Beth Hoffman: On the Politics of Narrative in Occupy Wall Street's Enactments of "Plural Existence"

Colloquium

Thursday, September 12, 2013 4:30 PM to 7:00 PM EDT
Johnson Center, B

“What Does ‘Occupy Wall Street’ Want?” Such media headlines constituted Occupy’s decentralized, leaderless model of resistance as a “problem” from its inaugural moment, demanding that the movement provide a coherent account of itself to make its energies politically efficacious. Rather than finally resolving this issue, however, I explore how Occupy’s “problem” demonstrates an ambivalent push-pull between the desire for narrative’s efficacy and the desire to circumvent its authorial assumptions and risk of interpretive closure—an ambivalence that structures any performance of what Judith Butler has called “plural existence in public space.”

Hosted by Cultural Studies Colloquium.

Sponsored by Cultural Studies.