The 20th Annual Stony Brook Manhattan Graduate Conference:

Sifting Through Lies: Toward an Aesthetic Impunity

James Baldwin, in a letter to his nephew, wrote the famous lines “It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” Writing at the 100th anniversary of U.S. Emancipation, Baldwin was telling a tale of a history entrapped, but it is this same notion of innocence and history that research methodologies, disciplinary factions, and a damagingly naïve Western critical framework of academia must confront in order to stop the perpetuation of lies almost intrinsic to our scholarly practices. In writing today, is there impunity to be found in acts of addressing, sifting and re-writing through lies? Is there the knowledge of possible impunity from the consequent knowledge of this entrapment in which we—academics, intellectuals, artists—are willingly initiated, caught and imputed? What are the risks and hopes of such engagements?

Sifting Through Lies: Toward an Aesthetic Impunity, the 20th Annual Stony Brook Manhattan Graduate Conference to be held February 15^th and 16th, seeks to focus on the fault lines of what can be accounted for and what new breaks must be made in order to redress the violent past archaeologies of thought and practice committed by our predecessors.

The questions that this conference sets out to address include: How can we as junior scholars critique the legacy that has been left to us while resisting the attempt to “fix” history—i.e., how—with which methodologies—to sift through the fragments of a narrative that has been ripped apart while defying the urge to build a new narrative based potentially on our own naiveté and criminal innocence? What knowledge is accessible, and just who can access it? In what languages can we communicate knowledge and what idioms, truths, and lies are privileged in this communication? What kinds of demands can we make on the work of those archaeologists of knowledge who have come before us as we confront the limitations of our own appropriations, paradoxes, and self-reflexivity? What can we really hope for or demand from interdisciplinary scholarship? For some, interdisciplinarity signals a breakdown of knowledge dissemination, for others the work is seemingly the only way to overcome or theorize the recycling of past mistakes: do the inherent conflicts and contradictions of interdisciplinarity stymie possible new movements toward academic accountability and what can an extended engagement with traditional disciplinary boundaries offer to the fight for this accountability? Is it possible that the mere rhetoric of the fragment, the fraction, and the rupture, paradoxically reinforce linguistic, bodily, disciplinary, and national boundaries?