CFP: “Dictator Capital: Authoritarianism, Capitalism, and the Circulation of an Aesthetic”
2014 ACLA MEETING: New York, March 20-23
Deadline extended until Nov 15th
Organizers: Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra (U. Mississippi) and Jini Kim Watson (NYU)
In Gabriel García Márquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), a dictator sells the Caribbean Sea to the U.S. In Augusto Roa Bastos’s I the Supreme (1974), thedictator personally oversees the trickle of permitted international trade. The Ruler in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow (2004-2007; 2006) wants to grow money on trees, while also seeking loans from the “Global Bank.” Following Ericka Beckman’s recent observations in Capital Fictions (2013), such ostensibly comic details make visible the rationalized irrationality of modern capitalism as experienced on the periphery. As Achille Mbembe wrote of the Postcolony (2000): everything leads to excess yet real value is obscured.
This seminar will explore dictatorship in a variety of aesthetic forms and regions, analyzing the relationship between authoritarianism and capital—financial, political, and cultural.
Artistic representations of dictatorship illuminate the networks of power that sustain authoritarian governments. But we must take into account thatdictatorship also becomes an exportable trope in the aesthetic production of the global South. If “the dictator” can function as cultural capital, what do we make of the relationship between dictatorship and (financial, political) capital?
Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
Global capital and authoritarian regimes—during and after the Cold War
Dictatorship, violence, and the logic of accumulation
The authoritarianism of forms of capital
Authoritarian regimes, third world debt, and the rise of neoliberalism
The dictator-novel as a hegemonic configuration in its own right
The selection, translation, and circulation of these works on the international market
The influence of authoritarianism on aesthetic forms that do not explicitly take up dictatorship
