Monologue workshop in Melbourne

[Matt Tomlinson]

Hi all,

Apologies for this late notice--if you (or your students, colleagues, etc.) happen to be in Melbourne next week, please feel free to come to this event!:

The Monologic Imagination
A workshop organized by Monash University and Australian National University
Organizers and chairs: Julian Millie (Monash) and Matt Tomlinson (ANU)

Monash University Law Chambers, 555 Lonsdale Street, Melbourne
August 8, 2014
9:00-17:00

Keynote speaker: 
Professor Greg Urban (University of Pennsylvania): "Cultural Replication: The Motional Basis of Monological and Dialogical Models of Culture"

With papers from: Alan Rumsey (ANU), Zane Goebel (Latrobe), Philip Fountain (NUS), Howie Manns (Monash), James Barry (Deakin), Julian Milie (Monash), Sherman Tan (ANU), Matt Tomlinson (ANU)

Description: Bakhtin's writings on dialogism have profoundly influenced anthropology during the past three decades, reorienting theory and ethnography in productive ways. Yet many scholars have neglected his related discussions of monologue. Bakhtin suggested that monologic projects gained force especially during the Enlightenment, when nationalist projects aimed to unify meaningful elements in "one consciousness" represented by "one accent." Although in Bakhtinian terms pure monologue is impossible (except, he noted, for Adam speaking in Eden), many religious and political speakers do attempt to harness discourse's "centripetal force," its "unifying, centralizing" tendencies which counterpose the "centrifugal force" of stratification and decentralization. In doing so, such speakers present their utterances as single-authored, single-voiced, and context-transcendent statements which preclude meaningful response. In short, they present their utterances as monologues. The papers in this workshop pose the questions of how anthropologists should study monologues, how audiences do or do not replicate them or attempt to turn them into new dialogues, and what the political implications are of such projects' success or failure.

--
Matt Tomlinson
Australian Research Council Future Fellow
Anthropology / CHL / College of Asia and the Pacific
Australian National University, Canberra 0200, Australia
https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/tomlinson-ma