Thursday 8 December 2011, 7pm
Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1
Price: £7.00 / £5.00 concessions (includes free glass of wine).

This season’s Whitechapel Salon organised by the IMCC in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery is on ‘Cultures of Capitalism’. Our third discussion focuses on imagining the Spaces of Capital. How can art and politics image, represent or map the spaces of contemporary capitalism? And, in the light of current spaces of occupation, what critical and political possibilities for resistance or opposition might such imaginings contain? Participants include Alberto Toscano, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths and author of The Idea of Fanaticism, and Andy Merrifield, author of Metromarxism and Dialectical Urbanism, along with a representative from the Haircut Before the Party collective. Chaired by David Cunningham.

Book your ticket at: http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/shop/product/category_id/22/product_id/1027?session_id=1320678264848dfa9cc85be835a3493e662f207489

The IMCC’s Anne Witchard will be speaking about her forthcoming book at the following event organised by our friends in the Contemporary China Centre:

Wednesday 7 December 2011, 4.30-6.30pm
Westminster Forum, Fifth Floor, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW

‘Lao She: A Chinese Writer in Modernist London’
Anne Witchard (University of Westminster)

Chinese cultural and intellectual texts engaged in various ways with Western constructions of modernism. Of these exchanges and encounters, my focus in this paper will be on the early life and work of the famous Chinese novelist and short story writer, Lao She (1898 – 1966). Lao She was uniquely positioned in his engagement with specific conditions of modernity and nationhood both in Britain and in China. By birth a disenfranchised Manchu, he lived and worked in London during the late 1920s, a period seen as the apex of high modernism and his writing registers this interaction in ways that suggest we rethink his work beyond the parameters of the socialist realist tradition to which, chiefly because of his proletarian magnum opus, Rickshaw Boy (1936), it has largely been confined. Reading Lao She as an incipient modernist, initiating in China new subjects and new styles of writing in the endeavour to remake the sensibility of the Chinese people, serves also to unsettle Eurocentric considerations of modernism as exclusively Western, its place of origin unquestionably the metropolitan West.

Anne Witchard teaches in the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster. She specialises in representations of China and the Chinese in early-twentieth-century Britain (see her book Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie, Ashgate, 2010; and most recent of various papers, a chapter in the collection Chinatowns in a Transnational World, Routledge, 2011). Her book Lao She, London and China’s Literary Revolution will be published in Autumn 2012 by the University of Hong Kong Press.

All welcome, but non-Westminster attendees should register in advance with Derek Hird: d.hird@westminster.ac.uk

‘Rorschach Audio: Mysterious-devil-tale, Devil-bewitched-by-Death’
Wednesday 7 December 2011, 1.15pm – 2.45pm
Room 359, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Following on from the “Rorschach Audio” lecture demonstration presented to the IMCC in March 2011, and, in particular, that lecture’s discussions of Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dali, EH Gombrich, Primo Levi and Leonardo da Vinci, visual and sound artist Joe Banks presents further explorations of the influence of “Rorschach Audio” phenomena on contemporary literature and creative art. This presentation directly extends the material discussed in the previous lecture, so any guests not familiar with the earlier talk are encouraged to read the “Rorschach Audio” research publications available here…

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/lmj/summary/v011/11.1banks.html
http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/002/004/articles/jbanks/index.php

Non-Westminster staff and students should RSVP Joe Banks at: j.banks@wmin.ac.uk

Tuesday 22nd November, 4-6pm
Westminster Forum, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 
 
Pascal Gielen (Groningen University, The Netherlands)  
‘Mapping the Community Arts: Artistic Autonomy, Repressive Tolerance and Pastoral Power’

In recent years there has been increased attention to so-called ‘socially engaged art practices’. Equipped with a sense of urgency and intent, artists and curators develop work with the support of communities or groups to tackle political and social issues. While the success of these projects are not easily measurable, they often reiterate the role of artist/curator as protagonists of specific forms of social change, which posits a direct contrast to recent activism which carefully distances itself from any leader-based political organizational categories.

Pascal Gielen, co-editor of the recently published volume Community Art, will draw out a critical cartography of community art and will speak about the power and impotencies of this phenomenon. Since modernity, art and community, artist and social work have had an ambivalent relationship, can art have a role in building communities? What is the political potency of forms of art that strive to integrate individuals and social groups? Pascal Gielen is Professor of Sociology of the Arts and Director of the research centre Arts in Society at Groningen University. His publications include The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude: Global Art, Memory and Post-Fordism (Valiz, 2009) and the co-edited Being an Artist in Post-Fordist Times (NAi Publishers, 2009).

Wednesday 23 November, 1.15pm – 2.30pm
Room 359, 309 Regent Street, University of Westminster

Samuel Thomas (Durham University)
“The Gaucho Sells Out: Thomas Pynchon, Nation Building & Argentina”

Wednesday 16 November, 4.15pm – 5.45pm
Room 312, Wells Street, University of Westminster, London W1T

‘Pragmatic Implicature and the novel’
Ruth Schuldiner, University of Oxford

This paper will discuss the sustained use of implicature to communicate central, unambiguous elements of plot in fiction novels; specifically, it will look at instances in which a reader’s understanding of an implicitly communicated event is integral to their understanding of the remainder of the narrative.  It is proposed that, in third-person narratives, a perceived context of fictionality is depended upon for the construction of some of these implicatures: many of them exploit the perceived omniscience of the narrator, and by extension the fictionality of the text.  This conclusion feeds into a broader argument concerning the possible differences associated with reading fictional vs. nonfictional texts, or how an assumed context of either fictionality or nonfictionality affects readers’ interpretations of individual utterances and the coherence of narratives as a whole.  When an author chooses to communicate central narrative information through implicature, the reader is faced with the important puzzle of why an omniscient persona would opt for an inarticulate mode of communication.  It is this implicitly posed question that emphasizes the relevance of the implicatures to their context, dispersing the ambiguity of superficial ellipses.  The paper discusses excerpts from M.E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret to evidence the argument.

Words and Wars
Group for War and Culture Studies Research Seminar
Monday 21 November 2011, 5.30-7.30pm
Room 152, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B

Adam Piette (University of Sheffield), “Sputniks, Ice-Picks, KGB: Nabokov’s Pale Fire”

Adam Piette is the author of Remembering and the Sound of Words: Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Beckett and Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939-1945. His latest book, The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), is a study of the psychological and cultural impact of the Cold War on the imaginations of citizens in the UK and US. The Literary Cold War examines writers working at the hazy borders between aesthetic project and political allegory, with specific attention being paid to Vladimir Nabokov and Graham Greene as Cold War writers. The book looks at the special relationship as a form of paranoid plotline governing key Anglo-American texts from Storm Jameson to Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, as well as examining the figure of the non-aligned neutral observer caught up in the sacrificial triangles structuring cold war fantasy.

Alan Morrison ( University of Westminster), “Virginia Woolf: War and Patriarchy”

Alan Morrison is also a Research Associate at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, and teaches on the Museum Studies Master’s Program at Johns Hopkins University. He is currently working on education and exhibition programmes linked to the centenary commemorations of World War I.

Including Book Launch for Adam Piette, The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam

Entrance FREE but RSVP Dr Caroline Perret: C.Perret@westminster.ac.uk or tel. 020 7911 5000 ext. 2307.

Thursday 8 December 2011, 7pm
Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1
Price: £7.00 / £5.00 concessions (includes free glass of wine).

This season’s Whitechapel Salon organised by the IMCC in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery is on ‘Cultures of Capitalism’. Our third discussion focuses on imagining the Spaces of Capital. How can art and politics image, represent or map the spaces of contemporary capitalism? And, in the light of current spaces of occupation, what critical and political possibilities for resistance or opposition might such imaginings contain? Participants include Alberto Toscano, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths and author of The Idea of Fanaticism, and Andy Merrifield, author of Metromarxism and Dialectical Urbanism, along with a representative from the Haircut Before the Party collective. Chaired by David Cunningham.

Book your ticket at: http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/shop/product/category_id/22/product_id/1027?session_id=1320678264848dfa9cc85be835a3493e662f207489

At the Workface: A Talk by Fred Lonidier
Tuesday 13 December 2011, 3.30-5.30pm
Fifth Floor, 32-38 Wells Street, University of Westminster, London W1T

Seminar: new arts and trade unions partnerships
Proposals for a national documentation project and AHRC research network focused on promoting new creative synergies and campaign strategies connecting the unions, social networking groups, NGOs, and arts sectors.

Fred Lonidier is one of the leading pioneers from the late 1960s onwards, of the arts and trade union movement in the USA. He studied at Yuba College and San Francisco State (graduate work in sociology and photography), and later joined the University of California at San Diego Faculty in 1972.  His work continues to deal with the possibilities of photography applied to trade union campaigns for social justice, labor history, and social change. He has also been the guiding energy behind the pioneer US Trade Union sponsored Labor Link TV which cablecasts on three channels in San Diego County. His work has recently focused on workers rights and cross-border labor struggles and solidarity between U.S. and Mexican workers.

Admission is free, but please book a place in advance from Dr Stefan Szczelkun: szczels@wmin.ac.uk

Coordinated by Littoral Arts Trust in association with Critical Network, Strategies for Free Education, and the IMCC, University of Westminster.

SCREAM HOWL SPEAK!
Kusum Normoyle, Alan Tomlinson, Steve Beresford + Disinformation
Live at Usurp, Tues 8 Nov 2011, 7pm sharp
Usurp Gallery, 140 Vaughan Road, London HA1 4EB

What is the connection between the works of French burglar and prostitute Jean Genet and of the 19th century Swiss crystallographer Louis Albert Necker? As an articulation of Jean Paul Sartre’s discourse on Genet’s embodiment of “the negative”, Disinformation remixes audio samples from the final interview with one of modern France’s most notorious writers, exploring perceptual ambiguities which link experiences of auditory and visual illusions.

Alan Tomlinson is a trombonist “who manages to be simultaneously the best & the funniest you have ever seen”. Alan was a long time member of Barry Guy’s London Jazz Composers Orchestra, has his own trio with Dave Tucker and Phil Marks, a trio in Berlin, and a duo with Romanian poet Virgil Mihaiu. Recent solos have been with a glass trombone, accompanying a fish & chip van and in the River Seven.

Kusum Normoyle works with extended vocal technique and noise for both performance and installation. Central to her practice is the idea of public space, intervention, and the displacement of normal expectations of the female body and voice, performing brief high-intensity vocal incursions which are extremely physical, dragging the audience into a hard, fast displays of screaming, amplification and feedback.

Internationally known as a superb free improviser on piano and electronics, Steve Beresford also composes scores for feature films and numerous TV shows and commercials. Steve has worked with hundreds of musicians, including Christian Marclay, Derek Bailey, Han Bennink, Ivor Cutler, Ray Davies, Najma Akhtar, Evan Parker, Adrian Sherwood, Otomo Yoshihide and John Zorn.

Further info at: http://www.usurp.org.uk/events/scream_howl_speak/

See: https://instituteformodern.co.uk/2011/neurogenesis-by-disinformation-usurp-signature-version

Wednesday 9 November, 1.15pm – 2.30pm
Room 359, 309 Regent Street, University of Westminster

Caroline Edwards (University of Lincoln)
‘Fictions of the Not Yet’

As the first decade of the twenty-first century comes to a close, there is a growing critical awareness of the current fascination with alternative and future worlds in contemporary British fiction. In addition to the continuing popularity of – and growing scholarly interest in – speculative and genre works, an emerging body of “literary” fictions is revealing a wide-ranging preoccupation with narratives of apocalypse, transmigration and haunting. Writers like David Mitchell, Jeanette Winterson, Jim Crace, John Burnside, Marina Warner, Maggie Gee, Jon McGregor and Sam Taylor are thus shifting the parameters of realist literary fiction and its generic borrowings, and in the process articulating a shared concern with the question of temporality. We need to develop a new strategy of reading such fictions in order to examine the formal innovations executed by these visions of temporal alterity and futurity. This paper will outline a refunctioning of Ernst Bloch’s category of the “Not Yet” (Noch Nicht) in order to provide a methodological framework that can draw out the distinctly utopian implications that are prevalent in the contemporary British novel. This refunctioning not only reconsiders the relationship between philosophical discourse and narrative imaginaries, but also helps us outline the distinctive structural, thematic and stylistic characteristics shaping an emerging caucus of fictions.

A new solo exhibition of the work of Thomson and Craighead has just opened in South East of Brussels (Watermael/Boisfort), where they are showing six artworks/installations at the same time across two sites, Watermael Station and Vénerie Stables, from 26th October to 18th December 2011. Alison and John will also be giving gallery talks at each site on Saturday 19th November from 15.30pm. Further info at: http://thomson-craighead.blogspot.com/

Brixton Calling!
28 October-21 December 2011, weekdays 10am-5pm
198 Contemporary Arts & Learning, Brixton

This exhibition is the final stage of Brixton Calling! archiving and community project that connects contemporary Brixton to its past through the history of the late Brixton Art Gallery & Artists Collective in the 1980s. Exhibition opening: Thursday 27 October 2011, 6.30-10pm.

UPDATE: Further details on the 198 website here: http://198.org.uk/pages/currentexhibition.htm

Brixton Calling! events at 198 

Saturday 19 November, 2-4pm,  Curators/artists talk
Friday 25 November, 7-9pm, Brixton Fairy Night
Saturday 26 November, 1-5pm, Radical Printing
Saturday 10 December, 2-5pm, Black Art

Other Brixton Calling! events:

’80s Women Lens Based Media Event
Brixton Village, Thursday10 & Friday11 November, 7-12pm, Saturday12 November, 10am–9pm
For more information contact: info@198.org.uk

Women Artists Feminism in the 80s and Now
Goldsmiths, University of London 3rd December, 10am-5pm, in collaboration with the Women’s Art Library
For more information contact: a.greenan@gold.ac.uk

Archive installation by Stefan Szczelkun and Oral History documentary on show continuously along with many other sub-projects!

Wednesday 26^th October, 1.15pm – 2.30pm
University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street building, room 359

Anna Katharina Schaffner (University of Kent)
‘Havelock Ellis and the Literary Imagination: On Sexology and Fiction’

Many important nineteenth- and early twentieth-century pioneers of the scientific study of sex make extensive use of literary sources in their works. Not only do they adopt terms and concepts from fictional sources, but literary representations and their authors frequently serve as case studies which are deemed as valid as empirical observations. Surprisingly, this blending of discourses, which has substantially shaped the nosologies of the early sexologists, has received little critical attention. This paper analyzes the epistemological status and functions that are assigned to fictional representations in the works of the British sexologist Havelock Ellis, as well as the wider theoretical ramifications of factualizing fictions. The way in which literary sources are used in Ellis’ and other sexological texts not only sheds light on the production of sexual knowledge and processes of discourse formation, but also brings to the fore the enmeshment of fantasy, language and desire, as well as the dependence of an entire scientific discipline upon narratives – both fictional and factual in nature.

Our friends in the India Media Centre at University of Westminster are organizing a series of fascinating events, please see details below:

Thursday 13th October, 6.30pm

BHOPALI, a film
Bhopali, (dir. Max Carlson, 2011, 89 mins) is a multi-award-winning documentary about the survivors of the world’s worst industrial disaster, the 1984 Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal, India. After the screening Mick Brown (journalist, writer and broadcaster) will chair a panel discussion with filmmaker Pawas Bisht (University of Loughborough), author, Meaghan Delahunt, (University of St Andrews) and Tim Edwards (International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal).
Venue: The Old Cinema, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Friday 14th October, 6.30pm

FORGOTTEN ERA: PARSI THEATRE AND EARLY INDIAN CINEMA
Kathryn Hansen, (University of Texas at Austin), a cultural historian with a special interest in Indian theatre, will present material from her new book Stages of Life: Indian Theatre Autobiographies (Anthem Press). This will be followed by a round-table discussion with Francesca Orsini, Reader in the Literatures of North India, SOAS; Rosie Thomas, Reader in Film and Director of CREAM and Co-director of India Media Centre at the University of Westminster; and Ravi Vasudevan, Professor of Film, Director of the Sarai Centre, Delhi, and Smuts Fellow at University of Cambridge.
Venue: Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Monday 17th October, 6.30pm

THE MAKING OF A MODERN INDIAN ARTIST-CRAFTSMAN: DEVI PRASAD
Devi Prasad was India’s pioneering artist-potter, visionary educationist and pacifist. This event looks at how his story exemplifies the importance of the Arts and Crafts Movement in shaping the nature of Modernism in India, and the role of pottery and the community of potters that Prasad set up. Naman P. Ahuja, (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi), will speak about the themes of his new book, The Making of a Modern Indian Artist-Craftsman: Devi Prasad, followed by a conversation with architect Sunand Prasad, Devi Prasad’s son, and with potter and writer, Julian Stair, Visiting Lecturer in Ceramics at the University of Westminster.
Venue: The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Friday 2nd November, 5pm – 9pm

INDIAN ARTS ON FILM: Charles Correa, Bhupen Kakar, Nalini Malani and Vivan Sundaram
What makes a successful documentary about art? What specific issues arise when translating the visual arts onto film? How far do different cultural contexts require different approaches? Award-winning arts filmmakers and scholars, Arun Khopkar and John Wyver (Iluuminations and University of Westminster), together with art historian Partha Mitter (University of Sussex), discuss these questions, followed by a screening of two of Khopkar’s films: Figures of Thought (1990, 33 mins), on Bhupen Kakar, Nalini Malani and Vivan Sundaram, and Volume Zero: The Work of Charles Correa (2008, 59 mins) on India’s most eminent architect.
Venue: P3 Gallery (5pm) and Cayley Lecture Theatre (7pm), University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS

These events have been organised in association with our partners, DSC-South Asia Literature Festival and Magic Lantern Persistence Resistance Festival. As spaces are limited, BOOKING IS ESSENTIAL (follow web-links for each event). For full details visit http://www.westminster.ac.uk/schools/media/cream

Spaces of Reckoning: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Conflict and Memory
Call for participants

Saturday 3 December 2011, University of Westminster, London

UPDATE: new website for the symposium at: http://www.spacesofreckoning.co.uk/ 

Both Conflict Studies and Memory Studies have, in recent years, become of increasing interest across the Humanities and Social Sciences, as they generate compelling dialogues between fields of study and build on the interdisciplinary turn in contemporary academe. This event will create a space that will allow for two things. The first is the development of opportunities for discussion across academic and cultural spheres. This will come about through the analysis and presentation of the representations and conceptualizations of violent conflict and memory addressed by emerging scholars seeking new networks and approaches to research. Secondly, it will include voices from outside academia that can provide new insight and potential empirical challenges to theoretical discussion.

The event will gather together new researchers, and is especially designed to bring together individuals from disciplines that do not traditionally intersect (e.g. Visual Culture and Socio-Legal Studies). The conference will allow mutually beneficial input and new ways of addressing the praxis of Conflict and Cultural Memory through the presentation of and analysis of both objects and concepts. When reflecting on the proposed theme, Post War Reckoning, Memorialisation, Institutions, Artefacts and the Semiotics of Collective Memory, for example, offer a wide territory for investigation, especially when combined with the study of cultural representations of these themes. We are seeking interested participants from across and outside the academic spectrum to contribute to the creation of new and productive dialogues.

Please submit up to 200 Word abstracts for 20 minute papers / presentations by November 10th  2011 to the organisers:
Marija Katalinic, Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies: marijakat@gmail.com
Tallyn Gray, Department of Advanced Legal Studies: tallyn.gray@my.westminster.ac.uk

Wednesday 19 October 2011, 4-6pm
Cayley Room, Room 152, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B

‘Queer Comrades: Gay Identity and Queer Politics in Postsocialist China’
Dr. Hongwei Bao (Goldsmiths)

One of the most interesting phenomena in modern Chinese language is manifested by the semantic change of the term tongzhi. Literally ‘comrade’, tongzhi was the most popular address term in China’s socialist era. Since the 1990s, the term has been used by LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) people in the Chinese-speaking world to refer to sexual minorities. Today, the queer use of tongzhi has dominated Chinese cyberspace. How did the change take place? What does the change mean? Was this simply linguistic change, or does it indicate transformations in bodies, desires, identities and subjectivities under shifting governmentalities? In this talk, Dr. Hongwei Bao traces the genealogy of the term tongzhi, discusses its political and social implications, and unveils its pertinence for contemporary Leftist politics.

Dr. Hongwei Bao is a British Academy visiting fellow at the Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London. He has taught media and communication, gender studies, cultural studies and Asian Studies at the National Academy of Chinese Theatrical Arts, Beijing, the University of Sydney, and University of Potsdam.

All welcome, but non-University of Westminster attendees please register with Derek Hird: d.hird@westminster.ac.uk

Wednesday 10th October 2011, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW

Helen Glew (History, University of Westminster)
“Women at the Regent Street Polytechnic, 1882 – 1945”

Further details on the English Literature and Culture research seminar series here.

‘Rorschach Audio: Mysterious-devil-tale, Devil-bewitched-by-Death’
Wednesday 7 December 2011, 1.15pm – 2.45pm
Room 359, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B

Following on from the “Rorschach Audio” lecture demonstration presented to the IMCC in March 2011, and, in particular, that lecture’s discussions of Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dali, EH Gombrich, Primo Levi and Leonardo da Vinci, visual and sound artist Joe Banks presents further explorations of the influence of “Rorschach Audio” phenomena on contemporary literature and creative art. This presentation directly extends the material discussed in the previous lecture, so any guests not familiar with the earlier talk are encouraged to read the “Rorschach Audio” research publications available here…

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/lmj/summary/v011/11.1banks.html
http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/002/004/articles/jbanks/index.php

Science Fiction Study Day
British Library, London
Friday 16^th September 2011, 9.30am – 5.30pm

Both David Cunningham and Chris Daley will be participating in a panel on J.G. Ballard as part of the British Library’s Science Fiction Study Day, accompanying the exhibition Out of this World, on Friday 16^th September. Other speakers include Mark Bould, Roger Luckhurst and John Milner.

From utopian to dystopian visions, Futurism to Futurology, the participants will talk about recent projects that feature various aspects of science fiction discourse. Learn about the most recent research trends, methodologies and applications, and get inspired by the ideas and questions examined during the day.

Details and booking here.