Interdisciplinary seminar series 2007-2008

The Département d’études anglaises and the CÉRIUM jointly present a series of interdisciplinary seminars that explore the relations among political, literary, and broader cultural representations of individual and collective security and insecurity. This series reflects the strong and innovative commitment, within the Département d’études anglaises, to the pursuit of new paradigms for the study of literary and cultural production.

Traditional discourses of security that take as their point of departure the stability of sovereign, national borders tend to focus on what are perceived to be the external threats posed by terror, aggression, and religious fundamentalism. Such threats are seen as impediments to civilization, development, and progress. Yet, the preoccupation with the production and circulation of discourses of fear and security must also be read as a reflection of a profound insecurity at the heart of our global modernity. Thus, fiction, film, and new media representations of in/security often challenge unacknowledged cultural fantasies and the continuity of received traditions, histories, and ethnic and religious affiliations. Often, they challenge not only the faith in a seemingly unequivocal identity but the unquestionable value of identity and history as the founding categories of human subjectivity per se. By drawing attention to how insecurity functions as a productive site of public and cultural life, these discourses render visible the global effects of alterity, uncertainty, and transcultural forms of belonging.

In an effort to foster dialogue between these emergent culturalist approaches and the more established approaches associated with the social sciences, this seminar series will explore, from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, the ambivalences and contradictions of competing, contemporary narratives of human security and insecurity.

Thursday September 27, 2007 from 12 noon - 2:00 p.m.
room 550-05, 3744 Jean-Brillant (lunch served)
The Power and Pathology of Security: Creating a New Global Agenda for the 21st Century. James Der Derian, Director, Global Security Program, Watson Institute for International Studies (Brown U.).
Tuesday November 27, 2007 from 12 noon - 2:00 p.m.
room 550-05, 3744 Jean-Brillant (lunch served)
La sécurisphère: une perspective empirique plurielle de la production de sécurité.
Benoit Dupont, Chaire de recherche du Canada en sécurité, identité et technologie, École de criminologie, Université de Montréal.
Thursday, January 24, 2008 from 12 noon - 2:00 p.m.
room 550-05, 3744 Jean-Brillant (lunch served)
Suspended on a Stake: From Apocalyptic Discourses to Poetics of Siege
Najat Rahman, Professeure agrégée, Département de littérature comparée, Université de Montréal.
Thursday, March 13, 2008 from 12 noon - 2:00 p.m.
room 550-05, 3744 Jean-Brillant (lunch served)
System Failure: Oil, Insecurity and Disaster
Imre Szeman, Senator, Chair of Globalization and Cultural Studies, McMaster University.
Thursday, April 17, 2008 from 12 noon - 2:00 p.m.
room 550-05, 3744 Jean-Brillant (lunch served)
Insécurité linguistique et rencontres barbares
Mireille Rosello, Chair of the Program of Comparative Studies, University of Amsterdam.
Thursday, May 15, 2008 from 12 noon - 2:00 p.m.
room 550-05, 3744 Jean-Brillant (lunch served)
The Disasters of War; On Inimical Life
Ian Baucom, Chair, Department of English, Duke University.

The Power and Pathology of Security: Creating a New Global Agenda for the 21st Century

James Der Derian, Director, Global Security Program, Watson Institute for International Studies (Brown U.).

Thursday September 27, 2007 from 12 noon - 2:00 p.m.
room 550-05, 3744 Jean-Brillant (lunch served)

Nation-states are beset by new global forces (WMD’s, transnational terrorism, panoptic surveillance), transborder flows (financial, population, environmental, viral), international regimes (tribunals, advocacy, sanctions) and complex networks (media, criminal, terrorist). The ubiquity and velocity of media-driven global events further undermine state-centric efforts to manage global security. Security issues can no longer be confined to a single domain (the individual, state, or system), nor comprehended by a single field of study (like psychology, political science, or international relations). Exceeding comprehension and remediation by single actors, disciplines, or beliefs, security needs multi-disciplinary, multi-perspectival, multi-national as well as multi-media approaches. Global Security – in the broadest sense of how we understand, manage, and better an endangered world – has become the most pressing challenge of the 21st century.

La sécurisphère : une perspective empirique plurielle de la production de sécurité

Benoit Dupont, Chaire de recherche du Canada en sécurité, identité et technologie, École de criminologie, Université de Montréal.

Tuesday November 27, 12 noon - 2:00 p.m.
room 550-05, 3744 Jean-Brillant (lunch served)

Cette présentation aura pour objectif de montrer à quel point la production de sécurité dans les sociétés modernes (quels que soient leur stade de développement) obéit à des logiques complexes d’acteurs pluriels qui remettent en cause le monopole de l’État sur l’exercice de la force légitime. Après avoir présenté les grands principes directeurs de la gouvernance contemporaine de la sécurité, on se servira de données empiriques recueillies à Montréal au cours des trois dernières années pour illustrer comment les acteurs institutionnels publics, privés et hybrides se structurent en de véritables réseaux de sécurité interdépendants. Cette sécurisphère possède un certain nombre de caractéristiques émergentes que l’on peut analyser à l’aide des outils théoriques et méthodologiques de plusieurs sciences sociales comme la criminologie, la science politique, la sociologie, l’économie, la géographie ou encore la psychologie.

Suspended on a Stake: From Apocalyptic Discourses to Poetics of Siege

Najat Rahman, Professeure agrégée, Département de littérature comparée, Université de Montréal.

Thursday, January 24, 2008 from 12 noon - 2:00 p.m.
room 550-05, 3744 Jean-Brillant (lunch served)

Hegemonic expressions of insecurity have often taken the specific form of an apocalyptic vision closely linked to political power with evocations of inevitable endings and necessary destruction, where humans are subject to immeasurable violence and are unable to intervene. The paper will address two questions: How do discourses of apocalypse translate into states of siege? To what extent do poetics of siege, literally under siege, put the "siege under siege," as Mahmoud Darwish would have it, as they call into question distinctions of inside/outside, exposing political and poetic violence, as well as bearing the fragile force of poetry?

System Failure: Oil, Insecurity and Disaster

Imre Szeman, Senator, Chair of Globalization and Cultural Studies, McMaster University.

Thursday, March 13, 2008 from 12 noon - 2:00 p.m.
room 550-05, 3744 Jean-Brillant (lunch served)

What are the dominant discourses through which we have narrated the coming end of oil? And which, if any, offer the imaginative resources to adequately deal with what will necessarily amount to a wholesale change in our political, social and cultural circumstances? In this paper, I assess the three dominant narratives concerning what is to be done about the disaster of oil circulating today: strategic realism, techno-utopianism, and eco-apocalypse. One of the most significant sources of insecurity today is the fate of the energy source on which we rely. Beyond the demand that we modify our behaviour as consumers, this presentation will think through the potential futures that each discourse on the end of oil might allow us to conceptualize.

Insécurité linguistique et rencontres barbares

Mireille Rosello, Chair of the Program of Comparative Studies, University of Amsterdam.

Thursday, April 17, 2008 from 12 noon - 2:00 p.m.
room 550-05, 3744 Jean-Brillant (lunch served)

Un des topoi qui circule dans la littérature et le cinéma contemporain amalgame violence et incompréhension. L'hypothèse implicite que font les films à grand spectacle comme Babel est que les différences linguistiques et culturelles sont à la source des difficultés de communication entre les sujets globalisés et que cette incompréhension fait basculer les dialogues de sourds et les malentendus dans un cycle de violence ou de terreur difficile ensuite à interrompre.

D'autres films, au contraire, s'intéressent au potentiel critique et parfois réparateur qui s'exprime dans ce que l'on pourrait appeler des rencontres barbares. En quête d'une multilangue de la globalisation, ces œuvres, souvent mineures ou du moins sans ambitions commerciales globales, analysent les effets de ce qu'on pourrait appeler l'insécurité linguistique (Bentolila 2007). Leur originalité est de ne pas se contenter d’imaginer que l’insécurité linguistique affecte seulement des sujets minoritaires qui n'ont pas accès a la langue nationale standard (les gosses des banlieues, les immigrants), mais aussi les locuteurs censés être dominants et qui sont confrontés à leur propre "barbarité" face à ce qu'on voudrait croire être la barbarité des autres.

Sans célébrer, ce serait sans doute naïf, un nouveau "barbarisme positif," certains cinéastes s’exercent à un genre nouveau: le film d’aventure linguistique au cours duquel s’inventent de nouveaux pèlerinages vers de nouvelles valeurs à partager et à définir.

The Disasters of War; On Inimical Life

Ian Baucom, Chair, Department of English, Duke University.

Thursday, May 15, 2008 from 12 noon - 2:00 p.m.
room 550-05, 3744 Jean-Brillant (lunch served)

This talk takes as its point of departure Kant’s stunning assertion that “[t[he rights of a state against an unjust enemy are unlimited in quantity or degree” (170): an assertion that would seem to contradict Kant’s stated desire to establish a condition of “international right.”

Kant defines the “unjust enemy” as “[s]omeone whose publicly expressed will, whether expressed in word or in deed, displays a maxim which would make peace among nations impossible and would lead to a perpetual state of nature if it were made into a general rule.” Who precisely qualifies, by this definition, as an unjust enemy? What is this unjust enemy’s place in the history of war, particularly the history of imperial war? What role has the unjust enemy been made to play in the long modern history of law-making and law-preserving violence? What connections might the unjust enemy, and the exceptional legal space surrounding this figure, have to those accounts of the state of exception through which writers like Giorgio Agamben have been attempting to make sense of our contemporary experiences of law, violence, and sovereignty? What lines might there be running back from the appearance of this figure in Kant’s late eighteenth-century text to earlier attempts to formulate a law of war and forward to the present appearance (or-reappearance) of the unjust enemy in the guise of the unprivileged, belligerent, and unlawful enemy posited within the framework of the current “war on terror”?

Pour commentaires ou information : info-etang@umontreal.ca
Page mise à jour le 27-08-2008

Département d'études anglaises - FAS / UdeM