"Southern Political Concepts"
A Political Concepts Workshop in Southern California
UC Irvine, January 17th 2025
HG 1010, All-Day Event
Concepts enable, canalize, and limit our being. Without them, there is no perception, thinking, or speaking, and therefore no action, either. In our everyday lives, however, we rarely pause to examine the concepts by which we orient ourselves in the world or come together with others, by which we are governed or attempt to subvert and resist. The philosophical consideration of concepts—the definitive Socratic question “what is X?”—is therefore critique per excellence: it examines the conditions of possibility of knowledge and action. Because it thus pertains to action and to our communal being in the world, the critical analysis of concepts must also probe their politics: the historical contingencies and structures that birthed a concept; its political ramifications for our perception of ourselves, others, and the world; and of its participation in determining “the present limits of the necessary.”
When exploring political concepts, however, intellectual history, the history of ideas, and even critical theory have all too often focused on Western concepts and on their philosophical traditions. What happens, we ask, when we shift our focus to examine the theoretical and political operation of southern concepts? Relocating the seat of theorizing away from the West, our workshop aims to investigate concepts “from” or “of” the South, as well as the traditions, genealogies and perspectives they reflect. In what ways might Western concepts—such as “war” and “state,” but also “translation” and “home”—be Southern or Southerned? What are their effects on the south and what meanings do they acquire there? What alternative concepts might we locate in the Global South, in both foreign languages and English? Could these serve to create better—more nuanced and robust, more capacious and locally specific—diagnostic tools and epistemological lenses that are of the South and not merely about it?
On January 17, 2025, Critical Theory at UCI will host an all-day workshop on the topic of southern political concepts, featuring faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and Ph.D students from various disciplines and academic institutions across southern California. Each of the short presentations at this workshop will focus on a single southern concept, broadly construed, in order to define it, explicate its political apparatus, and consider aspects of this concept that have thus far remained unquestioned and underthought. It will aim to formulate a lexical definition of this concept and its structural coherence, while accounting for its historical emergence and genealogical shifts. The ultimate goal should be refiguring the selected concept, rather than taking for granted its normative definitions, axioms, and properties.
The workshop will feature a keynote address by Adi Ophir (Brown University) on the concept of "Democratization" (11am, in HG1010).
This project is a collaboration between Jacques Lezra (Professor of Hispanic Studies and English, UCR) and Liron Mor (Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and director of Critical Theory, UCI). It builds on the work of the East coast Political Concepts group, aiming to bring this format to Southern California and to shift the emphasis to conceptual frames of knowledge and action that are of the Global South. We hope that it will be the first step toward creating a long-term cross-campus research group on Southern Political Concepts.
Participants are encouraged to read Adi Ophir's "Concept." in advance of the workshop.
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This event is co-sponsored by UCHRI, UCI's Department of History, Department of Comparative Literature, and the Humanities Center.
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Please RSVP here: Google Form for Political Concepts Workshop
For questions regarding this workshop, please message Liron Mor (morl@uci.edu). 