The return of the Rust Belt and the populist moment

June 20th, 21st, 2019

Université de Paris-Est Créteil

This conference considers the “Rust Belt” through various thematic, methodological and disciplinary angles. The Rust Belt is a rather loose name for the deindustrialized region around the Great Lakes, encompassing all or parts of the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania as well as several northwestern counties of New York state.

Because of its mining and industrial past, this region used to be a solid Democratic stronghold, clearly out of the reach of Republicans, at least at the level of presidential elections. Its demographic decline after World War 2 led to a lesser weight in the electoral college and it seemed to have lost any decisive role in nationwide ballots. However, the working class has increasingly drifted away from the Rooseveltian coalition and poor people have seemingly been voting against their economic interest. Moreover, the sense of dispossession and abandonment has contributed to boost populism, as the Trump vote as well as the Brexit vote have illustrated.

In the United States, the 2016 presidential election has unquestionably put the Rust Belt back on the electoral map and has reawakened long-gone media interest in it. Indeed, small majorities in a few Rust Belt states enabled Donald Trump to carry those states and their electors and gave him a majority in the Electoral college, despite trailing Mrs Clinton in the popular vote.

Stanley Greenberg, who identified the “Reagan Democrats” in the 1980s, interviewed the “Trump Democrats” in 2016 – those voters who used to cast ballots for Democratic candidates but chose to support Trump this time. Other investigations have shown that voters in such Midwestern states as Indiana as well as in the Rust Belt could vote for a local Democrat as well as Donald Trump for President on the very same day.

More recently, in March 2018, the victory of “blue dog” Democrat Conor Lamb in a Pennsylvania district that Trump had carried easily in 2016 reignited the debate around the Democrats’ ability to reconquer what had come to be known as “Trump country.”

If populism is not to be found exclusively in deindustrialized areas such as the Rust Belt, it remains clear that “Rust Belts” are fertile soil for populist movements on the left as much as on the right of the political spectrum.

It is in this context of rising populism in the United States and in Europe that the Rust Belt becomes (again) an invaluable object of interest in the political and cultural landscape in the United States. Yet it is also a region that has been undergoing tremendous (urban) renewal, whose economy has adjusted to the new Millennium, far from the Manichean stereotypes of decay and a region that had been long been ignored by journalists and politicians as opposed to the Sun Belt, from California and Texas to Florida and Virginia.

This conference, to be held in June 2019, aims to reexamine the Rust Belt between the midterm elections of November 2018 and the presidential and congressional elections of 2020, where the role of the Rust Belt may again be decisive.

Proposals should try to fit one or several of the following categories:

• The rebirth of cities and its electoral impact (urban renewal, gentrification, transportation, technological and industrial innovation). Electoral impact is understood at the federal level (Presidency, Congress) and at the local level (state assemblies, especially in cases of split voting, e.g., Trump Democrats).
• The transformations in the various rings of suburbs and exurbs (demographic, social and political diversification).
• Economic and health challenges (“deaths of despair,” decreasing life expectancy, opioid crisis) affecting rural communities and small towns.
• The impact of two years of “Trumponomics” on the US-Canada border in the context of NAFTA and its renegotiation, the transborder connections and fluxes between the US and Canadian metros and provinces.
• Local political changes, in particular in the context of anti-labor, “right-to-work” laws.
• The battles around gerrymandering and the partisan distortion of local representation, in the context of Court decision invalidating exaggeratedly partisan maps (Pennsylvania, North Carolina).
• Energy (coal – clean or not – and shale oil) and environmental issues, as well as their impact on jobs and elections.
• The perceptions and representations of the Rust Belt in films and TV series since 2000.
• We also invite comparisons with neighboring regions (the more rural Midwest, Appalachia) as well as with other Rust Belts in Europe (mining regions in Britain, North and Eastern France, the Ruhr in Germany).

Proposals should be about 300 words and a brief bio / bibliographic introduction should be attached.

Deadline for proposals: October 15th

To be sent to the organizing committee:
François Vergniolle de Chantal (Université Paris Diderot), fdechantal@univ-paris-diderot.fr
Lauric Henneton (UVSQ), lauric.henneton@uvsq.fr
Guillaume Poiret (UPEC), guillaume.poiret@u-pec.fr

Scientific committee :
Frédérick Gagnon (Chaire Raoul Dandurand, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada)
Justin Gest (George Mason University, United States of America)
Lauric Henneton (Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, France)
Denis Lacorne (CERI, Sciences Po Paris, France)
Renaud Le Goix (Université Paris Diderot, France)
Michael McQuarrie (London School of Economics, UK)
Guillaume Poiret (Université Paris-Est-Créteil, France)
François Vergniolle de Chantal (Université Paris Diderot, France)

Melville’s Measures

October 17-19, 2019

Université de Lille, Université Paris Diderot

Keynote Speakers: Branka Arsić (Columbia University); Cody Marrs (University of Georgia) 

“The measure! the measure!” cried Ahab.

               Ahab’s exclamation notwithstanding, Moby-Dick more readily calls to mind the longing for the “unshored, haborless immensities” (ch. 32), “indefinite as God” (ch. 23), than down-to-earth measures taken to apprehend or comprehend “the ungraspable phantom of life” (ch. 1). Significantly enough, “if money’s to be the measurer,” Ahab’s doubloon is an ambivalent gold standard, at once the symbol of rampant capitalism that has transformed the world into a “great counting-house,” the effigy of Ahab’s sovereign self and a figure for Ishmael’s continual forging of symbols of his own coinage. Even as it bears the stamp of Ahab’s empire, the gold coin remains a source of numberless speculations for Ishmael. “The measure” is rife with ambiguities.

               Maps, timetables, and other measuring tools may well guide us through Melville’s “voyage[s] hither” into the outlandish (Mardi); we readers still lose our bearings, and much more, along the way. In White Jacket and Billy Budd, states of emergency require that half-measures be ruled out, and if Melville’s works can be read as guidelines or blueprints for a common measure, it is ever yet to come. Of course, in mid-nineteenth-century America, Bartleby would prefer not to copy nor to compute; he already occupied Wall Street, walled-in in an office, entrenched in unrelenting opposition to the reckonings of a “calculating people” (Moby-Dick, ch. 41) and to globalization even before the word gained currency. A telling sign of the times, “Bartleby” remains a measure of our current perplexity in the face of digitalization and all-inclusive quantification.

               The question was, and to a certain extent, still is: What remedial (counter-)measures can be taken in a context of pervasive counterfeiting (The Confidence-Man) when conflicting standards and competing values proliferate and vie for hegemony (Pierre; or, the Ambiguities)? How can latter-day pilgrims orient themselves when old landmarks and familiar coordinates no longer make sense (Clarel)? Is there still a universal unit of measure, a “true” measure and sole criterion that might serve as a litmus test? Melville’s increasing interest in poetry and metrics may have something to do with his desperate search for “forms, measured forms…spell-binding the wild denizens of the wood” (Billy Budd).Can it be that these forms should be but another name for inflexible norms and a smokescreen for the repression of brute forces (Billy Budd)?

               The aim of this conference to take measure of Melville’s grappling with the measureless by surveying the various sets of gauging, computing, measuring instruments designed to circumscribe and contain it. In the end, we may wonder whether Melville’s works amount to an irregular system of sorts or whether measures are bound to anagrammatically “erase sums.” In what sense do they unsettle and even subvert “the art of measuring” advocated by Newton in his Preface to Principia Mathematica? To what extent are they doomed to be appropriated as canonical criteria by academe? If measures re-assume (yet another anagram) the part once played by a unique lost paradigm, what will result from their multiplication? Or, in Melville’s own words, “If Luther’s day expand to Darwin’s year / Shall that exclude the hope—foreclose the fear?” (Clarel)

Panels or individual papers may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

1. “Horologicals and chronometricals” (Pierre). Melville’s novels raise key questions of sizes and scales in maps and charts, weights & measures: surveying space, sounding depths, probing deep time, questioning probing into volumetrics, measuring out giant whales in the minutest detail; redrawing scientific taxonomies and systems of measurement as well as anthropometric and zoological classifications. Readers come to be queerly quizzed: How many inches of Ahab’s leg have been incorporated into the belly of the whale? To what extent is man a political animal and/or a beastly brute? What is the accurate ratio? As African American slaves were still subject to the 3/5 (three-fifths) rule, how did such an unstable statistical definition of identity (now a subject, now an object, now an infinitesimal number) challenge one’s sense of personal integrity, of being “an unfractioned integral” (Moby-Dick, ch. 107)?
2. Alternative measurements: accurate units of measurements like feet, pounds, nautical miles, grades, or degrees yield in front of the unaccountable. What is a mob? Are there shades or degrees of intensity in whiteness, that colorless, all-color je-ne-sais-quoi that evades classifications? Is it possible to characterize and categorize blubber? What does it mean to classify the whales by their volume (like books)? More largely, are even the most accurate measurements not doomed to remain forever indeterminate? Are not measures a grid that involves the erasure of gaps so that the real only surfaces when the whale (which could be read as the “whole”) happens to breach through?
3. Is Man still “the Measure of the Universe” (Shelley,Prometheus Unbound, Act 2, sc. 4, l.72)? Melville’s Leviathan explores a pluralistic universe in which the non-human looms large and the inhuman, be it the super-human or the sub-human “Not Me,” exceeds the self beyond measure. What does measuring up to the hidden God or dead deities still mean in a universe ruled by chance or haphazard contingencies?
4. “If money’s to be the measurer, man…” (Moby-Dick, ch. 36). To what extent do Melville’s writings question the power of “the Almighty Dollar” by means of alternative standards of exchange, ranging from the barter systems peculiar to “primitive” societies to belletristic intercourse in American literary circles complicit in a market-oriented society?
5. A Measure of Justice: triangulating aesthetics, ethics and politics. Cross-examining the Fugitive Slave Act, the Alien and Sedition Act and the enforcement of the Law in the State of Exception. Meting out punishment, adjudicating between coercive measures and measures of clemency, and writing down the literary record of the trials of justice. Exploring the extent to which the toughest disciplinary measures (manacling, lashing, flogging, hanging) may still hold in store unforeseen pleasures (Billy Budd). Accounting for the need for poetic Justice.
6. Measure for Measure, beyond bounds. Rewriting revenge tragedies, reassessing hubristic retribution and extravagant largesse. Dramatizing the moral tragedy inherent in double-binds.
7. “Buoyed up by that coffin…” (Moby-Dick, ch. 136). Measuring loss, deprivation and, conversely, the power of possibility.
8. Symmetry, balance and “ragged edges.” How can we interpret metric patterns and dissonant harmonics? To what extent do Melville’s poems and sense of rhythm in prose redraw the boundaries between metrical rules and free verse and even revisit the notion of tempo?
9. Correspondences and discordances between fiction, poetry, drama, music and the visual arts. Reappraising high and low productions. Measuring Melville’s canonicity.
10. “Sans commune mesure”? Critical and cultural translations in and of Melville’s works. Are Melville’s works lost or regained in translation? Are translations and critical interpretations mere sarcophagi or life-buoys similar to Queequeg’s made-to-measure coffin? What does Melville’s text amount to once it has been “transferringly measured” (Moby-Dick, ch. 110)?

Deadline for submissions: February 1st, 2019

Contact: melvillesmeasures@gmail.com

Proposals will be reviewed by the Conference committee: Dawn Coleman (Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville); Agnès Derail (École Normale Supérieure, Paris); Philippe Jaworski (Univ. Paris Diderot); Ronan Ludot-Vlasak (Univ. de Lille); Bruno Monfort (Univ. Paris-Ouest-Nanterre); Mark Niemeyer (Univ. de Bourgogne); Samuel Otter (Univ. of California, Berkeley); Cécile Roudeau (Univ. Paris Diderot)

Influence, Disinformation, and Power in Europe and the Americas

International conference organized by the University of Caen, the University of Poitiers, the University of Le Mans, the University of Paris-Nanterre, and the University of Montpellier

January 17th, 18th, 19th, 2019

University of Caen-Normandy France

In his book Power: A New Social Analysis (1938), the British philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote: “The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.”

In accordance with Russell, the Power Studies Network will be maintaining its focus on the concept of power in its 5th international conference, but has chosen to widen the scope to deal with its corollaries, namely influence, disinformation, and manipulation.

If power can be defined with regard to an action, a potential or a capacity to “get others to do what we want them to do” (Dahl), the effective use of this potential can be considered as a form of influence. However, exercising an authentic influence on a person or group entails creating an environment in which that influence will be the least questioned or contested. As Weber remarked: “Every such system attempts to establish and to cultivate the belief in its legitimacy.” Authorities exercising power, subject to being called into question at all times, must therefore make use of methods of manipulation that blur the message (whether intentionally or not) in order to attain their objective, namely to reinforce their own legitimacy and maintain their hold on power. As such the exercise of power can have two facets, one seen as acceptable (influence) the other as repugnant (manipulation). And yet, the famous American sociologist Talcott Parsons affirmed that “embedded power is always legitimized,” even by those who do not agree with it. In other words, the very exercise of power (imposed or not) would necessarily confer a sense of political and social legitimacy.

This conference, in continuity with previous activities of the Power Studies Network, will adopt a multidisciplinary approach. This call for papers thus reaches out to research specialists working on the Americas or on Europe from a variety of disciplinary approaches within the social sciences.

Possibilities for papers include:

• Theoretical approaches on the links between power, domination, influence and manipulation, for example in the field of political sociology, the Gramscian concept of hegemony would offer an interesting perspective.
• In political science, the study of competing factions in a country’s internal politics, the question of the role, and relative power of lobbies, analyses of foreign policy, studies of regional geopolitics, etc.
• In sociology, the study of powers and countervailing powers can be seen in an exchange relationship; power becomes a central element in social organization
• Media studies, political marketing, analyses of disinformation and “fake news” are also fundamental themes of interest with regard to influence and power.
• Artistic production (painting, music, film, literature) can be analyzed under the lens of power, domination and influence. This production can also be seen from another angle as the means for ensuring power structures and maintaining a regime’s legitimacy.

This conference is open to any proposal offering a new perspective or a new approach to the study of power, influence and manipulation.

Deadline for proposals: September 30th, 2018

To be sent to:
Taoufik Djebali (taoufik.djebali@unicaen.fr); Eliane Elmaleh (eliane.elmaleh@univ-lemans.fr); Salah Oueslati (salah.oueslati@univ-poitiers.fr); Pierre Guerlain (pierre.guerlain@gmail.com); Raphël Ricaud (raphael.ricaud@univ-montp3.fr)