“Re-orienting Assemblage Theory in Anglophone Literature and Culture” (RELY)
The project, “Re-orienting Assemblage Theory in Anglophone Literature and Culture” has been funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain (Ref. PID2022-137881NB-I00) for the period 2023-2026 and its acronym is RELY.
On the basis of the research carried out in a previous project on the concept of ‘orientation’, “‘Orientation’: A Dynamic Understanding on Contemporary Fiction and Culture (1990-onwards)” (FFI2017-86417-P-FEDER), this new project takes as its starting point the work developed so far on the critical notion of ‘orientation’ for current literary and cultural studies, and proposes to expand on its relational mode by paying attention to the concept of ‘assemblage’. Following Ian Buchanan’s statement in Assemblage Theory and Method (2021) that the “interest in the concept of assemblage…can be understood as a critical response to the growing awareness at the turn of the last century that…the world is…textured in quite different ways” (1), the aim of this project is to study and apply assemblage thinking to Anglophone literature and culture today, as well as to demonstrate that literature (and culture), as having an assemblage mode of existence, contributes to reflecting, refracting, and shaping overlapping structures of care, co-functioning on multiple societal levels, thus enabling change. In this sense, we concur with Israel Rodríguez-Giralt et al. in that assemblage theory allows “scholars to attend to the complex ecologies within which agents, both human and non-human, mobilise to effect change…[thus constituting] a useful tool in the task of constructing forms of attention and care that aspire to learn from and think with social movements, rather than explaining them away” (1).
Therefore, in this project, we wish to further our research by re-orienting ourselves towards the conceptual framework of ‘assemblage’ which permits a clearer focus on multiplicity, multilinearity, multidirectionality, and relationality, somehow already delineated in the former project in our discussion of ‘polytemporality’ (following Victoria Browne). Granted that we established ‘orientation’ as being multidirectional as far as temporality is concerned, we propose here that ‘orientation’ should give way to a critical notion that encompasses a more relational approach to today’s literature and culture in English, in the context of the ‘network turn’ in the humanities (Ahnert et al. 2020). As subsequently evinced, ‘assemblage’ will prove to be even more fruitful than ‘orientation’, both sharing characteristics such as fluidity and movement, for the analysis of literary texts and cultural works in English today, in the same timeline as in the previous project (1990-onwards), notwithstanding the relevance of works from the nineteenth-century past, also under scrutiny in this project, which resonate with our current preoccupations and crises in the Global North. Conversely, we will study Anglophone literature and culture through the lens of assemblage, showing that literary (and cultural) assemblages reflect, project and foster the current needs of human and non-human co-existence, as well as the building up of multi-layered structures of individual and social care.
Literary assemblage 