This conference seeks to center the contemporary valences of the concept of the lumpenproletariat, which Friedrich Engels identified as “social scum,” particularly outcasts, such as professional thieves, pimps, and gamblers. More generally, this term refers to those who do not generate profits for employers. In this judgment, the hegemonic working-class paradigm of the left and conservative notion of the “undeserving poor” converge.

We are organizing this conference to honor and extend the work of our teacher, Glyn Salton-Cox, who was an Associate Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara and who suddenly passed away while working on a book on the topic. As students enormously indebted to Glyn’s intellectual guidance, we are hosting this conference to expand his ideas and evaluate the global lumpen today across global literary, media, historical and sociological contexts. We seek to examine how contemporary representations across literature, media, and the social sciences signal its future valences. Where in the 21st century, can ‘lumpens’ be located (if at all): as technological advancement, environmental degradation, and global instabilities continue to redefine the meaning of “productivity,” “collectivity,” “precarity” and political consciousness?

This symposium will not only honor the legacy of Glyn, but also provide a space for emerging and established scholars to reflect on the untapped potential of the concept of the lumpenproletariat and its varying forms given the unstable and uneven faces of global capitalism today.

Where: HSSB 6020, McCune Conference Room, Humanities and Social Sciences Building

Note: In order to reach the McCune Room, enter from the southernmost building door–closest to the events center parking lot–and take the elevator to the top floor

Join Zoom Meeting-
https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/82749750603

(Please note that the Zoom live-stream is for accessibility purposes only–presenters will be giving their papers in-person, and we will NOT record the proceedings)

Please reach out directly to lumpenconference@hotmail.com if you have any questions

KEYNOTE SPEAKER:

Cedric Johnson, Professor of Black Studies and Political Science (University of Illinois Chicago)

INVITED FACULTY SPEAKERS:

• Maurizia Boscagli, Professor of English (UCSB);
• Coleen Lye, Associate Professor of English (University of California Berkeley);
• Catherine Liu, Professor of Film and Media Studies (University of California Irvine)

ABOUT GLYN

Glyn Salton-Cox was an Associate Professor of English with research interests including Marxism, queer theory and social history, 1930s literature, nineteenth and twentieth century British, French, and German intellectual history, the modern novel, Weimar Berlin, Soviet aesthetics, twentieth-century British comedy, and comparative urbanisms. His monograph, Queer Communism and the Ministry of Love: Sexual Revolution in British Writing of the 1930s (Edinburgh UP, 2018) examines queer writers of the 1930s who engaged with Communism, including Christopher Isherwood, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Katharine Burdekin. With Leo Mellor, he guest edited a special edition of Critical Quarterly on “The Long 1930s” (October 2015). Among other venues, his work also appeared in Modern Language Quarterly, Comparative Literature, A History of 1930s British Literature (Cambridge UP, 2019), Keywords: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, and Twentieth-Century Communism. At the time of his passing Salton-Cox was also working on book projects on the intellectual, literary, and cultural history of the lumpenproletariat as an alternative genealogy of the revolutionary subject, and on British comedy’s compensatory responses to decolonization.