Please circulate
AAG CHICAGO 2006 CFP
SPACED-OUT: GEOGRAPHIES OF NARCOTIC MODERNITY
Abstracts are invited to address the volatile chemistry of drugs and
modern culture. Literature, cinema, the rise of industrial capitalism,
geopolitics, racism, youth culture and travel are unthinkable without
the material agency of drugs. Cultural studies and literary criticism
(Sadie Plant, Avital Ronell) as well as popular writers have recently
returned to psychedelic questions almost forgotten since the sixties.
Possibly, this is because these questions can be posed afresh within
biotechnological advancements and an intellectual climate opening to
nomadic thought and radical undecidability. Geography, however much it
has turned towards embodiment and senses other than vision, has
remained surprisingly agnostic in comparison. Building on Nietzsche,
Freud, Bataille, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Blanchot and other
thinkers of immanent alterity, the intent of this session is to grapple
with the hidden forces of intoxication, and find out how they’ve been
hidden for so long.
Themes might include:
- the war on drugs and the war on terror
- crack and the industrial prison complex
- drugs and Orientalism
- neopaganism and shamanism
- Chinatown’s opium dens
- the hippie/hashish trail
- cinema as intoxication
- gonzo journalism
- Baudelaire, Benjamin and the intoxicated flaneur
- theosophy and aristocratic highs
- hallucination in phenomenology and psychology
- rave spaces
- travel and the LSD trip
- Leary’s theory of set and setting
- smuggling
- domestic pharmacology
- rural crystal meth
- speed and war
- drunk driving
- weed and (non)sociability
- cocaine and social distinction
Send abstracts by 30 September 2005 to Arun Saldanha, Geography,
University of Minnesota: [log in to unmask]
arun saldanha
geography
university of minnesota
267 19th av s
minneapolis 55455
usa
ph (1) 612 625 9660
fax (1) 612 624 1044
everything that cannot be understood does
nevertheless not cease to exist
(pascal, pensées § 261)
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