Welcome from the CSA President
October 14, 2020
Dear Cultural Studies Association Members,
I hope this finds you, your families, and your friends well. I know we are all preoccupied with pressing matters, from the health crisis to defending Black lives to urgent political battles. I know that there’s much we don’t know right now—about who will be elected, about whether some of us will be employed next year, about whether others of us will be allotted travel funds from our institutions. What I hope we do know is that the annual CSA conference allows us to come together to think through and theorize what matters most to us. Stuart Hall, writing about AIDS, spoke of the “privileged capacity” of cultural studies in times of crisis:
Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God's name is the point of cultural studies? What is the point of the study of representations, if there is no response to the question of what you say to someone who wants to know if they should take a drug and if that means they'll die two days later or a few months earlier? At that point, I think anybody who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little we've been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. If you don't feel that as one tension in the work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook. On the other hand, in the end, I don't agree with the way in which this dilemma is often posed for us, for it is indeed a more complex and displaced question than just people dying out there. The question of AIDS is an extremely important terrain of struggle and contestation. In addition to the people we know who are dying, or have died, or will, there are the many people dying who are never spoken of. How could we say that the question of AIDS is not also a question of who gets represented and who does not? AIDS is the site at which the advance of sexual politics is being rolled back. It's a site at which not only people will die, but desire and pleasure will also die if certain metaphors do not survive, or survive in the wrong way. Unless we operate in this tension, we don't know what cultural studies can do, can't, can never do; but also, what it has to do, what it alone has a privileged capacity to do. It has to analyze certain things about the constitutive and political nature of representation itself, about its complexities, about the effects of language, about textuality as a site of life and death. Those are the things cultural studies can address.
Hall gives us permission to be theorists as well as activists; to step out of the street protest to consider what it means. For our 2021 conference, we’ve selected a theme that will let us flex our intellectual muscles and thus bring us together more powerfully. “Anti-Bodies” invites us to consider bodies and resistance from all possible perspectives.
Our 2020 conference was quickly reconfigured to be virtual at the peak of the pandemic. Although we had hoped to be in person in Chicago in 2021, we will once again hold a virtual conference, from June 10 to 12. We’ll miss seeing you all face to face, but we can capitalize on everything we learned from the last meeting to hold a wonderful event. It also means that everyone will be able to participate, no matter how far away or how quarantined they may be.
Submissions are now welcome on our CSA website. Early bird registration rates currently apply. If you had a paper accepted for 2020 that you didn’t present, your acceptance extends to 2021.
I’d like to thank the Program Committee for putting together such a rich cfp. I hope it inspires you to apply. Please share widely.
Thank you,
Helen Kapstein
Cultural Studies Association President
Dear Cultural Studies Association Members,
I hope this finds you, your families, and your friends well. I know we are all preoccupied with pressing matters, from the health crisis to defending Black lives to urgent political battles. I know that there’s much we don’t know right now—about who will be elected, about whether some of us will be employed next year, about whether others of us will be allotted travel funds from our institutions. What I hope we do know is that the annual CSA conference allows us to come together to think through and theorize what matters most to us. Stuart Hall, writing about AIDS, spoke of the “privileged capacity” of cultural studies in times of crisis:
Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God's name is the point of cultural studies? What is the point of the study of representations, if there is no response to the question of what you say to someone who wants to know if they should take a drug and if that means they'll die two days later or a few months earlier? At that point, I think anybody who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little we've been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. If you don't feel that as one tension in the work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook. On the other hand, in the end, I don't agree with the way in which this dilemma is often posed for us, for it is indeed a more complex and displaced question than just people dying out there. The question of AIDS is an extremely important terrain of struggle and contestation. In addition to the people we know who are dying, or have died, or will, there are the many people dying who are never spoken of. How could we say that the question of AIDS is not also a question of who gets represented and who does not? AIDS is the site at which the advance of sexual politics is being rolled back. It's a site at which not only people will die, but desire and pleasure will also die if certain metaphors do not survive, or survive in the wrong way. Unless we operate in this tension, we don't know what cultural studies can do, can't, can never do; but also, what it has to do, what it alone has a privileged capacity to do. It has to analyze certain things about the constitutive and political nature of representation itself, about its complexities, about the effects of language, about textuality as a site of life and death. Those are the things cultural studies can address.
Hall gives us permission to be theorists as well as activists; to step out of the street protest to consider what it means. For our 2021 conference, we’ve selected a theme that will let us flex our intellectual muscles and thus bring us together more powerfully. “Anti-Bodies” invites us to consider bodies and resistance from all possible perspectives.
Our 2020 conference was quickly reconfigured to be virtual at the peak of the pandemic. Although we had hoped to be in person in Chicago in 2021, we will once again hold a virtual conference, from June 10 to 12. We’ll miss seeing you all face to face, but we can capitalize on everything we learned from the last meeting to hold a wonderful event. It also means that everyone will be able to participate, no matter how far away or how quarantined they may be.
Submissions are now welcome on our CSA website. Early bird registration rates currently apply. If you had a paper accepted for 2020 that you didn’t present, your acceptance extends to 2021.
I’d like to thank the Program Committee for putting together such a rich cfp. I hope it inspires you to apply. Please share widely.
Thank you,
Helen Kapstein
Cultural Studies Association President
