Communal Hypothesis Annual Symposium
830am-1pm EST
Please join the Communal Hypothesis Research Group for our annual symposium which will take place April 3 at the University at Buffalo.
The morning sessions are open to the public, while the afternoon roundtable is for members of the research group only.
April 3, Grenier Hall 216
8:00-8:30am: coffee and welcome
8:30-11:00am: Session 1, “Communal Hypotheses”
Daniel Nemser (University of Michigan), “Fugitive Communality”
Brian Whitener (University at Buffalo), “3 Concepts for the Communal Hypothesis”
Luis Moreno-Caballud (University of Pennsylvania), “Back to What Village? Legacies of the (Dis)encounter Between ‘Modern’ Leftists and Rural Communalism in Contemporary Spain”
11:30-1:00pm: Session 2, “Primitive Accumulations”
Katryn Evinson (Duke University), “African Art Collections and the Problem of Property”
Lexie Cook (Northwestern University), “Before the Fetish: Material and Moral Worlds of Merchant Capital in Early Modern West Africa”
Bret Leraul (Bucknell University), “Futures Primitive: The Politics of Rent in the Southern Cone”
1:00-2:00pm Lunch (served for participants)
2:00-4:30pm Session 3 (closed to public)
Research Group Discussion: “New Horizons at and beyond the Primitive/Communal Interface”
Katryn Evinson is Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Studies at Duke University. Her research focuses on the relationship between art and capitalism in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her first book project, Sabotage: Artistic Destruction and the Creative Economy in Neoliberal Europe, examines the resurgence of sabotage tactics in Spanish contemporary art as a way of challenging the European Union’s neoliberal enclosure of culture in the service of financialization. Her new project looks at the history of non-European art collections to argue that the imperial invention of so-called primitive art complicates the opposition between Marxist and Proudhonian debates around property. Her writing has appeared in boundary 2, the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, and the Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies, among many others. With Brian Whitener, she co-directs the Communal Hypothesis and is also a member of Rhythms of Feminized Labor in Spanish Visual Culture, where she is co-editing the volume Labores borradas: Imágenes del trabajo feminizado en España. She also serves on the board of ALCESXXI and on the editorial board of Revista Re-Visiones.
Daniel Nemser is an associate professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico, which won the Latin American Studies Association’s Mexico Humanities book award.
Bret Leraul is assistant professor of Comparative Humanities at Bucknell University. He researches the political economy of culture in Latin America during the neoliberal era with a focus on the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile, Brazil). His first book Study Without Ends: Aesthetic Education in Neoliberal Latin America will be published with Northwestern University Press in the fall.
Luis Moreno-Caballud studied philosophy in Madrid and Barcelona and earned his PhD in Hispanic Studies at Princeton. He works at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia as an Associate Professor. His research has focused on capitalist “modernization”, legacies of the communal peasant world, neoliberal crisis, social movements and cultural hierarchies of Spain. His work on the emergence of egalitarian cultural and political practices following the 2008 crisis is compiled in the book Cultures of Anyone. Studies on Cultural Democratization in the Spanish Neoliberal Crisis (Liverpool University Press, 2015).
Lexie Cook is a specialist in the written, material, and performative cultures that traversed Iberian and West African historical worlds during the early modern period. Trained as a literary scholar and art historian, her work brings the attention to form and meaning cultivated in these fields to bear on larger historical questions around empire, race, political economy, and the law, with special regard for how these are experienced and negotiated by people of ordinary condition. Her book-in-progress – Before the Fetish – tells the story of how a medieval Portuguese concept of artificial magic came to define as “fetishes” a corpus of African forms accused of blurring the boundaries between sacred and commercial spheres.
Brian Whitener is an Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo and the author of Crisis Cultures: The Rise of Finance in Mexico and Brazil (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), and editor and translator of numerous other volumes. In addition, he has published two books of experimental poetry, Face Down (2016) and The 90s (2022), and for many years he was a member of La Lleca, an artistic collective based in Mexico City. His most recent projects include the edited volume In Defense of Common Life: The Political Thought of Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar (Common Notions, 2024) and a translation of Maurizio Lazzarato’s Revolutions of Capitalism: The Politics of the Event (Duke UP, 2026).
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