Beyond Socialism and Liberalism? Transnational Perspectives from Eastern Europe and East Asia

Friday, January 28, 2011 to Saturday, January 29, 2011

Speaker: Elizabeth Dunn, University of Colorado-Boulder, Lisa Hoffman, University of Washington-Tacoma, Alexei Yurchak, University of California-Berkeley, Rebecca Karl,
New York University

"Beyond Socialism and Liberalism?" explores whether our inherited oppositional understandings of socialism and liberalism can really account for the new kinds of political ideas and social subjectivities, the new aesthetics and mediated forms of knowledge and the new relations of practice and property that have emerged in China and Eastern Europe after the collapse of Cold War geopolitics. We investigate what new kinds of analytical strategies and conceptual categories might emerge by taking the hybridity (rather than incommensurability) of socialist and liberal influence as our point of departure. One provocative consideration is that we may need to think beyond the categories of socialism and liberalism altogether, these categories having been deeply embedded in the political ontologies of modern (western) Europe in its historical phase of state consolidation and colonial expansion in the 19th and early 20th centuries.