Call for Papers:  

Marxism East and West

Proposed Special Session Panel

MLA Convention, Dec. 27-30, 2009

Philadelphia, PA

Chairs:

Robert Tally, Texas State University

Rita Wu, Purdue University

The advent of globalization has brought Marxist critical theory to a crossroads, as production, consumption, distribution, and labour are constellated in a worldwide network of power relations that seem to undermine the traditional critique of capitalism formed in the mid-nineteenth-century.  But even as the post-Cold War rhetoric of the capitalist West trumpeted the end of communism (or, á la Francis Fukuyama, the End of History), the twenty-first is already being declared “The Chinese Century,” and China, after all, remains a putatively Marxist state.  In this panel we wish to explore the challenges of and to Marxism, while focusing attention on the distinct aspects of Marxian thought in the East and the West.  By sharing ideas on the role and future of Marxism in the world today, we hope to highlight the geographical specificity as well as the historical grounds for Marxist criticism in the age of multinational capitalism.

Please submit a 300-word abstract and brief CV to Robert Tally (robert.tally@txstate.edu) and Rita Wu (wu16@purdue.edu) by March 10.