Rethinking the Political: Narrative, Protest and Fiction in the 21st Century

The second annual CAPONEU conference, held at the University of Brighton

The first decades of the 21st century have witnessed a fundamental rethinking of politics and of the political. Rather than begin with universal theories of the polis in the abstract, contemporary theorists focus on how dominant notions of the political depended upon racist and gender based violence, the destruction of the planet and of those lives that do not conform the proper bounds of the polis. For many decolonial and black pessimist theorists any common ontology of the political fails to recognise the coloniality of Being (Wynter 2015) constitutive of life in the polis, and the human. Likewise, for queer critics of identity politics, bodies and selves are ‘fragmented, unfinished, broken beyond-repair forms’ (Halberstam 2018) that resist any common ontology. Despite their radically different starting points these accounts all view politics as a contested and contingent space that concerns both the drawing of borders, and the contestation of the borders drawn. They point to the moments of rhetorical and sometimes violent excess that betray the contingency, and the inequalities, of political orders. At this conference we aim to think the political from a starting point outside the long history of ‘the polis’ and its various declensions. Instead we think politics in terms of care, practice, and the enactment of an equality that is never finally realised.

Recordings of the Keynote Speakers and Roundtable 

• Professor Moya Lloyd: Radical Corporeal Politics: Flesh as a Locus of Political Struggle
• Professor Alan Finlayson: A Hero’s Journey? Ideological Entrepreneurs and Reactionary Digital Politics
• Dr German Primera: Colonial Biopolitics and the Arc of Refusal: Rethinking Grammars of Resistance
• Roundtable: Can We Theorise the Political?