CFP: Illustrating Anarchy and Revolution: Mexican Legacies of Global Change (Due 9/1)

Illustrating Anarchy and Revolution: Mexican Legacies of Global Change
Center for Mexican American Studies – UT Austin
February 5-7, 2014

Keynote Address: Dr. Claudio Lomnitz, Columbia University
Author of The Return of Ricardo Flores Magón: Ideology and Absence in the Mexican Revolution (Zone Books).

This conference traces various efforts to imagine a better, more inclusive political future, especially efforts rooted in the anarchist legacy of the Mexican Revolution. In 1903, the Flores-Magón brothers declared, “La Constitucion ha muerto” on a banner which they hung outside the offices of the anti-Porfirista newspaper El Hijo del Ahuizote in Mexico City. The routes of exile they traveled following this watershed proclamation created opportunities for insurgent Mexicans and their sympathizers – first, on the Texas-Mexico border and then across the globe – to form radical communities through a variety of media. Of particular interest is how these “sueños de libertad” galvanized communities at the turn of the century in cities ranging from San Antonio, Laredo, Chicago, Los Angeles, and St. Louis to Alcoy, Barcelona, and Moscow. With a mixed media exhibition at Mexic-Arte, a Fine Arts Museum housing works by Mexican and Mexican American artists in downtown Austin, and an academic conference at UT Austin co-sponsored by the Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS) and the Hijo de Ahuizote Museum-Archive in Mexico City, we wish to revisit these early 20th century articulations of transnational collaboration as we discuss their anarchist spirit and global legacies.

We seek papers that examine these early 20th century utopian, revolutionary networks both in the U.S./Mexico Borderlands and beyond in visual, textual, historical, archival, performative, digital, activist, literary and other media. We are especially interested in papers that foreground and analyze the materiality of these media. What can these historical, visual, and literary tensions tell us about alternative histories of revolutions, gender, race, sexuality, and social class? How can the recovery and/or reintroduction of such texts via digital media or contemporary art articulate queer, feminist, or gender perspectives that might be lacking in traditional accounts of the transformative historical moment that was the early 20th century? How do anarchist archives create collective memories and imagined communities, past and present?

Themes we wish to consider include the following:

• Anarchy
• Anarchism and marginalized groups
• Typographies of revolutionary movements
• Digital media and the repurposing of revolutionary texts
• Anarchist networks and the politics of scale
• Anarchism, Marxism, and labor movements
• The influence of the Mexican Revolution in anti-racist and anti-imperialist political struggles
• Pedagogy and Anarchism
• Anarchism and Religion
• Prison, incarceration, political prisoners, and anarchist movements
• Geographical nodes of anarchist activity (Leavenworth, St. Louis, Alcoy, Barcelona, Mexico City).
• Fear, conspiracy, and the Red Scare
• Anarchism and fascism
• Anarchist print culture
• The militarization of borders
• Counterinsurgency and anarchist movements
• Legislation against anarchy in the U.S., Mexico, and beyond – including The Espionage Act, The Selective Service Act of 1917, and The Sedition Act of 1918
• The criminalization of war dissenters
• Confluences of Anarchist and Indigenous struggles (contemporary and historic)
• Critiques of leadership, political organizing and social movements
• Anarchy and women’s rights
• Queering the anarchist legacy
• Anarchist and revolutionary failures
• Contemporary activism and successful agendas
• Community autonomy and self-determination
• The role of printmaking in revolutionary movements
• Alternative press
• The semiotics of political movements
• Collectively-created visual culture

Submitting a conference proposal for review

Submission Deadline:

September 1, 2013

Notification of Acceptance:

October 1, 2013

Please include the following in your submission:

Name, Affiliation, Contact Information
Presentation type (individual paper or panel session)
Abstract of paper: a short summary of the main idea of your proposal, 200 word limit
Keywords: 3 keywords that identify main themes or arguments of your paper
Language: we will accept submissions in English, Spanish, or Catalán

Organizers are currently exploring venues in which to publish extended versions of conference papers.
All abstracts and panel submissions should be sent to: revolutionandanarchy@gmail.com

For questions about the conference, exhibit, or submissions, please contact Nicole Guidotti-Hernández  or Michael Cucher.