Ethan will be attending the ACLA Conference Annual Meeting, March 29 - April 1, 2018. The conference will be held at UCLA, in downtown Los Angeles.
From Ethan:
My paper "The Failed State of Utopia: Affect’s Emergent Territories Under the Chilean Dictatorship," has been accepted as part of "The State of/as Utopia" seminar. Many philosophers and theorists of utopia focus on its spatial aspect or its impossibility as a form of governmentality in their discussion of the contested etymology—(eu)/οὐ-topos: the good (ideal) place that is nowhere. But restricting utopia to a fixed place or places, or to a (spare) system of governance neglects utopia as a form of sociality; and the social is the territory of affect. As Brian Holmes writes in The Affectivist Manifesto, “expression unleashes affect, and affect is what touches” (Reading/feeling 75). 1973 in Chile was a time where two utopian projects of the state collided, and required immediate alternatives: Allende’s Socialist Democracy and Pinochet’s institution of neoliberalism through a U.S. backed, military regime. Using Holmes’s concept of “Affectivism” as the process by which artistic action creates an emergent territory of utopian possibility, this paper focuses on the material writings of Raúl Zurita and the art activism of the Chilean Avanzada as the embodied performances in which possibilities for new social relationships emerge during Chile’s dictatorship and its “transition to democracy.”