A Dialogue on Global States, 6 May 2006

September 10, 2013 Posted by Webmaster under Volume 17, Number 1, September 2006

 

 

 

 

Introduction by Global States conference organizers Anna Cavness, Jian Chen, Michelle Cho, Wendy Piquemal, Erin Trapp, and Tim Wong. Video by Laura Johnson.

 

[image of Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak]
 

The following dialogue between Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak took place on 6 May 2006 as the keynote event of the “Global States” Conference at the University of California, Irvine.

 
The conference was organized by graduate students in the Department of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine. Participants were invited to address the term “state” and to consider the effect of the “global” on discourses of knowledge and power, literary analysis, and theories of subjectivity. The conference sought to reconceptualize the global by delineating states of sentiment, desire, and affect, and examining their deployment on–or relation to–the global scene of political and economic states.

 
In their dialogue, Butler and Spivak discuss alternative subjectivities and state forms in a “global state.” In arguing for the possibilities afforded by forms of belonging that are unauthorized yet exist within the state, Judith Butler suggests that the “right” to rights arises in the form of social discourse–calling for freedom is already an exercise of freedom. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak disarticulates the identity of state and nation and develops the concept of critical regionalisms as a new analytics of power that rethinks territoriality and sovereignty.

 

 

University of California, Berkeley
Columbia University