Southland Conference 2021: Emergences

In their critique of “the human” as transhistorical, isomorphic entity, Lisa Lowe and Kris Manjapra consider “the manifold variety of heterogeneous and assembled relations – social, cultural, economic, and ecological – that continuously emerge, transform, and remake themselves, in the past and in the ongoing present.” Their analytic process “considers relation rather than fixed entities, transformations rather than stability, dissymmetry rather than analogy.”(1) As scholars of the humanities and social sciences continue to reckon with the ongoing crises that mounted over the course of 2020, we reflect on the systems, movements, events, and ideas that created the conditions for our present moment and the shifting relations that shape our orientation towards past, present, and future.

We are excited to welcome keynote speakers Fred D’Aguiar, Professor of English at UCLA and Yến Lê Espiritu, Distinguished Professor of Ethnic Studies at UCSD.

This year, the Southland Conference calls scholars from various disciplines to consider interrelated notions of “emergence”: as a process of coming into being, coming into view, or of exposure after concealment. What transformations, both subjectively and collectively, are we experiencing and envisioning? How do we forge new ways of being and thinking in a time that also seems to demand constant reorientation and redirection? What historical events, socio-political movements, literary and visual texts, environmental crises, etc. have become urgent and demand our attention, now? “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule,” writes Walter Benjamin. “We must attain to a conception of history that accords with this insight.” What changes when we think about emergency, not as aberration, but rather as constant? How might we think about “emergence” amidst states of emergency or consider the ways that conditions of crisis shape theory and praxis?