This year’s Left Forum, which starts March 18 and runs through March 20 at Pace University, includes a Social Text-sponsored panel:
Don’t Take the Bait: The Left and Crisis – A Social Text Roundtable
Saturday, March 19, 5:00 PM to 6:50 PM
Michael Ralph
Micki McGee
Neferti Tadiar
Randy Martin
Panel abstract:
The recent financial crisis would seem to present precisely the opportunity that the left has been waiting for: a moment of reckoning when failure is undeniable and injustice unconcealed. Yet crisis has not proven to be so ready or willing an object to think with. Financiers continue to take crisis as their opportunity, while misery continues to be spread around. How the left might see itself if crisis is taken as its mirror? If economic indicators are proclaimed to have returned to normalcy, does that send the left back to its cave to hibernate until the next calamity strikes? Alternately, how does the left recognize its own critical agency and efficacy if it comes to understand itself through an account that may prove altogether hostile. What traps ensue from a left taking its own opportunity from the conditions of crisis. What would it mean to not take the bait, to find other means of valuing and evaluating the grounds and effects of left politics, occasions and opportunities?
