In his travelogue Filibusters in Barbary (1932), Wyndham Lewis evoked the fantasy of being ‘thoroughly unanchored’ from London, from controversy, from recognizability: from his life as he lived it at the time, in effect. The fantasy compels not only because it is a typically contrarian move made by an unapologetic contrarian, but also because it invites reflection on the very Lewisian problem of autonomy itself.

This conference, a hybrid event featuring in-person and remote presentations, seeks to open up these issues for discussion, focusing on the doubled and doubling identity announced in the title of Lewis’s 1932 work: the filibuster. An obstructive, loquacious speaker as well as a kind of aggressor, the filibuster is as much a symbol of Lewis himself as of the age in which he lived—a time of proliferating orators and antagonists, of voices and violence.

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