Literary assemblage

Read the report here: https://unpliegodepapel.wordpress.com/2024/05/14/33o-jornadas-james-joyce-ensamblajes-modernistas-ayer-y-hoy/

On 25 January 2024 the first-ever project seminar was held on Zoom. The rationale behind the event was to discuss methodological approaches and research in progress with 10/15-minute presentations per researcher. There were 8 presentations in total.

1. Rosario Arias (University of Málaga): “Assemblage Thinking, Network Theory, and Recent Theories about Care in Literature and Culture”

To kick off the day, the PI, Prof. Rosario Arias, reminded project members in attendance of the links between past projects on Orientation and this one, e.g. the Network Turn (Ahnert et al., 2020). She presented some of the effects and affects of the literary assemblage as co-production, “co-functioning” (Deleuze and Parnet, qtd. in DeLanda, 2016), inherently relational and entangled, in permanent flux or re-construction, with the potential to mobilize social change and create new modes of care.

2. Carmen Lara-Rallo (UMA): “Assemblage Theory and Temporalities: Unearthing the Past”

In her presentation, Lara-Rallo addressed the interrelatedness of archeology and literature in artistic practice while focusing on sensorial and temporal assemblages. She drew attention to the transformative potential of the arts and to the “co-presence” of memories (Hamilakis, 2017) constantly reshaping past and present.

3. Laura Monrós-Gaspar (U of Valencia): “Re-orienting theatre history through assemblage theory”

Prof. Monrós-Gaspar applied Nail’s (2017) “agencement” to re-read British theatre history, looking at the assemblage as a “multiplicity” (23) where “different sets of relations” (24) intertwine.

4. Miriam Borham-Puyal (U of Salamanca): “Palimpsestic spaces and entangled temporalities”

Borham-Puyal’s presentation delved into the ideas of experience and memory, and of the present as always mediated, shaped by the past. Neo-Victorian crime sci-fi is an example of how a return to the past can right its wrongs. Drawing parallels with testimonial narratives, storytelling can re-write collective memory (Marshall et al., 2017) and be harnessed as a political claim: what to erase/preserve/modify matters.

5. Lin Pettersson (UMA): “Entangled Identities in Neo-Victorian Asylum Fiction”

Petterson drew from a forthcoming article where she explores madness and otherness, re-reading Foucault’s (1961) Madness and Civilization, and how identities are entangled in the institutional machinery. 

6. Ana Belén Martínez García (U of Navarra): “The Identity Assemblage in (Refugees’) Testimonial Projects”

Martínez García draws from life-writing scholarship to grapple with the intriguing notion of the “identity assemblage” (Smith, 2019). Identities are never stable, but constantly “becomings” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2017, 21). The tension between identity and multiplicity pervades testimonial texts, where it is important that one attends to not only personal but collective identities, and gauges the impact of “identity technologies” whereby the elusive self is re-constructed online (Poletti and Rak, 2014).

7. Manuel Hueso Vasallo (UMA): “On Assemblage and Queer Theory: An Overdue Conceptualisation”

Hueso Vasallo proposed Browne (2014, 271-274) as key to future scholarship in the coming years on the assemblage as an aggregate of voices and materials of relevance for queer studies.

8. Raquel García-Cuevas (UMA): “Re-orienting Theories of Assemblage towards Notions of  Kinship”

García-Cuevas read Victor Turner’s (1969) “liminal stage” and “equality” in the context of rhizomatic thinking, assessing keywords such as in-between or mutability, and suggesting how these might lead to understanding Donna Haraway’s (2016) “kinship” as an inter-/non-human assemblage.

9. María Torres Romero (UMA): “Cognitive Assemblages and the Nonhuman”

Finally, Torres Romero presented a novel analysis of Hayles’s (2017) Unthought, with a particular focus on Part II: “Cognitive Assemblages”, to account for cognition that goes beyond the merely human. After a thorough examination of the potential of this theory, she closed with a reflection on the ethical import of this new framework and the role the humanities can play in society.

We finished the day with a lot of food for thought, plans to meet up at the next AEDEAN conference, and eager to keep exploring the notion of the literary assemblage.

Blog post (636 words) by Ana Belén Martínez García