Re-thinking Political Agency, Identity and History through Art

Abstract

This panel focuses on art’s potentialities to re-configure and re-think political agency, identity and history. Art has the ability to trigger in both spectators and producers different or even antagonistic forms of historical knowledge, political emotions and identity concerns. Thus, the main purpose of this panel is to explore what exactly makes artistic production a strong (yet neglected) field of political critique when democratic political agency, history from below and identity politics are threatened. To this ends, the papers build first a connection between political theory, on the one hand, and the philosophy of art, on the other. They highlight artworks’ epistemic, moral and political abilities to disclose, problematise, criticise and intervene politically as democratic interpellations about important aspects of our political reality. At the same time, politically concerned artworks are not necessarily those that carry a political message or content (as mistakenly understood). We reject the simplistic view that that form is the depoliticized structure of the art piece while content alone carries significance. The papers in this panel argue that both art’s content and form have political functions and meanings. Secondly, the authors zoom in on several loci where artworks have successfully intervened in the service of justice. This panel focuses on both arts’ political potentialities and on political art’s effectiveness in dealing with violent pasts, various forms of injustice and hegemonic patterns of domination. The geographical focus covers a multitude of contexts and includes works from a variety of media (visual art, film, performance, conceptual art, theater, literature, and textiles). These are analysed in view of highlighting the connection between artistic production and democratic political agency, identity claims and the constitution of the demos. Moreover, artistic production can also “step back in time” with the aim of rendering “history from above” permeable by the (his)stories of those who have not been the “winners” or the “heroes” of political history. Art can perform historical pasts in a democratic way allowing histories from below to contribute to the pervasive politics of memory.