Authoritarian Imaginaries

A Counter-Imaginary in Authoritarian Times is a national, multi-year initiative engaging artists, academics, activists, and other community members to analyze authoritarian dynamics and develop strategies for confronting them. Focused on questions of censorship, surveillance, repression, and ideological uptake, the project is led by scholars Judith Butler, Shannon Jackson, and Debarati Sanyal at UC Berkeley and Denise Ferreira da Silva at New York University. Through a program of collaborative workshops, conferences, performances, publications, and a dynamic, open-ended digital platform, participants will consider how the arts and humanities might contribute to the development of an anti-authoritarian imaginary.

The themes of this conference—the project’s inaugural public event—originate from the understanding that building an effective counter-imaginary means addressing the issue of authoritarianism in a critical, shared, and multi-faceted manner. Through panels that consider the libidinal investments in fascist politics, gender and the affective economies of authoritarianism, and how Palestine serves as a template for repressive politics in the US, we aim to diagnose the formidable challenges we face in effectively resisting authoritarian logics and to begin to envisage ways of scaling these impasses.

Participants include Nadia Abu El-Haj, Amahl Bishara, Gillian Branstetter, Judith Butler, Anton Ford, Jason Frank, Katherine Franke, Adom Getachew, Jacob Johanssen, Jane Junn, William Mazzarella, Robert Meister, Sianne Ngai, Brenda Tindal, Lisa Wedeen, and Linda Zerilli.

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This event is free and open to the public.

Please note: Registration is required and is not a guarantee of admission. Seating will be available on a first-come, first-served basis, subject to capacity.