Un-Histories: Art and the Unconcluded

March 9-10, 2018

Within the term “history” lies a conceptual confinement—the presumption that the topics being written about remain consigned to the past. This conference seeks to counter history’s containment and to foreground its continuing relevance in the present. Through the notion of “un-histories,” conventional limits can be unsettled by prompting critical inquiries into how history functions: by re-organizing the composition of the past, by re-constructing methods of transmitting narratives, and by destabilizing the seeming linearity of events. Un-histories reimagine history as a practice for addressing the “unconcluded”—subjectivities and narratives previously considered spectral, disparaged, marginalized, erased, shamed, abashed, or localized.