Narrative and Political Theory: Experimentation, Canon Dynamics, and Reinvention

Session Submission Type: Virtual Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Political theory is not only—and perhaps not even primarily—an academic business. It unfolds and is elaborated not only in the library or at the scholar’s desk, but also in the streets, the theater, the media, through social action, journalism, and the arts. Within the latter sphere, literature has nurtured and been nurtured by political theory in multiple ways. Our panel explores the dynamics of this productive relationship. First, it examines how narratives make normative values and principles concrete, give them new content and push them in different directions. Thus, it shows that narratives are not merely “illustrations” of more abstract theories, but actually make certain theoretical mindsets real, vivid, and thus possible. Second, it discusses how literature can provide new methodological insights to political theory, thereby preparing different possibilities of thinking about politics. Finally, the panel inquires into the ways in which literature has been instrumental in modelling our tradition(s) of political thought, by transforming the reception of figures and ideas in history, and thus helping determine what is deemed “canonical.”
Jennie Ikuta’s paper studies the new iteration of the mythic narrative of the American Dream provided by Arlie Russell Hochschild in Strangers In Their Own Land, which, in contrast to the conventional narrative of the Dream, takes on an explicitly racialized character. As such, Ikuta argues, the new narrative is crucial for explaining white resentment towards the success of people of color. Adriana Alfaro’s paper explores recent appropriations of the story of the Garden of Eden, specifically Carmen Boullosa’s The Book of Eve, studying how different symbolisms of evil (Paul Ricoeur) depict different understandings of human nature and of power relations. From a Ricoeurian perspective, the paper argues, Boullosa invites us to reimagine our founding myths, and thus, to transform the identities that are formed within them.
Lowry Pressly’s paper asks whether there can be an experimental political theory and what it would look like. It proposes using the model of experimental poetry, rather than experimental science, by looking to the example of poet, critic, and theorist Fred Moten, whose “fugitive socio-poetics” offers a valuable alternative (and complement) to the current way of thinking politics. Finally, Tae-Yeoun Keum’s paper argues that Voltaire’s play Socrate offers contemporary political theorists an instructive case study in the dynamics of canonization. Recovering the conflicting interpretive traditions of Platonism that were available to the leading figures of the Enlightenment, it shows how Voltaire reinvented a tradition that saw Plato as a symbol of the Enlightenment, at the expense of a Neoplatonic tradition that emphasized the mystical aspects of his philosophical system.
Considered together, the papers in this panel explore the relations between literature and political theory, and, more specifically, how the former enriches the latter, transforming and broadening its contents, methods, and history.

Sub Unit

• Division 1: Political Thought and Philosophy

Cosponsor

• Division 41: Politics, Literature, and Film

Individual Presentations

• Whiteness, Mobility, and 'The Line' in Hochschild's Strangers In Their Own Land - Jennie Choi Ikuta, University of Missouri-Columbia

• Eve and the Symbols of Evil: The Book of Genesis in the 21st Century - Adriana Alfaro, Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico

• The Open Tangle: On Fred Moten and Experimental Political Theory - Lowry Pressly, Brown University

• Voltaire’s Socrates and the Enlightenment Plato - Tae-Yeoun Keum, University of California, Santa Barbara

Chair

• Andrew Norris University of California, Santa Barbara

Discussant

• Joshua Foa Dienstag University of California, Los Angeles