State Forms and Forming States: A 2-day presentation

Two afternoons with The Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture

In a two-part presentation, the Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture will share our collective research on states: states of governmentality, states of matter, states of being. States move through us, states congeal borders, states govern, states violate, states intervene, states organize abandonment, states let die. States also signal a condition of being–states of emergency, states of grace, states of matter, statelessness. What a sorry state you’re in! There are corrupt states, failed states, and disordered states of the economy. In many “state” formations, stability is revered. We challenge its troubling promise to bind places and peoples together, to curate state feelings, while attending to the ways in which groups gather to diffuse and refuse boundaries in altered states. Together, our panels suggest that when states transform, perhaps it is a revolution or perhaps–it is alchemy.

The project is divided into two halves:

First part: STATE CURATORS
Saturday, May 21, 4 to 6 pm US and Canada EDT / 8 to 10 pm GMT

“State Curators,” takes up histories of sovereignty and governmentality, and the relationship between knowledge, culture, and the state. Moving across the Mexico-Texas border, colonial India and Reconstruction America, Harlem and postcolonial Algeria and Cuba, it looks at state-associated actors from social scientists to missionaries to poets.

Second part: FLUID STATES
Sunday, May 22, 4 to 6 pm US and Canada EDT / 8 to 10 pm GMT

“Fluid States,” considers the inherent instabilities of sovereign states and states of matter, lingering on contemporary texts and objects that are in fluid states, with fuzzy borders and internal incoherence–at times evading capture and at others, facilitating capitalist exchange.

THE YALE WORKING GROUP ON GLOBALIZATION AND CULTURE http://wggc.yale.edu/ is an interdisciplinary cultural studies laboratory that has been practicing collective research at Yale University since 2003. Over the years, we have presented  work at numerous cultural studies conferences as well at the Marxist Education Project, the Left Forum, Occupy Boston, and the World Social Forum. Projects have been published as “Going into Debt,” online in Social Text’s Periscope, and as “Spaces and Times of Occupation” in Transforming Anthropology; a collective interview regarding “Matters of Life and Death” appeared in Revue Française d’Études Américaines.

 THE CURRENT MEMBERS OF WGGC: Aanchal Saraf,  Damanpreet Pelia, Ever Osorio, Jessica Marion Modi, Kelvin Ng, Lucero Estrella, Maru Pabón, Michael Denning, and Monique Flores Ulysses

The current members work in African-American studies,  American studies,  Latinx studies, history, literary criticism, and women’s, gender and sexuality studies.