Join us at the Graduate Center on March 5th and 6th for panels, conversations, performances, and workshops at Trance: the 2015 CUNY Graduate Center ESA (English Student Association) Conference. Trance not only challenges Enlightenment models of knowledge production, but also forces us to navigate extra-linguistic experience, thus challenging language as epistemological ground. Questions abound: is trance out-of-body or emphatically embodied? Is trance inherent to aesthetic experiences? Does trance (d)evolve from boredom or hyper-attention? Is it inherently active or passive? Does trance occasion a rupture in “business-as-usual” or are the predominant forces of media and markets the producers of trance? Attention to trance in academic study demands reconsiderations of the ways in which modes of (irrational) experience or altered-consciousness are differently accessed, coded and perceived. How is trance racialized, gendered and/or classed? How is the entranced subject read differently across cultural lines? How does trance act as both a decolonizing and colonizing practice? Given trance’s richly valenced place in poetics, literature, psychological inquiry, religious practice, and sites of cross-cultural exchange, this conference features scholars and artists working in various departments (English, Anthropology, Biology, Psychology, Comparative Literature, Urban Education) at the Graduate Center and beyond.

As noted on the attached poster, there will be an opening panel on Thursday, March 5th (6-8PM) featuring Susan Buck-Morss, Kandice Chuh, and Eric Lott, as well as a trance poetics workshop with Kristin Prevallet and a closing keynote from Wayne Koestenbaum on March 6th. Please see our website for a full schedule of panels, performances, readings, and workshops.

We look forward to seeing you!

2015 ESA Conference Committee
Iemanja Brown, Karen Lepri, Talia Shalev, Wendy Tronrud