M. C. Armstrong

Reading Terror: Representations and Resistance

On November 5th and 6th, 2015, City University of New York (CUNY) will be hosting “Reading Terror:  Representations and Resistance,” an interdisciplinary conference that will address questions such as: What is the nature of terror?  How have representations, definitions and our understanding of terror changed over time?  How is terror used aesthetically, politically and socially?  How is terror translated textually and visually?  What are some of the modes of resistance to terror, through literature, art, and the media?

Panels and Presenters (in order of schedule)

Thursday

Breakfast (9:00 – 10:00, room 4116)

Welcome Panel – “Constructing and Inhabiting the Spaces of Terror” (10:00, rooms C204/205)

•         Matthew Armstrong (Independent Researcher) – “Reading the GWOT: The Relationship between the Global War on Terror and Global Literacy.”
•         Shaza Elsheshtawy (The New School for Social Research) – “Cairo’s Ashwa’iyyat: Informal Settlement Formation & the (Discursive) Construction of Terror.”
•         Sally Sharif (The Graduate Center, CUNY) – “The Aesthetics of Jihad: A Study of Videos Released by the Islamic State.”
•         Hamza Muhammad Iqbal (Habib University) – “Terror in Karachi: Representation and Experience.”

1A. Terror Today (11:45 – 1:15, room 8301)

•         Peter M. Boudreau  (Tufts University) – “Touch Me in the Morning: Finding Community in Ron Athey’sDissociative Sparkle.”
•         Vincent Sallé (The Graduate Center, CUNY) – “Can terror be funny?”
•         Anne-Gabrielle Roussel (Brown University) – “French government’s fight against terrorism: the websitestop-djihadisme.gouv.fr”

1B. Turning Terror into Text (11:45 – 1:15, room 8304)

•         Ruth Riftin (University of Virginia) – “The Transmission of Terror: How the Witnesses of the Saint-Bartholomew’s Day Massacre turn their horrific experiences into text.”
•         Noni Carter (Columbia University) – “Archiving Terror and the Slave Sublime: Marlon James’ The Book of Night Women and its contribution to the politics of remembering.”
•         Malte Fabian Rauch (The New School for Social Research) – “An Aesthetic of Remembrance: Representing Atrocity in the Novel.”
•         Dolores Resano (University of Barcelona) – “9/11, Hero-cops and Counterdiscourse: Being or Acting Terror in Jess Walter’s The Zero.”

1C.      Terror on the Stage (11:45 – 1:15, room 8400)

•         James Rumsey-Merlan (Princeton University) – “Stage Fright.”
•         Enzo Vasquez Toral (Princeton University) – “Brazilian Theater under Dictatorship and the Shinning Path: Reading Brechtian Influences as Inspiration and Response to Terror in Theatrical Discourse.”
•         Maria-Cristina Necula (The Graduate Center, CUNY) – “Raising the Iron Curtain: The Bucharest Opera Resistance.”

2A. Terror and the Body (2:15 – 3:45, room 8301)

•         Rebeccah Leiby (Boston University) – “Sublime Terror and the Danger of Serenity.”
•         Daniela Jiménez (University of California, Los Angeles) – “‘Every Time a Corpse Enters the Picture…’: Gothic and Evitamania in Santa Evita.”
•         Colin Burns (Fordham University) – “Performing the Body in Pain: Body Art in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man.”

2B.      Terror and Trauma (2:15 – 3:45, room 8304)

•         Diviani Chaudhuri (SUNY Binghamton) – “Reading the Landscape of Terror in Partitioned Nations: India/Pakistan and Israel/Palestine.”
•         Kaitlyn Martin Fox (Boston University) – “Wstawàch: Reading Terror as Awakening to the Unclaimed Past in Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening”
•         Laurel Billings (University of Michigan) – “9/11’s Queer Poetics: Radical Love and Everyday Loss W.H. Auden’s ‘September 1, 1939’ and Claudia Rankin’s ‘Don’t Let Me Be Lonely’.”

2C.      The Revolutionary Spirit of Terror (2:15 – 3:45, room 8400)

•         Luis A. Lei (The New School for Social Research) – “Absolute Freedom and Revolutionary Terror in China.”
•         Yannleon Chen (University of Arizona) – “The Different Faces of Terror: Facets of Violence and Terror in the RAF and BRD.”
•         Nick Olson (The Graduate Center, CUNY) – “TBD”

3A. Terror in Latin America (4:00 – 5:30, room 8301)

•         Philip Johnson (The Graduate Center, CUNY) – “Letting the Bodies Hit the Floor: Reading Sovereign Violence at Guantánamo Bay.”
•         Ruth Halvey (Princeton University) – “Countering Narco Theatricality: Photojournalism and the Corpse in Contemporary Mexico.”
•         Andrea Adhara Gaytán Cuesta (Rutgers University) – “De la mano peluda a la Santa Muerte: Zombies, Death, Bodies and collective fear in Mexican daily life.”

3B.      Existential Terror (4:00 – 5:30, room 8304)

•         Zunaira Yousaf (Independent Researcher) – “Terror and the Self.”
•         Paula Libfeld (The New School for Social Research) – “Disrupting the Instant: Levinas and Ethical Representations of the Holocaust.”
•         Marc Rickenbach (The Graduate Center, CUNY) – “Tone-Deaf Subjects, Overhearing Noise: Robbe Grillet’s Jealousy and Heidegger’s Hebel.”

3C. Terror/Transformations (4:00 – 5:30, room 8400)

•         Ruichuan Wu (University of Pennsylvania) – “Pyramid of Skulls (​Jingguan)​: Ritualizing Terror in Early Chinese Military Culture”
•        Anila Gill (New York University) – “Reflecting Absence: History, Memory, and Void in the 9/11 Memorial Museum.”
•        Lucy Hall (University of St. Andrews) – “‘A Hyperbole of Heat and Terror’: Fear and the Gothic Psyche in Rumer Godden’s Breakfast with the Nikolides.”
•        Ryan Gilligan (Fordham University) – “Demonic Possession and Grace: Understanding Terror in Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear it Away”

Keynote Event – Robin Wagner-Pacifici (6:00 – 7:30, room C202)

Evening Reception (7:30 – 8:30, room 4116)

Friday

Breakfast (9:00 – 10:00, room 4116)

Welcome Panel – CUNY Faculty Panel – Title TBD (10:00 – 12:00, The Segal Theater)

•         Giancarlo Lombardi (The Graduate Center, CUNY)
•         Monica Calabritto (The Graduate Center, CUNY)
•         Richard Wolin (The Graduate Center, CUNY)
•         Charity Scribner (The Graduate Center, CUNY)
•         Anna Ayse Akasoy (Hunter College, CUNY)
•         Moderator: Bettina Lerner (The Graduate Center, CUNY)

4A.      Pop Terror (1:15 – 2:45, room 8301)

•         Sarah Yurch (Independent Researcher) – “The Danger Zone: Terrorism and Zany Comedy in Archer.”
•         James M. Kopf (Pennsylvania State University) – “’I am reality’: Terror, Transgression, And Displacement In The Aesthetics Of The Butthole Surfers.”
•         Heath Pearson (Princeton University) – “White Flesh in Terror, or, Taylor Swift and the Meaning of Whiteness.”
•         Patrick Kent Russell (University of Connecticut) – “Disarticulating Domestic Terrorism and Crimes against Corporate Property through Popular Entertainment.”

4B. Terror, Horror and the Sublime (1:15 – 2:45, room 8304)

•         Steph Buongiorno (West Virginia University) – “Toward a Theory on the Terror of Horror.”
•         Heather J. Macpherson (Worcester State University) – “Poetic Terror & the Sublime: Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard’, Lewis’ Antonia & Pictorial Art in the Media.”
•         Leah Becker (New York University) – “‘I am nothing’: Sublime Insanity in Edgar Allan Poe.”
•         Emily O’Rourke (UC Berkeley) – “Between the terrible and the horrible: The dialectics of ‘delight’ in Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies (1967).”

4C.      La Terreur (1:15 – 2:45, room 8400)

•         Christine Carter (The Graduate Center, CUNY) – “Le Fantastique et La Violence dans La femme au collier de velours et Les Mille et Un  Fantômes d’Alexandre Dumas père.”
•         Tamara Brown (Queens College) – “The Sublime Turn: The Logic of Terror and Hope for Liberation.”
•         Laura Broccardo (Duke University) – “Representing that which is Inconceivable: Germaine de Staël versus Terror.”
•         Justyna Czader (Purdue University) – “Between Law and obedience. Women’s political resistance inprison letters and memoirs during the Reign of Terror.”

5A. Terror: Storytelling the Ineffable (3:00 – 4:30, room 8301)

•         Gareth Mandin (University of Ottawa) – “Indigeneity and Terror: Indigenous Existence and Settler Existentialism”
•         Dominik Zechner (New York University) – “Mocked By Death: Kafka and the Terrors of Narration.”
•         Jerilyn Sambrooke (UC Berkeley) – “‘Calm down, you’re just paranoid’: Terror, Paranoia, and Critique in Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist.”
•         Alberto Gelmi (The Graduate Center, CUNY) – “A broader Levi: the atomic threat and the author of Se questo è un uomo.”

5B. Faces of Terror (3:00 – 4:30, room 8304)

•         Erika Lorenzana Del Villar (University of Connecticut) – “The Forgotten Face of Fear: Female Terrorists and the Gendered Politics of Terrorism.”
•         Muhammad Waqar Azeem (Binghampton University, SUNY) – “Dialogue, Media and Terror.”
•         Jonathan Liebembuk (The Graduate Center, CUNY) – “Cuteness & Terror: ‘Suspect #2 is Cute’.”
•         Saiful Saleem (The Graduate Center, CUNY) – “Disrupting The Racial Politics of Radicalization and Terror(ism) through A rebours.”

Evening Reception (5:30 – 7:00, room 4116)

City University of New York