School of Advanced Study, University of London
IMLR Graduate Forum
Thursday
20th April 2017, 18:00-19:30
Room 246, Senate House
Speakers:
Alexandre Leskanich (Royal Holloway):
‘Orientation, Identity, and the Tautology of the Anthropocene,’ and
Dylan
Sebastian Evans (Royal Holloway): ‘Rape in France: Notes towards a Historical Understanding of the “Problem”.’
This forum is run by and for graduate students from the Colleges and Institutes in and around London,
working on any cultural aspect of those parts of the world where Germanic or Romance languages are spoken (including Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish and many more).
Graduate students from departments other than Modern Languages (e.g. Anthropology, History, History
of Art, Film and Media, etc.) and students working on comparative projects involving one or more Germanic or Romance language are particularly welcome to join the group to develop interdisciplinary links.
Abstracts:
Alexandre Leskanich (Royal Holloway):
‘Orientation, Identity, and the Tautology of the Anthropocene,’
This paper contends that the Anthropocene, more than simply a hypothetical periodisation in planetary
history, itself constitutes a coercive identitary proposition. The Anthropocene symbolically serves to identify the existential situation of the human species: it classifies it by reference to a comprehensive tautology that makes both mind and world equivalent.
Humanity suddenly finds itself unable to escape from itself, anxiously sequestered in a disintegrating, artificial world of its own making.
Dylan Sebastian Evans (Royal Holloway): ‘Rape in France: Notes towards
a Historical Understanding of the “Problem”.’
In her attempt to theorize a queer approach to historical inquiry, feminist historian Donna Penn addresses
an issue of fundamental importance and an aspect often overlooked in the study and writing of history: ‘Despite constructionists’ efforts to detail the changing meaning and content of specific homosexualities, a central conceptual problem nonetheless remains.
Simply put, agreeing that the object of our study is, for example, “the homosexual”, does not tell us what a homosexual is, regardless of our attention to the constructed meanings. Consequently, we are left with a basic question: on what basis do we make our
determination of the subject of our inquiry?’ (1995: 27–28). Deriving inspiration from Penn’s problem-based approach to history, this paper seeks to sketch out and draw some lessons from my own personal research trajectory. Shot through with references to
the work of French theorist-practitioner of multiplicities Michel Foucault, this paper retraces the circuitous route that has led me to the following set of critical interrogations. First, why take rape as the subject of our inquiry? What makes it particularly
worthy of or amenable to academic study? Next, why adopt a specifically historical approach to studying rape? What is involved or at stake in seeking to account for rape historically? And, finally, how can a specifically French or francophone study contribute
to better understanding or diagnosing the ‘problem’ of rape and its history?
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Institute of Modern Languages Research
Best wishes,
Sinan Richards, Dana
Lungu, and Cinthya Oliveira
