This workshop investigates the notion of community as expressed in twentieth- and twenty-first century literature, philosophy and visual art, to explore two key ideas.

Firstly, the notion of community may operate both as a healing ideal and as a suffocating ideology: it is often mobilized to give expression to an ideal, a promise of oneness, but particularly since World War II, it is exactly this promise of fusion that has become suspect: warmth becomes stifling; sharing turns into suppression of difference; and oneness the embodiment of totalitarian logic. Sue-Im Lee (The Paradox of Community, 2009) coins a phrase for the idealised community’s inescapable counterpart: the “dissenting community”, which exposes the fundamental paradox of community: that there can never be a single body of individuals.

Secondly, the tension between a desire to belong and a will to individuality is also a key site of contention: questions of community are of all ages, yet explicit concerns over a lack or loss of community permeate much present-day public discourse. A crumbling of social texture is felt to be typical of contemporary Western society that nonetheless craves cohesion in a world dominated by globalisation, migration, urbanisation and virtualisation. A desire for collective identity constructions, an upsurge in national sentiment, or an increase in regional or local identification, are all expressions of such a need for communality.

This workshop will explore critical frameworks for discussing community across and away from assumed cultural barriers. Where “culture” and “identity” sometimes carry problematic assumptions of discrete and homogeneous cultural groups, “community” may provide an alternative perspective from which to investigate how cultural production expresses tensions between the need for individuality and the desire to belong. We will explore how “community”, imagined neither as idealised nor dissenting, emerges as a potentially enabling and productive idea.