Radical Imaginary: Contemporary Perspectives on Art and Struggle
Over the last decade, wave after wave of struggle has cracked open the radical social imaginary, aiming for the roots of systems of domination and creating space for liberatory formations to emerge. What can we learn from autonomous political traditions such as the Black liberation movement, feminism, Zapatismo and other anticolonial and emancipatory movements about what those liberatory formations might look like? What is the relation between individual and collective creativity? How can we rethink the autonomy of art, its capacity to create new aesthetic forms, in relation to political and social practices rather than as necessarily removed from them? If another world once more seems possible, what new – and renewed - understandings of aesthetics and politics can help us bring it into being?
This free lecture series is co-sponsored by Armory Center for the Arts and the CalArts MA in Aesthetics and Politics Program. This first installment features scholars Jennifer Ponce de León & Gabriel Rockhill. Upcoming presenters in this series include Shana Redmond (October 28) and Bojana Cvejic and Ana Vujanovic (December 2).
Masks and proof of vaccination are required for all guests.
About the Speakers
Jennifer Ponce de León is an interdisciplinary scholar who works across studies of contemporary visual arts, literature, and performance; transnational Latinx and Latin American studies; and Marxist aesthetics and social theory, including anticolonial and postcolonial thought. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Ponce de León’s first book, Another Aesthetics is Possible: Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War, theorizes aesthetics as an integral aspect of contemporary political and social struggles.
Gabriel Rockhill is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University and Director of the Critical Theory Workshop in Paris. His main areas of research are modern and contemporary thought, social and political theory, continental philosophy, aesthetics, and historiography. Gabriel is the author of books such as Radical History & the Politics of Art; Interventions in Contemporary Thought: History, Politics, Aesthetics; and Counter-History of the Present: Untimely Interrogations into Globalization, Technology, Democracy, as well as numerous articles, book chapters, reviews, and edited books.
