The Ph.D. Program in History

at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York

GC Events

Mar. 5-6 GC English Student Association Conference: Trance

This conference seeks to bring together critical and imaginative forms of scholarship, workshops, performance and other creative work around ideas of trance. From the Great Awakening’s irruptive glossalia to the glossed eyes of late capitalist workers, from various manifestations of trance dance to the moving spiral, trance is woven into the fabrics of spiritual, theological, political, and literary histories, texts and methodologies. Trance not only challenges Enlightenment models of knowledge production, but also forces us to navigate extra-linguistic experience, thus destabilizing language as epistemological ground.

Spells, tricks, and 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? Beyond these dialectical poles, what other modalities of critical and creative thinking and expression does trance invite? Trance raises questions concerning conceptions of subjecthood, empiricism versus mysticism, and the limits of knowledge and conscious experience. While trance helps us to explore various modes of being and knowing, it also becomes complicatedly racialized, gendered and classed. We encourage work that explores these tensions, asking how the entranced subject is read differently across cultural lines? How does trance act as both a decolonizing and colonizing practice? Attention to trance in academic study demands reconsiderations of the different ways in which modes of (ir)rational experience and altered-consciousness are accessed, coded and perceived.

We believe that a convocation around trance will produce important interdisciplinary connections and inspire further inquiry through and about our own scholarly and creative methods. Given trance’s richly valenced place in poetics, literature, psychological inquiry, religious practice, and sites of cross-cultural exchange, this conference encourages proposals from across a variety of disciplines. We especially welcome proposals for interactive performances and workshops that might engage participants more experientially.

Professors Susan Buck-Morss and Kandice Chu will be among the opening panel participants on the evening of Thursday, March 5. Professor Wayne Koestenbaum will be our closing keynote speaker the evening of Friday, March 6.

Participant panels, performances and workshops will take place all day Friday, March 6. Please email proposals by November 3rd to trancetheconference@gmail.com.

Possible proposals may involve but are not limited to the following: • Trance-related art, writing, movement, etc. workshops • Trance and aesthetic experience (temporality, corporeality, aurality, visuality, etc.) • Institutional trance (schools, prisons, museums, etc.) • Trance of production and consumption (the commodity, the assembly line, labor, eating while reading) • Trance and religion/spiritual practices • Trance dance (might include Vodou rituals, the Shakers, Evangelicals, Ravers, and possession of various kinds) • Racial and cultural implications of trance’s uses and accessibility (might include Primitivism, New Age and Radical Faeries) • Hypnosis and induced therapeutic states • Transcendence and immanence • Trance and the image • Magic, charms and spells • Methodologies of trance (automatic writing, ritual, practice, etc.) • Sex and trance • Trance and weather • Trance and land(scape) • Reading and writing practices/experiences • Mesmerism in literature • Drugs and the literary • Distraction and/or getting into the zone • Spectatorship, audience participation and crowd mentality • Trance and cinema • Performance as/and trance • Sound and trance • Trance and habit/trance and ordinariness • Trance and ugly feelings • Trance and violence • Trance and so-called criminal behavior • Trance and space/movement • Notions of sanity and mental illness • Trance and trauma • Pain, illness and trance • Prosecution of trance and entranced prosecutors • Trance and community • Trance and marginal state/status • Trance and miscommunication • Trance and the digital • Modes of learning, study skills and procrastination • Radical possibilities of trance