Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour: European, American, Transnational
Monday, April 5–Wednesday, April 7

A virtual colloquy featuring 16 scholars, writers, artists
& the global premiere of Carla Harryman’s “Occupying
Theodor W. Adorno’s Music and New Music: A Re-Performance”
attendees welcome; registration required; click here

Originally organized for the 2020 conference of the European Network of Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies (EAM) conference in Ghent, Belgium, canceled due to COVID-19 (here), and following last year’s virtual colloquy on “Modernism @ Zero Hour” (here). The seminars have  been reorganized and expanded, with participating scholars and artists from seven nationalities and time zones, and with the addition of the streaming of Carla Harryman’s revised production of “Occupying Theodor W. Adorno’s Music and New Music,” originally staged at dOCUMENTA 13 (2012). The colloquy takes up transnational approaches to the emergence of avant-garde art and practices after the metahistorical date of “Zero Hour,” 1945—the end of the war which is not one—to comprehend the profound reflection on destruction, displacement, and a new global order in post–1945 movements and works.

Organized by Barrett Watten, English, Wayne State University
and Lauri Scheyer, British and American Poetry Research Center,
Hunan Normal University
Sponsored by Projects in Poetics and Statement Magazine,
California State University, Los Angeles

PROGRAM [here]

Seminar 1 / Chair TBA / Monday, April 5, 3 PM EST (12 PM PST; 8 PM London; 9 PM Berlin; 10 PM Moscow; 3 AM Tue Changsha; 7 AM Tue New Zealand)

Barrett Watten, Wayne State University (Professor, English)
“Liberation and the Historical Present: Gertrude Stein and Louis Ferdinand Céline @ Zero Hour”
Andrew Haas, University of California, Berkeley (Graduate Student, English)
“Continuities of Racial Fascism: ‘The Pisan Cantos’ as Elegy for Louis Till”
Evgeny Pavlov, University of Canterbury, N.Z. (Associate Professor, Russian and German)
“Berlin, 1946: Zero Hour in Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s Novels”
Konstantin Plotnikov, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Ad-ministration (Associate Professor, Cultural Studies and Social Communication)
“The Post-Humanism of the Avant-Garde: The Art of Vadim Sidur”

Seminar 2 / chair TBA / Tuesday, April 6, 12 PM EST (9 AM PST; 5 PM London; 6 PM Berlin; 7 PM Moscow; 12 AM Changsha; 4 AM Weds New Zealand)

Anna Markowska, University of Wroc?aw, Poland (Professor, Art History)
“Objects as Actors of a Revolution Following the Zero Hour”
Claudia R. Franken, Aachen, Germ. (Independent Scholar)
“Zero Hour at Gadir!: Arno Schmidt and Lajos Ami; or, Adventure Allegorists at a Confluence of Elusive Plots”
Ian Curtis, Kenyon College (Assistant Professor, French)
“‘A New Historic Youth’: Lettrism, Delinquency, and Violence in Postwar France”
Ben Libman, Stanford University (Graduate Student, English)
“The Last Avant-Gardes: Apolitical Literature in France and the United States after 1945”

Special event / chair TBA / Tuesday, April 6, 3 PM EST (12 PM PST; 8 PM London; 9 PM Berlin; 10 PM Moscow; 3 AM Changsha; 7 AM New Zealand)

Carla Harryman, Eastern Michigan University (Professor, English)
Global premiere of “Occupying Theodor W. Adorno’s Music and New Music: A Re-Performance,” composed by Harryman and Jon Raskin (2020) after a prior version performed at dOCUMENTA 13 (2012); studio recording featuring Harryman, voice; Raskin, voice and saxophone; Gino Robair, prepared piano and voice; Florian Werner and Adorno, recorded voices; sound engineering, Robair
Harryman, Jed Rasula (University of Georgia), Raskin, and Robair, discussion

Seminar 3 / chair TBA / Wednesday, April 7, 3 PM EST (12 PM PST; 9 PM Berlin; 10 PM Moscow; 3 AM Thu Changsha; 7 AM Thu New Zealand)

Liang Luo, University of Kentucky (Associate Professor, Chinese Studies)
“Profound Propaganda: The International Avant-Garde and Modern China”
Lauri Scheyer, Hunan Normal University (Distinguished Professor, British/American Lit)
“Surrealist Poetics of Protest in the African Diaspora”
Daniel Eltringham, University of Sheffield (Postdoctoral Fellow, English)
“The ‘Translational’ British Neo-Avant-Garde and Mexico: Tom Raworth ‘in Nahuatl’”
Parvinder Mehta, Wayne State University (Adjunct Professor, English)
“Bodies Feeling Hunger: The Spectacle of Embodiment, Modernity, and Affect”

SEMINAR CFP

This seminar continues the work of “Modernism @ Zero Hour” (ACLA 2020) and the 9th annual conference of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies (EAM 2020) to focus on European, American, and transnational avant-gardes subsequent to the epochal moment of “Zero Hour,” 1945. At a moment of crisis and renewal, modernity is disclosed in a process of “systemic detotalization” that new avant-garde tendencies interrogated in forms of mimetic activity, at once preservative and self-undoing. The destruction of European cities, the displacement of peoples, the end of colonial empires, political and economic antagonisms, the specter of mass extermination, but also new cultural freedoms are enacted in a broad range of aesthetic, philosophical, and political forms, differing substantially from the historical avant-garde. What was “new” in 1945 was to see the world as it had never been, as a locus of destruction and creation on a global scale. Seminar topics might include transnational routes for the avant-garde: the global influences of surrealism and existentialism; the ethical imperatives of “bare life” and abstraction; the eruption of absurdism; cross-racial aesthetic motives and possibilities; the circulation of new cultural forms such as American jazz in Europe or New Wave film in the U.S.; the tension between avant-gardes, state formations, and ex/repatriation; and aesthetic movements of the global South that oppose the spatial hierarchy of prior avant-gardes. In each instance, radical form addresses modernity in crisis and the inauguration of a new global order in unique ways. The seminar will interrogate the work of post–1945 avant-gardes, seen in relation to the historical crisis of “Zero Hour” 1945 and its challenge to progressive historicism.

Notes

Attendees register here; Zoom recordings will be made available for those who cannot attend sessions due to constraints of global time zones.