‘Edward Carpenter and the Future’
A Symposium
Friday 28 June 2024
Queen Mary, University of London
CALL FOR PAPERS
‘The world travels on––and shall travel on.’ So declared Edward Carpenter in the first part of his long and visionary poem Towards Democracy. Written and revised over many years, from 1881 to 1905, and running to some 400 pages, Towards Democracy sang of a democratic spirit that Carpenter felt and hoped was coming into being. Democracy, as he described it, was slowly unfurling, like a ball of wool rolling steadily into the future. ‘A few centuries shall not exhaust the meanings of it’, he said: ‘In you and me too, inevitably, its meanings wait their unfolding.’
The future was in the heart of Edward Carpenter and at the heart of his work as a poet, a practitioner of everyday utopia, and a pioneering queer activist. As feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham stated in her 2008 biography of Carpenter, this man – famous for his sandals, simple lifestyle, and relationships with Walt Whitman, Bloomsbury Group stalwarts, and working-class lovers – ‘possessed a knack which helped to prod the modern world into being.’ At this symposium, held 95 years since the day of his death in 1929, we invite contributors to gather together with the aim of looking afresh at the futures Carpenter made possible in his own time and what he means to us today, as we face our own uncertain future. Across a day of papers and discussions, we will reconsider Carpenter’s life and legacy as well as his highly varied body of work – an oeuvre that spanned poetry, protest songs, social and artistic criticism, biography, political treatises, and much else – re-reading him as a writer in his own right and exploring some of his more overlooked work on, for example, empire, eco advocacy, and anti-carceral politics.
Carpenter is with us today. Invoked in a number of contemporary novels, such as Patrick Gale’s A Place Called Winter (2015), Tom Crewe’s The New Life (2023), and Alice Winn’s In Memoriam (2023), Carpenter often attends narratives that look back to and re-imagine queer lives and hopes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Carpenter’s role in these works is usually small, for the most part little more than a cameo, but – like the repressed – his persistence is striking and demands to be read. What, this symposium asks, does Carpenter do for us today? In what ways are writers, thinkers, and activists putting him to use? What does the continued interest in Carpenter reveal about our own political imaginaries and what might be missing from them as we head into a future marked by political and ecological crisis?
‘It is very unlikely’, the politician Gilbert Beith wrote in 1949, ‘that Carpenter would have regarded the present position of the Labour Party as a fulfilment of his ideals.’ No doubt we would say the same today. Carpenter was committed to and enabled a politics that refused to be divorced from the personal. Democracy, in his view, was something lived in everyday life and relations – ‘a thing of the heart’, as Beith put it, and not only a ‘political creed.’ For this reason, Carpenter became essential to many intellectuals and activists within the Women’s and Gay Liberations movements of the 1970s. These radical movements, as Sheila Rowbotham has said, ‘intent on breaking with existing conditions and resolutely utopian in their aspirations, made Carpenter seem suddenly relevant for a new politics. The hopes of transforming human relationships and culture, which socialists had put on one side, were resurfacing. Inequality was being questioned, not simply in terms of ownership of things, but in how the subordinated were defined.’ This symposium tests Carpenter’s continued relevance to our current needs and problems, at a time when many of the gains of twentieth-century progressive politics are being rolled back.
Carpenter is remembered today as someone who lived his life with startling honesty and frankness, maintaining a rich archive that could be accessed by the historians, writers, and activists who would come after him. ‘He did live his political beliefs in his personal relationships’, Rowbotham explains, ‘and he wanted us to know what many people would conceal because he believed a future would come in which his desires, and those of his friends, would not be regarded with contempt.’
CONFIRMED PARTICIPANTS
Professor Sheila Rowbotham
Professor Ruth Livesey (RHUL)
Professor Scott McCracken (QMUL)
Dr Kirsten Harris (Bristol)
Dr Owen Holland (Edinburgh)
HOW TO CONTRIBUTE
We invite proposals for papers and presentations from academics of any career stage and any discipline as well as non-academic speakers and practitioners interested in any aspect of Carpenter’s life, work, and legacy. Taking our cue from this experimental figure, we also welcome contributions in creative and non-traditional formats, such as: performance, creative writing, video essays, and creative practice. Individual papers, readings, and screenings, etc., should be no more than 20 minutes.
Topics for discussion could include but are not limited to:
· Edward Carpenter’s legacies and afterlives in literature, culture, and politics
· Utopian futures – political, ecological, sexual – in Carpenter, his contemporaries, and his followers
· Towardsness: prefiguration, anticipation, and the future tense in literature and politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
· Long poems and long lives: accretion and revision in poetics and politics
· Edward Carpenter’s place in literary and cultural histories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, in Victorian, modernist, and gender and sexuality studies today
· The uses of Edward Carpenter, his writing, practice, and thought, to meet the crises of our own present and future
Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words, with a short contributor biography of 100 words, to Dr Matt Ingleby (m.ingleby@qmul.ac.uk) and Dr Charlie Pullen (c.pullen@qmul.ac.uk) by April 15th 2024.
Edward Carpenter and the Future: Friday 28th June 2024 One-Day Symposium (QMUL) & Run-Up Events. 