Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

6T
Freedom, Justice and Loss Beyond Liberal Paradigms (Chair, TBA)
In this panel we address limitations of dominant liberal conceptions of freedom, justice and loss. At the same time
we seek to push beyond critique to identify and explore alternate modes for engaging with these concepts, in
particular those offered in artistic, performative and ritual forms. This we argue not only highlights the inadequacies
of current thinking about what it means to be free, to grieve, and to seek redress, but also opens up the possibility of
more transformative social and political imaginaries.
Kiran Grewal
Collective Love as Public Freedom: Kristeva, Gandhi, and Idle No More
The term “free” has been traced by etymologists to an Indo-European root meaning “love.” In this paper I
suggest that the connection between freedom and love might be found in danced rituals of collective love as
public freedom. Taking up the connection between freedom and love in the work of Hannah Arendt, I argue
that collective love is a form of public freedom rooted in philoxenia: friendship that includes the normally
excluded, the marginal and oppressed, in which hierarchies of status and power are overturned. I draw on
Mohandas Gandhi and Julia Kristeva to argue that philoxenia requires the capacity for being the other, and
the capacity to mourn the loss of the mother. And I trace these themes through an analysis of the round
dances that have served as the heart of the Indigenous Idle No More movement.
Magdalena Zolkos
Ritual as Subaltern Politics in Post-War Sri Lanka
Following the end of the decades long civil war in 2009 Sri Lanka has been in a process of coming to terms
with the past and seeking to establish a peaceful post-war order. In a country ravaged by decades of political
violence, by natural disaster and continued communal division and socio-economic disadvantage what does
it mean to speak about reconciliation, transition and justice? While political elites within and outside of the
country debate the best institutional response(s), in this paper I focus on concurrent processes occurring at
the level of local communities. These take the form of ritual worship and performance, the revival of
mythical pasts and the re-articulation of traditional stories with contemporary twists. Predominantly the
domain of more disadvantaged or marginal(ised) members of the Sri Lankan polity, these practices I argue
present an often overlooked or undervalued setting for the articulation of alternate social and political
narratives.
Allison Weir Thinking Loss beyond the Logic of the Exchangeable: Idioms of Auto-destructiveness and
Incalculability in Contemporary Art
How can we think about loss and dispossession beyond the logic of the exchangeable – or, what Catherine
Malabou calls “the law of generalized equivalence,” where “everything is equal to everything [else],”
whereby any harm is rendered, potentially, compensable and rectifiable. That is true of liberal institutional
response to wartime dispossession as state duty to recompense rights violations, which reduce loss to that
which is, always and fully, compensable and rectifiable. Seeking alternative idioms of loss, I turn to two postwar
European artists, Gustav Metzger and Magdalena Abakanowicz. From the work of Metzger I take the
concept of auto-destructive art as a marker of preoccupation with the unrepresentability of loss and as an
attempt to enact, or enunciate, loss through self-destructive gesture; from the work of Abakanowicz I take
the idea of quantities so large that, in her words, “counting no longer makes sense.” The idioms of loss
proposed in these artistic productions – the auto-destructive and the incalculable – offer an important
alternative to the liberal restitutive discourse.
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