The United Students Society

(The Department of American Literature, University of Łódź)

invites you to participate in its 8th student conference:

All Lives Matter?

Tokenism, Universalization and Containment

Saturday, 1 June 2019

The Department of Philology, University of Łódź

Keynote speaker:

dr Justyna Stępień (University of Szczecin)

With the advent of new Black activism, aligned under the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, numerous white liberal intellectuals protested the supposedly exclusive slogan and attempted to substitute it with the statement #AllLivesMatter. In her 2016 book Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway comments on this “sorry spectacle”, considering it “an effort to delegitimize [#BlackLivesMatter] with false universal kinship”. Over the past century such universalizing gestures have been repeatedly performed in response to many cultural crises and revolutionary moments, and opposed by various grassroots organizations, from the Civil Rights Movement to ACT UP.

Strategies and discourses of containment inform the current cultural moment to a great degree. From the box office triumphs of non-white-heterosexual-male superheroes to discussions of inclusivity in award systems, the status quo is apparently being challenged, but do these cases exemplify actual shifts in power relations, or are they merely marketing ploys, aimed at monetizing diversity and diffusing dissent? How do they connect to the current economic and political situation? And if, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr, “there is a critical distinction between a modest start and tokenism,” then into which category do the current debates fall?

“All Lives Matter? Tokenism, Universalization and Containment” is the eighth annual conference organized by the United Students Society, an extracurricular reading group under the auspices of the Department of American Literature, University of Łódź. We aim to discuss the legacy of the cultural revolution in the latter half of the 20th century in the light of the current socio-political situation in the United States and Canada. We invite undergraduate and graduate students (including doctoral candidates) to submit abstracts on subjects related to US American and Canadian literature and culture that include, but are not limited to, the following:

·       Cultural representations of women, Blacks, queers, Latinx and other non-WASP groups

·       Strategies and discourses of containment

·       The issue of inclusivity/exclusivity in the 21st century

·       Contemporary re-readings of cultural texts in the context of inclusivity/exclusivity debates

·       The modern culture of assembly and collective action

·       Interrelations between political activism and cultural texts

·       The role of marketing in diffusion of dissent

·       Otherness and intersectionality in literature and/or popular culture

Please send an abstract of 150-200 words and a bio of up to 100 words to the following address: universalkinshipconference@gmail.com. The deadline for submissions is March 31, 2019. There is no conference fee.