by detailed attention to sensations in the body, to other objects in the room, to the feel and smell of the page, even at the risk of an appropriative, improper reading, or of escapism.
The archive in question assembles textual objects of fin de siècle and early twentieth-century Mexico, in which interest in the occult or paranormal frequently crosses paths with the pathologization of difference, as in the medical diagnosis, treatment, or punishment of hysteria and other conditions. I situate these documents at the nexus of what might be termed the “abnormal” and the “paranormal,” or madness and magic. A reading attuned to both the stigmatization of difference and the creative possibilities afforded by unconventional perceptions of the world allows us to conceive of a hopeful, desired otherwordliness—elsewhere and elsewhen—that is still always anchored in a unique materiality.
