Radical Humanism
Santa Fe Community Convention Center
Organization: Department of Arts & Human Sciences at Northern New Mexico College
Radical Humanism
call for papers
Deadline for Submissions: May 31, 2023
Decision: July 31, 2023
Name of Organization: The Department of Arts & Human Sciences at Northern New Mexico College
Conference Chair: Robert Beshara
Date: September 8-9, 2023
Time: 8 am – 5 pm
Location: Santa Fe Community Convention Center, Oga Po’geh, Nuevo México, Turtle Island
Keynote Speakers: Bedour Alagraa and Matthew Flisfeder
Introductory Speakers: Robert Beshara, Matthew Martinez, Johanna Case-Hofmeister, and Ana X. Gutiérrez Sisneros
The International Conference on Radical Humanism invites scholars to submit proposals for papers, which critique bourgeois, liberal, and/or Eurocentric humanism(s) from the perspectives of Indigenous studies, Black studies, and/or postcolonial/decolonial studies and using concepts from Marxism, anarchism, critical theory, psychoanalysis, and/or Africana, Asian, and Latin American philosophies.
Central Themes:
o What is radical humanism? And why is it relevant today?
o Key theorizations include (but are not limited to) Frantz Fanon’s “new humanism,” Raya Dunayevskaya’s “Marxist humanism,” Paulo Freire’s “revolutionary humanism,” Edward Said’s “radical humanism,” C.L.R. James’s “decolonial humanism,” Jean-Paul Sartre’s “existentialist humanism,” and Achille Mbembe’s “critical humanism”
o What is the place of radical humanism in prefigurative (or utopian) politics?
o How can we reinvigorate the “human sciences” (Geisteswissenschaft) by shifting the geography of reason (Lewis Gordon)?
o Critiques of bourgeois, liberal, and/or Eurocentric humanism(s)
o Critiques of antihumanism, transhumanism, and/or posthumanism
o Our relationship with the more-than-human world (David Abram)
o Anthropocene or capitolocene (Jason Moore)?
o The possibility of ecocentric humanism in response to charges of anthropocentrism
o New humanism after Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, and C.L.R. James
o Marxist or dialectical humanism (Dunayevskaya, Anderson, Ko?akowski)
o Critical humanism after the Frankfurt School (Fromm, Marcuse, Benjamin)
o Revolutionary humanism and pedagogy after Paulo Freire
The aim of the conference to problematize and expand the Euromodern conception of the “human” in order to document and develop critical epistemologies, ontologies, and methodologies that honor the complexities of humans around the world, particularly Indigenous, Black, and Global Southern humans, who have been historically excluded from the category of “human.” We encourage papers on radical humanism that assume a worldly, or pluriversal, vision. We expect critical reflexivity when it comes to your citational practices (i.e., you can cite Euromodern thinkers, but you cannot uncritically cite them while ignoring non-European thinkers), and as such we highly recommend the following reading list to contextualize our dialogue:
Achille Mbembe & Deborah Posel (2005) A critical humanism, Interventions, 7:3, 283-286.
Adamson, A. (2019). CLR James’s Decolonial Humanism in Theory and Practice. The CLR James Journal.
Durkin, K. (2014). The radical humanism of Erich Fromm. Springer.
Fanon, F. (1952/1967). Black skin, white masks. Grove.
Freire, P. (1970/2018). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Bloomsbury.
Fuchs, C. (2021). Cornel west and Marxist humanism. Critical Sociology, 47(7-8), 1219-1243.
Gagne, K. M. (2007). On the obsolescence of the disciplines: Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter propose a new mode of being human. Human architecture: Journal of the sociology of self-knowledge, 5, 251.
Gogol, E. (2004). Raya Dunayevskaya: Philosopher of Marxist-Humanism: Philosopher of Marxist-Humanism. Wipf and Stock Publishers.
Gordon, L. R. (1995). Fanon and the crisis of European man: An essay on philosophy and the human sciences. Psychology Press.
Gordon, L. R. (2000). Du Bois’s humanistic philosophy of human sciences. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 568(1), 265-280.
Gordon, L. R. (2007). Through the hellish zone of nonbeing. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, 5-12.
Gordon, L. R. (2018). Disciplining as a human science. In Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performance (pp. 233-250). Palgrave.
Hissim-Sabat, M. (2008). Lewis Gordon: Avatar of Postcolonial Humanism. The CLR James Journal, 14(1), 46-70.
Johnson, P. (1994). Feminism as radical humanism. Routledge.
Maldonado-Torres, N. (2008). Lewis Gordon: Philosopher of the human. The CLR James Journal, 14(1), 103-137.
Mignolo, W. D. (2015). Sylvia Wynter: what does it mean to be human?. In Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (pp. 106-123). Duke University Press.
Parker, E. A. (2018). The Human as Double Bind: Sylvia Wynter and the Genre of “Man”. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 32(3), 439-449.
Radakrishnan, R. (2007). Edward Said’s literary humanism. Cultural Critique, 13-42.
Said, E. W. (2004). Humanism and democratic criticism. Columbia University Press.
Sartre, J. P. (1945/2007). Existentialism is a Humanism. Yale University Press.
Scott, D. (2000). The re-enchantment of humanism: An interview with Sylvia Wynter. Small Axe, 8(120), 173-211.
Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument. CR: The new centennial review, 3(3), 257-337.
Wynter, S., & McKittrick, K. (2015). Unparalleled catastrophe for our species? Or, to give humanness a different future: Conversations. In Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (pp. 9-89). Duke University Press.
Abstracts:
If you wish to propose a paper, or a panel of 3 presenters, please submit a title, a 300-word abstract, and a short biographical note via this Google form (https://forms.gle/7Yiy2WHRF4Vig5s97). Participation is limited to around 50 presenters.
Registration fee: free!
https://www.criticalpsychology.org
Robert Beshara