Events

It is again time to take serious account of the thought of Georg Lukács. Thanks, no doubt, to the persistence of Frederic Jameson’s defense, the waning of intellectual currents generally hostile to Lukács including certain strains of American cultural studies, post-Marxism, and poststructuralism, as well as the mounting pressure being brought to bear on modernism as an unproblematically valorized cultural-historical category, the last few years have seen something of a renaissance in Lukács studies. From special editions of journals, ambitious translations projects, to monographs, edited collections, and panels at major conferences, the last few years have seen a resurge in interest in the 20^thcentury’s most prominent Marxist theorist. Recent accounts situate Lukács within a number of important dynamics and contexts, including critical engagements with contemporary theory and social movements, reassessments of the concept of realism, and re-imaginings of Lukács within the dynamics of decolonization.

“Lukács and the World” will bring together scholars from a wide variety of disciplines to articulate a set of perspectives simultaneously and equally attendant to particularized sites of historical reception and to contemporary problematics in the humanities. What, for instance, does it mean for scholarly debates on Marxism and queer theory today that Lukács had a reception among queer writers in Britain in the 1930s? How might we re-think the contemporary paradigm of “alternative modernities” through the prewar and wartime Japanese reception of him not only as a leading Marxist cultural critic but also in the context of German phenomenology? How can we challenge the canonized—i.e., Westernized—view of this Hungary-born thinker by illuminating his later and more precarious adoption in areas such as Africa, the Middle East, and (post-)socialist Cuba and China? Addressing these previously neglected issues from a truly transnational perspective, “Lukács and the World” aims to articulate a new geopolitical framework for reexamining the history of twentieth-century cultural production and one of its most important theorists.