Conference PIN, Postcolonial Intellectuals and Their European Publics
Utrecht, 5-6 February 2019
Who are the postcolonial intellectuals? Which of them are currently the most influential? What kind of intellectual activity do collectivities, networks and movements gathering around issues of race and citizenship perform? How do postcolonial academics, artists, writers, parties and movements respond to current timely issues in the European landscape such as migration, citizenship and the legacies of colonialism? How do they contribute to a new idea of “Europe” and relate to Western categories of modernity? Are their critical tools effective enough?
The PIN – Postcolonial Intellectuals and their European Publics network, not only focuses on postcolonial intellectuals as outspoken individuals, but also challenges the traditional definition of the “public intellectual” by emphasizing the role of artists, writers, activists and social movements in shaping postcolonial publics and knowledges.
Postcolonial Intellectuals and their European Publics network (PIN) brings together an international and interdisciplinary network of scholars to investigate the role of postcolonial public intellectuals as crucial actors in renewing the function of the humanities and of democratic participation in Europe.
See our conferences section for more information.
See our conferences section for more information.
Practical information
Date: 5-6 February 2019
Location: Drift 21, room 0.05 Sweelinckzaal (entrance drift 27)
More info will follow soon on our website www.postcolonialstudies.nl
Photo courtesy of © Omar Victor Diop, Sashakara, 2016, Le Studio des Vanités
8th PCI FILM SERIES announcements for November and December 2018
26 November: Human Flow (2017, Ai Weiwei, Germany, USA, China, Palestine, 140 min.) Introduction by Prof. dr. Sandra Ponzanesi (Gender Studies, Utrecht University)
Time: 17.00 - 19.30
Location: Entrance at Muntstraat 2A, MCW-LAB (Grote zaal KNG20)
About the film: Over 65 million people around the world have been forced from their homes to escape famine, climate change and war in the greatest human displacement since World War II. Human Flow, an epic film journey led by the internationally renowned artist Ai Weiwei, gives a powerful visual expression to this massive human migration. The documentary elucidates both the staggering scale of the refugee crisis and its profoundly personal human impact.
Time: 17.00 - 19.30
Location: Entrance at Muntstraat 2A, MCW-LAB (Grote zaal KNG20)
About the film: Over 65 million people around the world have been forced from their homes to escape famine, climate change and war in the greatest human displacement since World War II. Human Flow, an epic film journey led by the internationally renowned artist Ai Weiwei, gives a powerful visual expression to this massive human migration. The documentary elucidates both the staggering scale of the refugee crisis and its profoundly personal human impact.
10 December: In the Same Boat (2016, Rudi Gnutti, Spain, 70 min). Introduction by dr. Domitilla Olivieri (Gender Studies, UU).
Location: Entrance at Muntstraat 2A, MCW-LAB (Grote zaal KNG20)
A fascinating and stylish investigation into globalisation and the future of our economyn The Same Boat is an artistic and sophisticated analysis of the effects of globalisation on the world, which presents an optimistic argument for the future of the planet. Guided by some of the world's leading radical figures, from Zygmunt Bauman to Jose Mujica, In The Same Boat travels the world discovering the views of its people on work, happiness, the environment, and the economy. Supported by Rudy Gnutti's stunning cinematography and compositions, this film will transform your understanding of the modern world.
PCI Film Series presents '1/2 Revolution' (dir. Karim el Hakim, Omar Shargawi, 2016)
14 January: 1/2 Revolution (2016, Rudi Gnutti, Spain, 70 min). Introduction by dr. Domitilla Olivieri (Gender Studies, UU).
Time: 17.00- 19.30
Location: Entrance at Muntstraat 2A, MCW-LAB (Grote zaal KNG20)
January 2011 — downtown Cairo — a close-knit group of friends struggle to stay alive and stick together as waves of protests escalate around them in their neighborhood near Tahrir Square during the first chaotic days of the Egyptian Revolution. Armed with cameras and focused determination, directors Omar Shargawi and Karim El Hakim take to the streets to capture a view of the revolution unlike any other. Shot from street level and featuring stunning on-the-ground footage of history in the making, 1/2 Revolution is one of a kind real-life action thriller.
Columbia University
The Heyman Center for the Humanities
Migration and Mobility in a Digital Age: Paradoxes of Connectivity and Belonging
Tuesday, April 10, 2018 - Wednesday, April 11, 2018
Organizer
Sandra Ponzanesi- Visiting Professor, Department of English and Comparative LiteratureColumbia University/Professor Gender and Postcolonial Studies, Utrecht University.
Keynote Speakers
Arjun Appadurai- Paulette Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University
Mirca Madianou
- Professor in the Department of Media and Communications Goldsmiths, University of London
The image of Syrian refugees with a smartphone shooting ‘selfies’
upon reaching dry land has captured the international imagination
(Chouliaraki, 2017; Kunstman, 2017; Risam, forthcoming 2018). It
suggests an image of the ‘connected migrant’ (Diminescu, 2008), which is
shaped by a profound ambivalence: migrants are expected to be people
fleeing from war, violence, and poverty; they are not expected to be
‘digital natives’, equipped with technologies to navigate their
difficult journeys. While smartphones are accessible, affordable, and
easy to use, in the realm of the public imaginary the image of the
disenfranchised and disconnected migrant remains that of the ‘have
nots’, and therefore subject to ‘high tech orientalism’ (Chun, 2006, p.
73). This posits the figuration of the migrant as outside the realm of
development and modern forms of communication, disenfranchised and
vulnerable in order to be worthy of international aid and pity
(Boltanski, 20000; Ticktin, 2008). And yet smartphones are ubiquitous,
and migrants have been early adopters and heavy users of technologies
for the simple reason that these technologies are ingrained in their
daily practices and everyday lives, which often involve perilous
crossings but also the need to keep in touch with the home front and
their diasporic communities. The promise of connectivity that is
guaranteed even under duress becomes fraught with the profound
disconnection brought about by the disciplining gaze of Western media
and publics.
It is, therefore, crucial to focus on the specific way in which digital technologies bridge or magnify the gap in migration between geographical distance and digital proximity. How are affect, intimacy, and belonging negotiated online in the face of forced migration and expulsions (Sassen, 2012) but also of circular migration, expatriation, and transnational movements?
This conference aims to cover a broad range of conflict-related issues on migration in a digital age. Using the latest insights from a range of interdisciplinary fields, it will explore theories of displacement such as diaspora, cosmopolitanism, and nomadism, and the transformations brought about by the digital revolution, through the analysis of virtual communities, social media platforms, and digital activism. It will also focus on media production and the regulation of information on forced migrants in a ‘post-truth’ era: fake news; the humanitarianism-securitization nexus, migration management, social and political conflicts related to migrant and diaspora communities, radicalization and online counter-terrorism, hate speech and racism, but also solidarities, activism, and protest.
For more info e-mail Sandra Ponzanesi: sp3630@columbia.edu
Or follow the link updates on the programme and schedule:
http://heymancenter.org/events/migration-in-a-digital-age-paradoxes-of-connectivity-and-belonging/
The conference is a collaboration between Columbia University, Heyman Center for the Humanities, and the ERC project ConnectingEurope and other co-sponsors (Columbia University, Division of Humanities, New York University, The New School, IRWGS, Council for European Studies etc..)
It is, therefore, crucial to focus on the specific way in which digital technologies bridge or magnify the gap in migration between geographical distance and digital proximity. How are affect, intimacy, and belonging negotiated online in the face of forced migration and expulsions (Sassen, 2012) but also of circular migration, expatriation, and transnational movements?
This conference aims to cover a broad range of conflict-related issues on migration in a digital age. Using the latest insights from a range of interdisciplinary fields, it will explore theories of displacement such as diaspora, cosmopolitanism, and nomadism, and the transformations brought about by the digital revolution, through the analysis of virtual communities, social media platforms, and digital activism. It will also focus on media production and the regulation of information on forced migrants in a ‘post-truth’ era: fake news; the humanitarianism-securitization nexus, migration management, social and political conflicts related to migrant and diaspora communities, radicalization and online counter-terrorism, hate speech and racism, but also solidarities, activism, and protest.
For more info e-mail Sandra Ponzanesi: sp3630@columbia.edu
Or follow the link updates on the programme and schedule:
http://heymancenter.org/events/migration-in-a-digital-age-paradoxes-of-connectivity-and-belonging/
The conference is a collaboration between Columbia University, Heyman Center for the Humanities, and the ERC project ConnectingEurope and other co-sponsors (Columbia University, Division of Humanities, New York University, The New School, IRWGS, Council for European Studies etc..)
The Short, Happy Life of Harry Kumar: island hopping and gender swapping
With Professor Ashok Mathur (University of British Columbia, Canada)
Utrecht University, April 25, 2017
‘The Short, Happy Life of Harry Kumar: island hopping and gender swapping’ As an artist, critic, and novelist, Ashok Mathur is interested in how our bodies, histories and geographies inflect our contemporary social and political conditions. Through his fiction, which often incorporates South Asian mythologies and contemporary practices of magical realism and intertextual strategies, he tries to comprehend this relationship by exposing the reader to multiple and alternative realities. In his novel The Short, Happy Life of Harry Kumar, he became fixated on the origins and interpretations of the Ramayana, particularly the kidnapping of Sita and sequestering her on the island of Lanka, and the highly constructed gender implications of duty and responsibility. He began to investigate the multiple global histories of islands as sites of incarceration, exile, and isolation, and what this meant for a contemporary reality of migration and citizenship.
In the Doing Gender and PCI Lecture prof. Ashok Mathur will unravel the process of writing this novel, not just about the various island sites, but from them, as the novel was written as a peripatetic exercise as he travelled, researched and wrote while inhabiting each of these island locations. He will show how the creative process is itself a flexible one, far from the chlichéd notion of writing being isolationist and best enacted from a singular fixed location. He will present short excerpts from the novel and illustrated annotations that discuss the value and importance of gendered and raced readings in the production of meaning through fiction.
Practical information:
Tuesday April 25, 2017
Time: 16:00-17:30
Location: Drift 25, room 0.02
Chair: prof. Rosemarie Buikema
Please register at nog@uu.nl
Postcolonial
Film Series 2017
The Postcolonial Studies Initiative continues its 7th film series in 2017 with a selection of films, shown monthly, that draw on a variety of different contexts in our postcolonial world. The series is organized annually and invites all interested in our European postcolonial present and the representation of its political, cultural and aesthetic realities and challenges.
This year the focus will be on the relation between documentary filmmaking and postcolonial theory, and their deep entanglement in the critique of realism and representation of the other. We want to explore, through visual representations and cinematographic narratives, how postcolonial realities are analyzed and re-imagined in contemporary film.
Each film will be introduced briefly by
scholars connected to the PCI and international guests and filmmakers.
Editions
17 January: Akram Zaatari. Letter to a Refusing Pilot (2013). Lebanon, 34 min.
28 February:
Francesco Rosi, Fuocoammare (Fire
at Sea, 2016). Italy/France, 114 min.
14 March: Patricio
Guzmán, The Pearl Button (2015).
Chile, 82 min.
11 April: University of East London, Everyday Borders (2014). England, 50 min.
Practical information
Time: 19:15 to 22:00
Location: Drift 21, room 032
28 February
In this internationally prize-winning documentary, which focuses on the refugee crisis, Gianfranco Rosi contrasts the lives of the desperate migrants landing on the shores of Lampedusa with the everyday existence of the locals. Using mainly fixed camera positions and no narrative voiceover, Gianfranco Rosi enigmatically juxtaposes scenes, switching between the migrants’ daily, desperate arrivals, and the everyday existence of one Lampedusa family: and one young boy in particular, Samuele, whose solitary meandering through the beautiful rugged island, making naught slingshots, creates a strong contrast between his carefree childhood and the harsh realities of the refugees.
Samuele has a lazy eye that doctors are treating with the old-fashioned method of blanking out one lens for the good eye. This becomes a metaphor for the lazy eyes of Europe, or for the EU desire to look away. Though his camera work Rosi forces us to look at and focus on the tragedy that continues to unfold in the Mediterranean. Samuele is also suffering from hyperventilation and anxiety, and is treated by the same island doctor, dr. Bartolo, who has to attend to the migrants for many years and continue to carry out autopsies on their wretched corpses. He is the one of the few explicit points of contact between the migrants’ story and Samuele, one hint of a symptom, or a larger malaise.
14 March
Dr. Doro Wiese will introduce Patricio Guzmán’s, The Pearl Button (2015). An exquisite essayist and intuitive interviewer, (the Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán) embarks on a wondering examination of indigenous coastal tribes, subject to extermination long before Pinochet’s crackdowns on civilians. From there, he discusses (and visualizes) one of that dictatorship’s signature atrocities: flying helicopters over the Pacific to dump the bodies of torture victims into that vast anonymous grave. (...) A master of voice-over and metaphor (the title alone has an amazing payoff), he sifts through essential truths and draws links between Chile’s past and present inhabitants. (Oct-22, 2015). (Nicolas Rapold, New York Times).
Postcolonial Film Series 2017
The Postcolonial Studies Initiative continues its 7th film series in 2017 with a selection of films, shown monthly, that draw on a variety of different contexts in our postcolonial world. The series is organized annually and invites all interested in our European postcolonial present and the representation of its political, cultural and aesthetic realities and challenges.
This year the focus will be on the relation between documentary filmmaking and postcolonial theory, and their deep entanglement in the critique of realism and representation of the other. We want to explore, through visual representations and cinematographic narratives, how postcolonial realities are analyzed and re-imagined in contemporary film.
Each film will be introduced briefly by scholars connected to the PCI and international guests and filmmakers.
This year the focus will be on the relation between documentary filmmaking and postcolonial theory, and their deep entanglement in the critique of realism and representation of the other. We want to explore, through visual representations and cinematographic narratives, how postcolonial realities are analyzed and re-imagined in contemporary film.
Each film will be introduced briefly by scholars connected to the PCI and international guests and filmmakers.
Time: 19:15 to 22:00
Location: Drift 21, room 032
11 April
A joint project of The University of East London’s Centre for Research on Migration, Refugees and Belonging and activist organisations based in London (Southall Black Sisters, Migrant Rights Network, and the Refugee and Migrant Forum of Essex and London), this documentary examines the UK’s Immigration Act of 2014 and the experience of everyday bordering.
Everyday Borders traces the effects of legislation shifts which increasingly institute immigration checks and controls throughout the space of everyday life. As Nira Yuval-Davis explains in the film, these shifts are “threatening to destroy the conviviality of pluralist metropolitan London, and multi-cultural Britain in general.” The documentary is a piece of public scholarship, which combines an activist orientation with analysis of shifts in UK immigration policy from academics working in the UK.
Creating Spaces for Other Voices: Postcolonial Student Symposium
Everyday Borders traces the effects of legislation shifts which increasingly institute immigration checks and controls throughout the space of everyday life. As Nira Yuval-Davis explains in the film, these shifts are “threatening to destroy the conviviality of pluralist metropolitan London, and multi-cultural Britain in general.” The documentary is a piece of public scholarship, which combines an activist orientation with analysis of shifts in UK immigration policy from academics working in the UK.
Creating Spaces for Other Voices: Postcolonial Student Symposium
This symposium is set up using student feedback on the Postcolonial Studies Initiative survey where we asked students to write down the topics, speakers and theoretical content they are missing or would like to see addressed in Academia. Results show that students want more diversity of speakers and broaden academic traditions and mainstream canons. Moreover, students would like to know more about initiatives in their community and how to exercise their academic expertise in a practical way.
With this valuable input, we are organizing a symposium where students can engage with local student initiatives from a postcolonial perspective, network, socialize and attend workshops. First of all, there will be a marketplace where students can gain/ask for more information about local student actions. Secondly, the day will consist of speakers from different communities in Utrecht with student panel discussions aiming at exercising the practicality of their academic knowledge/skills. Thirdly, students can sign up for two workshops where there is an opportunity to go more in depth on specific postcolonial themes in the Dutch context, with the guidance of young student professionals.
Proudly we would like to introduce the power ladies speaking at the Creating Spaces: Student Symposium: Pravini Baboeram musician & activist involved with the International Institute for Scientific Research and volunteer at the Sarnámihuis. Patricia Kaersenhout visual artist, activist, and womanist. Sayonara Stutgard organizer of the Feminist Open Mic in Utrecht and hosts two book clubs: It's LIT YA & and a Postcolonial Book Club Aphra's Book Club. Alfie Vanwyngarden the Queen of Bonaire, afro feminist, freedom fighter and RMA Media Studies student. Furthermore, there will be performances and lectures by Decolonial artist; Patricia Kaersenhout, Sarnámihuis member & Echo: center of expertise for diversity policy program manager; Pravini Baboeram-Mahes, and many others.
This symposium is for students by students and aims at creating a comfortable space for students to come together and discuss diverse affirmative actions in their communities where a diversity in perspectives and approaches is valued.
Practical information:
Date: 3 February
Time: 10:00 - 17:00
Location: Casco- Lange Nieuwstraat 7, 3512 PA, Utrecht
Entrance: Free
Make a lunch reservation here.
More information, head to the Facebook event here.
This symposium is set up using student feedback on the Postcolonial Studies Initiative survey where we asked students to write down the topics, speakers and theoretical content they are missing or would like to see addressed in Academia. Results show that students want more diversity of speakers and broaden academic traditions and mainstream canons. Moreover, students would like to know more about initiatives in their community and how to exercise their academic expertise in a practical way.
With this valuable input, we are organizing a symposium where students can engage with local student initiatives from a postcolonial perspective, network, socialize and attend workshops. First of all, there will be a marketplace where students can gain/ask for more information about local student actions. Secondly, the day will consist of speakers from different communities in Utrecht with student panel discussions aiming at exercising the practicality of their academic knowledge/skills. Thirdly, students can sign up for two workshops where there is an opportunity to go more in depth on specific postcolonial themes in the Dutch context, with the guidance of young student professionals.
Proudly we would like to introduce the power ladies speaking at the Creating Spaces: Student Symposium: Pravini Baboeram musician & activist involved with the International Institute for Scientific Research and volunteer at the Sarnámihuis. Patricia Kaersenhout visual artist, activist, and womanist. Sayonara Stutgard organizer of the Feminist Open Mic in Utrecht and hosts two book clubs: It's LIT YA & and a Postcolonial Book Club Aphra's Book Club. Alfie Vanwyngarden the Queen of Bonaire, afro feminist, freedom fighter and RMA Media Studies student. Furthermore, there will be performances and lectures by Decolonial artist; Patricia Kaersenhout, Sarnámihuis member & Echo: center of expertise for diversity policy program manager; Pravini Baboeram-Mahes, and many others.
This symposium is for students by students and aims at creating a comfortable space for students to come together and discuss diverse affirmative actions in their communities where a diversity in perspectives and approaches is valued.
Practical information:
Date: 3 February
Time: 10:00 - 17:00
Location: Casco- Lange Nieuwstraat 7, 3512 PA, Utrecht
Entrance: Free
Make a lunch reservation here.
More information, head to the Facebook event here.
Date: 3 February
Time: 10:00 - 17:00
Location: Casco- Lange Nieuwstraat 7, 3512 PA, Utrecht
Entrance: Free
Make a lunch reservation here.
More information, head to the Facebook event here.
Previous events
17 January
Letter to a Refusing Pilot.
Taking
a cue from Albert Camus' epistolary essay "Letters to a German
Friend," in Letter to a Refusing Pilot, Zaatari conducts both an
investigation and a stirring tribute to an act of resistance (or forbearance)
that marked his childhood memories: the refusal of an Israeli pilot to bomb a
boys' high school on June 6, 1982 in south Lebanon. Oscillating between
documentary, essay and fiction, this elegant and multi-layered film and
installation combine personal and archival documents as it seeks to recuperate
historical truth from the annals of personal reminiscence, laced with both
enchantment and fear. Framed like a coming-of-age filled with wonderment and insuperable
curiosity, Letter to a Refusing Pilot humanizes a personal gesture in face of a
greater conflict.
PCI Film Series presents: The Nine Muses
Introduced by Dr Jamila Mascat (Gender Studies, UU)
Part documentary, part personal essay, this experimental film by John Akomfrah combines archive imagery with the striking wintry landscapes of Alaska to tell the story of immigrant experience coming into the UK from 1960 onwards.
Twenty-five years after the end of the Trojan War, Odysseus still has not returned home. So his son, Telemachus, sets off on a journey in search of his lost father. So begins Homer's revered epic poem, The Odyssey, the primary narrative reference point for The Nine Muses, a remarkable meditation about chance, fate and redemption.
Practical information
Date: 13 December
Time: 19.15 - 21.30
Location: Drift 21, room 0.32
Twenty-five years after the end of the Trojan War, Odysseus still has not returned home. So his son, Telemachus, sets off on a journey in search of his lost father. So begins Homer's revered epic poem, The Odyssey, the primary narrative reference point for The Nine Muses, a remarkable meditation about chance, fate and redemption.
Practical information
Date: 13 December
Time: 19.15 - 21.30
Location: Drift 21, room 0.32
Public lecture by Prof. Zygmunt Bauman
Between separation and integration: Strategies of cohabitation in the era of diasporization and Internet
Liquid Modernity
Zygmunt Bauman is one of the world's most eminent social theorists writing on a number of common themes, including globalisation, modernity and postmodernity, consumerism, and morality. Well known for his groundbreaking work Liquid Modernity (2000), he is the author of 57 books and over a hundred articles.
Publications in recent years include monographs and co-authored books such as Strangers at our door, Babel, Practices of Selfhood, State of Crisis, Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity, and Liquid Modernity, Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation (all published with Polity).
Practical information
Date: 16 December
Location: Trippenhuis Building, Kloveniersburgwal 29, 1011 JV Amsterdam
For more information or to register, please visit the website of the KNAW.
PCI Film Series 2016 presents: Lift and Calais the Last Border
Introduced by Dr Domitilla Olivieri (Gender Studies, Utrecht University)
During this edition of the PCI Film Series, Dr Domitilla Olivieri will introduce two documentaries by director Marc Isaacs.
For Lift, Isaacs installed himself in the lift of a typical English tower; and for ten hours a day, over two months, he would ride up and down with the residents, with his camera pointing at them. As people start talking to hi, we discover their lives.
The film portrays the life in a high-rise building in London and implicitly engages with questions of cultural encounter, class, everyday urban life, and the sense of home.
Calais, the Last Border takes place in the French port town of Calais. For many English citizens, this is the gateway to Europe or a place to buy cheap alcohol. For hundreds of migrants it is the final barrier in the desperate search for a new life in England. This intimate film weaves together character driven stories of refugees, migrants and English expatriates to build a picture of life in a transient town where the inhabitants dream of somewhere better.
Practical information
Date: 15 November
Time: 19.15 - 21.30
Location: Drift 21, room 0.32
PCI Film Series presents: Bricando El Charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican
Introduced by Frances Negrón-Muntaner (Columbia University, USA)
Refreshingly sophisticated
in both form and content, Brincando el Charco contemplates
the notion of 'identity' through the experiences of a Puerto Rican woman living
in the US.
In a wonderful mix of fiction, archival footage, processed interviews and soap
opera drama, Brincando el
Charco tells the story of Claudia Marin, a middle-class,
light-skinned Puerto Rican photographer/videographer who is attempting to
construct a sense of community in the US. Confronting the simultaneity of both
her privilege and her oppression, Brincando
el Charco becomes a meditation on class, race and sexuality as
shifting differences.
During this edition, one of Negrón-Muntane's short films will also be screened:
'Small City, Big Change'. This film portrays how the smallest city of
Massachusetts, of mostly Latino working class residents, provided the key
leadership for the approval of the Transgender Equal Rights Act of the state.
Q&A with the director
After the screening, there will also be a Q&A session with director Frances Negrón-Muntane. And on 13 October,
she will provide a Doing Gender lecture.
Negrón-Muntaner is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, curator, scholar and
professor at Columbia University, where she is the founding director of the
Media and Idea Lab and founding curator of the Latino Arts and
Activism Archive at Columbia’s Rare Books and Manuscripts
Library. She also served as the director of Columbia’s Center
for the Study of Ethnicity and Race from 2009-2016.
Negrón-Muntaner’s work spans multiple disciplines and practices, including
cinema, literature, cultural criticism, and politics. Her work focuses on a
comparative exploration of coloniality in the Americas, with special attention
to the intersections between race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.
Practical information
PCI Film Series
Date: 11 October
Time: 19.15 - 21.30
Location: Drift 21, room 0.32
Doing Gender Lecture by Frances Negrón-Muntaner
Two days after her films are screened in the PCI Film Series, Frances
Négron Muntaner will provide a Doing Gender lecture. Her talk is titled
'What To Do with All This Beauty? The Political Economy of Latina
Stardom in the Twenty-first Century'.
The
talk explores the political economy of a common stereotype in U.S.
media, the Latina beauty, since its emergence in the late nineteenth
century to its present incarnations. The presentation will also inquire
about how and why this is the only Latino stereotype that produces major
stars like Jennifer Lopez, Eva Longoria, and Salma Hayek; and examine
the racial, gender, cultural, and market contexts that allow
contemporary Latina actresses to leverage their beauty capital into
influence inside the entertainment industry, domestic and international
politics - to a point.
Practical information
Date: 13 October
Time: 16.00 - 17.30
Location: Drift 21, room 1.05
Please register by sending an email to nog@uu.nl.
PCI Film Series presents: The Lost Ones. Long Journey Home
Introduced by Susan Rose (Dickinson College, USA)
The Lost Ones: Long Journey Home is
a documentary film that weaves together Native American oral histories
and historical, archival research as it pieces together the story of two
Lipan Apache children captured along the Texas-Mexican border in 1877.
After
the massacre of their village known, as Remolino or the "Day of
Screams," the children rode from fort to fort with the U.S. Calvary for
three years before being taken to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School
(CIIS) in Pennsylvania – thousands of miles from their home. Carlisle,
established in 1879 at the end of the “Indian wars,” served as the model
for off-reservation boarding schools across the United States and
Canada. Its goal was to “civilize” and assimilate Indian children to
Euro-American culture: “education for extinction.” The children’s ties
with their family were completely severed; the only legacy the children
left was Kesetta's three-year-old son who became the youngest child ever
to be enrolled at CIIS. While the family remembered the Lost Ones every
year, they never knew what had happened to the children or where they
were buried until two centuries later.
This
documentary reveals the mystery of how on the 132th anniversary of
Remolino, Lipan Apache descendants from California, Texas, and New
Mexico came to Carlisle to offer blessings so the children could be sent
home. The film demonstrates the power of collective memory, the impact
of intergenerational trauma, and the ways in which photographs can be
used as a form of both erasure and reclamation.
Date: 20 September
Time: 19.15 - 21.30
Location: Drift 21, room 0.32
Doing Gender Lecture with Prof. Susan Rose
The
Global Clothesline Project (GCP): Bearing Witness to Violence Against Women is part of the international movement against
violence directed at women. The GCP invites women to create T-shirts that
express the violence they suffered and the healing they have experienced.
The
effectiveness of the project lies in the work that can be done at an individual
or small group therapeutic level (anonymously or confidentially as women may
individually or collectively create T-Shirts), and at the social movement level
with the public display of shirts that expose the violence and healing that has
taken place within a particular community – be it a university campus, NGO, or
local community. The exhibit has the potential to open up a dialogue about
violence and to engage victim-survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators to “see”
what impact violence has and work towards ending it.
A powerful tool to educate
the community about the impact of gender violence, it provides both agency and
safety to vulnerable victims. It empowers survivors and allies to come together
to not only express individual stories but also to collectively challenge human
rights violations that are often constructed and dismissed as traditional cultural
practices. This presentation will offer a qualitative and comparative analysis
of women’s experiences of violence, healing, and action across cultures. It
examines the relationship between gender inequality and gender violence, and
the health impacts of gender violence as the most pervasive human rights
violation that affects women and children today across both the developed and
developing world.
In the
process of breaking silence through images and words, survivors are not only
finding their own voices, they are also collectively creating new narratives
that challenge the individual and collective denial of abuse and the
reproduction of violence. As contributors are constructing oppositional
narratives that challenge traditional narrative, they often encounter
skepticism and resistance to the telling of their stories for speaking out is a
political as well as a therapeutic act, and as such, is a claim to power. As
Milan Kundera writes in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 'Man's struggle
against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’
About Susan Rose
Susan D. Rose is a Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology and Director of
the Community Studies Center at Dickinson college (USA). Professor Rose
specializes in the sociology of religion, family, and education; violence;
indigenous studies; and inequality, race, class, and gender studies. She uses a
comparative (cross-cultural and historical) approach to the study of family,
sexuality, religion, education, migration, and violence.
She has conducted fieldwork
in the United States, Guatemala, the Philippines, and South Korea on
evangelical movements, education, and gender that has resulted in a number of
articles and books. These include: Challenging
Global Gender Violence: The Global Clothesline Project (Palgrave,
2013); Exporting the
American Gospel: Global Christian Fundamentalism (Routledge, 1998)
and Keeping Them Out of
the Hands of Satan: Christian Schooling in America (Routledge,
1986; 2017).
Her recent work explores sexuality education and
gender-based violence in Cameroon, Cuba, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands,
Venezuela, and the United States; the impact of the Religious Right on social
policy in the United States, and Indigenous Studies: The Carlisle Indian Industrial
School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations
(University of Nebraska Press, 2016).
Time: 15.30-17.00
Location: Drift 25, room 0.02
Chair: Prof. Rosemarie Buikema
If you want to attend, please register via nog@uu.nl.
Inaugural Lecture
Connecting Europe: Postcolonial Mediations
Utrecht University, Academic Building
Friday, April 15, 16.15
Friday, April 15, 16.15
ABSTRACT
Connecting Europe: Postcolonial
Mediations
The current refugee crisis, magnified by media
sensationalism and political opportunism, brings into sharp focus internal
tensions that threaten the very notion of Europe.
In a wave of nostalgia for the false security of the
old sovereign states, old borders are being re-established and Fortress Europe
is imploding into a multitude of mini-fortresses, behind whose walls
long-cherished European ideals are imperilled and civil liberties threatened in
the name of national security.
Postcolonial Europe
So does Europe have a future? Where does Europe begin
and where does it end? What is the point of Europe?If Europe is to remain a
viable entity, and Ponzanesi in her inaugural speech contends that it can and
should, we must engage with Europe from a postcolonial perspective.
This means taking into account the notion of a Europe
perceived through an awareness of many diverse entanglements — historical,
disciplinary and institutional; a Europe seen in ‘deep time’. Crucially Europe
must acknowledge and confront its own past, accounting for colonial legacies
which, long after the old empires have disappeared, continue to menace our
present.
Digitally connected migrants
The postcolonial project is also aspirational and
future-oriented. It challenges us to account for our modern hyper-mediated
world; a world in which the digital footprints of ‘connected migrants’
emerge as hybridised and heterogeneous forms of participation, changing
the way we understand and account for social inclusion, gender emancipation
and intercultural identities, and, by foregrounding the notion of a
multidirectional and networked Europe in flux, changing the idea of Europe
itself. Ponzanesi argues that a multimedial postcolonial
approach helps to envision new, alternative, cosmopolitan perspectives.
Public
Lecture
Utrecht University, March 23,
2016
Robert Stam University Professor of Cinema Studies (New York University, Tisch School of the Arts)
Robert Stam University Professor of Cinema Studies (New York University, Tisch School of the Arts)
Robert Stam
will present from his new book Keywords. Keywords offers a conversational
journey through the overlying terrains of politically engaged art and
artistically engaged politics, combining a major statement on subversive
aesthetics, a survey of radical film strategies, and a lexicon of over a
thousand terms and concepts.
No other book
combines an ambitious essay on radical politics and aesthetics in film with a
lexicon of terms and ideas, many of which are new and innovative.
- Creates and illustrates over a thousand terms and concept, drawing its examples from a wide range of media
- Provides a broad timespan, covering the
very ancient (Ramayana, Aristotle) to the most current (digital mashups,
memes)
- Uniquely discusses the areas of film,
television and the internet within one book
- No other book combines an ambitious
essay on radical politics and aesthetics in film with a lexicon of terms
and ideas, many of which are new and innovative
- Keywords is no list of PC jargon, but rather an almost Borgesian carnival of concepts that inspires something akin to hope. Flipping through these pages is like being at a party where the brightest, most passionate thinkers and dreamers have gathered to celebrate the role of the critical imagination as a tool for genuine social change.” James Schamus, Oscar-nominated screenwriter (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and Professor, Columbia University
Robert Stam is
University Professor at New York University. He has taught in France, Tunisia,
and Brazil, and his work has been translated into French, Italian, Greek,
Farsi, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian,
German, Hebrew, Arabic, Estonian, and Serbo-Croatian. His books include
Francois Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality, and the Art of Adaptation
(Rutgers, 2006); Literature through Film: Realism, Magic and the Art of
Adaptation (Blackwell, 2005); Film Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell, 2000);
Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema
and Culture (Duke University Press, 1997); Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin,
Cultural Criticism, and Film (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989);
Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard (UMI,
1985, Reprinted Columbia Press, 1992), and Brazilian Cinema (with Randal
Johnson, Columbia University Press, 1995). With Ella Shohat, he co-authored
Unthinking Eurocentrism (Routledge, 1994, new edition 2014), Multiculturalism,
Postcoloniality and Transnational Media (Rutgers University Press) and Flagging
Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism (Routledge, 2007). He has
co-authored with Ella Shohat): Race in Translation: Culture Wars in the
Postcolonial Atlantic (NYU, May 2012).
Date: March 23,
2016
Time:
17.00-19.00
Location:
Utrecht University, Drift 21, Sweelinckzaal
This public lecture is
sponsored by Utrecht University's strategic theme Institutions for Open Societies in collaboration with the Postcolonial Studies
Initiative.
May 24 Archives of Subalternity: Questions of and Provocations for Digital Humanities
Rhadika Gajjala (Bowling Green University, USA)
Masterclass:
Masterclass:
May 24 E-diasporas in Big and Small "Data"Space: A Postcolonial and Feminist Perspective
Rhadika Gajjala (Bowling Green University, USA)
Open for MA and PhD Students
Rhadika Gajjala (Bowling Green University, USA)
Public lecture: Archives of Subalternity: Questions of and Provocations for Digital Humanities
Masterclass: E-diasporas in Big and Small "Data"Space: A Postcolonial and Feminist Perspective
Radhika Gajjala is currently Fulbright Visiting Professor of
Digital Culture at the University of Bergen, Norway, Visiting Scholar at The
Fulbright Program and Co-Editor at ADA: A Journal of Gender, New Media and
Technology. She is Professor of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State
University, Ohio. She has published books on Cyberculture and the Subaltern (Lexington Press, 2012) and Cyberselves:
Feminist Ethnographies of South Asian Women (Altamire, 2004). She has co-edited
collections on Cyberfeminism 2.0 (2012), Global Media Culture and Identity (2011), South Asian Technospaces (2008) and Webbing Cyberfeminist Practice (2008).
Abstract public lecture: Digital archives of subalternity are
being built in corporate media and popular culture and through philanthropy 2.0
- without proper investigation into subaltern histories and contexts or any
form of subaltern participation.
If digital humanities is a scramble to
digitize and organize information, the popular, commercial and NGO based
renderings of the digital subaltern should matter very much for projects
ranging from digital history collections, cultural archives and big data.
Popular culture and media are indeed considered part of such informational
archive but don’t always include commercial/marketing platforms that become
used as representations of authentic subalternity even as in actuality they are
selectively staged. Add to this mix the interactivity of web 2.0 and
gamification and we have social justice projects that emerge in digital
contexts in the hopes of connecting the haves and have-nots in digital giving
and sharing. A central issue for my presentation is to ask –“What does it mean
to build a humanities database of subaltern contemporary lives?” In an emerging
formation of digital humanities that is strongly practice based and in which
everything is about “data” which in turn is a capital asset, how do we raise
the question of “the subaltern citizen”? Should we?
Date: May 24, 2016
Time: 16.00-18.00.
Location: Utrecht University, Drift, 21, Sweelinckzaal
Abstract Masterclass: With the growth of
international (im)migration, refugee crises, labor recruitment, leisure
activity and social diasporic community connectivity through digital space
across time zones the last two decades, the Internet and related wireless and
mobile technologies have become crucial for members of various diasporic
communities seeking to connect with both their countries of origin and their
host nations. Connections are established not only through social media and
email, but also through money transfers, philanthropy and business, gaming and
related virtual environments. For instance Internet use facilitates information
gathering efforts of (im)migrants searching for potential host countries,
assist (im)migrants’ acculturation practices after migration, and advance the
socio-economic development of diasporic subjects and those they may have left
behind. In addition, we also have new forms of digital diaspora that occur
through offshore labor forces that have their bodies in their “home” nations
but work in time zones and relational socio-financial and organizational spaces
that exist “in diaspora.”
This course will
explore issues of theory and method around formations of e-diasporas in big and
small digital “data” space.
Conference
Call: ECREA’s 6th European Communication Conference
‘Mediated
(Dis)Continuities: Contesting Pasts, Presents and Futures’
Open to MA
and PhD Students affiliated to the ERC project 'Digital Crossings in Europe:
Gender, Diaspora and Belonging' and the Netherlands School of Gender Studies
(NOG). For more information and registration, please contact Sandra Ponzanesi
(S.Ponzanesi@uu.nl) or send the NOG (nog@uu.nl).
Date: May 24, 2016
Time: 9.30-13.30.
Location: Utrecht University, Drift, 21, Sweelinckzaal
PCI film Series 2015-2016
The Postcolonial Studies Initiative is happy to
announce its 6th film series with a selection of films, shown monthly, that
draw on a variety of different contexts in our postcolonial world. The series
is organized annually and invites all interested in our European postcolonial
present and the representation of its political, cultural and aesthetic
realities and challenges. We want to explore, through visual representations
and cinematographic narratives, how these realities are analyzed and
re-imagined in contemporary film. Each film will be introduced briefly by
scholars connected to the PCI.
The series will take place every third Tuesday of the
month, starting with September until April.
September 15
|
Those who feel the fire burning (Morgan Knibbe, NL, 2014)
Introduced
by Christine Quinan
|
October 20
|
Fitzcarraldo (Werner Herzog, Germany, 1982)
Introduced
by Kari Driscoll
|
November 17
|
Besouro (João Daniel Tikhomiroff,
Brazil, 2009)
Introduced
by Edward Akintola Hubbard
|
December 15
|
Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako, France/Mauritania, 2014)
Introduced by Domitilla
Olivieri
|
January 12
|
The Missing Picture
(Rithy Panh, Cambodia, 2014)
Sandra Ponzanesi
|
February 16
|
Aferim! (Radu Jude, Romania, 2015)
Introduced
by Laura Candidatu
|
March 15
|
Drone (Tonje Hessen Schei, Norway, 2014)
Introduced
by Doro Wiese
|
April 19
|
The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer,
Indonesia, 2013) Introduced by Susanne Knittel
|
Those who feel the fire burning (Morgan
Knibbe, Netherlands, 2014)
Introduced by Christine Quinan
With the special presence of filmdirector Morgan Knibbe for Q&a.
With the special presence of filmdirector Morgan Knibbe for Q&a.
Synopsis:
Those Who Feel the Fire
Burning is
a timely and poetic documentary that explores the current crisis of the many
refugees who are attempting to cross the borders into Europe on a daily basis.
Those who arrive are typically met with a hopeless situation. But many do not
make it and perish attempting to make it into Fortress Europe. Knibbe’s
unconventional documentary is told from the perspective of one such individual,
now a ghost whose soul passes by the harsh realities of those refugees who are
attempting to survive. In a creative and unconventional way, this 2014
IDFA-breakout film prompts urgent social and political questions around
immigration, violence, and precarity.
Trailer:
Date: Tuesday, September 15
Time: 19.15-21.30
Location: Drift, 21 room 032
Duration: 74 min
Fitzcarraldo (Werner
Herzog, Germany, 1982)
Introduced by Kari Driscoll
Synopsis:
The movie is the story of a dreamer named Brian
Sweeney Fitzgerald, whose name has been simplified to “Fitzcarraldo” by the
Indians and Spanish who inhabit his godforsaken corner of South America. He
loves opera. He spends his days making a little money from an ice factory and
his nights dreaming up new schemes. One of them, a plan to build a railroad
across the continent, has already failed. Now he is ready with another: He
seriously intends to build an opera house in the rain jungle, twelve hundred
miles upstream from the civilized coast, and to bring Enrico Caruso there to
sing an opera.
If his plan is mad, his method for carrying it out is
madness of another dimension. Looking at the map, he becomes obsessed with the
fact that a nearby river system offers access to hundreds of thousands of
square miles of potential trading customers -- if only a modern steamship could
be introduced into that system. There is a point, he notices, where the other
river is separated only by a thin finger of land from a river that already is
navigated by boats. His inspiration: Drag a steamship across land to the other
river, float it, set up a thriving trade, and use the profits to build the
opera house -- and then bring in Caruso! This scheme is so unlikely that
perhaps we should not be surprised that Herzog's story is based on the case of
a real Irish entrepreneur who tried to do exactly that.
But "Fitzcarraldo" is not all sweat and
madness. It contains great poetic images of the sort Herzog is famous for: An
old phonograph playing a Caruso record on the deck of a boat spinning out of
control into a rapids; Fitzcarraldo frantically oaring a little rowboat down a
jungle river to be in time to hear an opera; and of course the immensely
impressive sight of that actual steamship, resting halfway up a hillside.
"Fitzcarraldo"
is not a perfect movie, and it never comes together into a unified statement.
It is meandering, and it is slow and formless at times. Perhaps the conception
was just too large for Herzog to shape. The movie does not approach perfection
as "Aguirre" did. But as a document of a quest and a dream, and as
the record of man's audacity and foolish, visionary heroism, there has never
been another movie like it. (http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/fitzcarraldo-1982)
Trailer:
Date: Tuesday, October 20
Time: 19.15-21.00
Location: Drift, 21 room 032
Duration: 158 min
Besouro (João Daniel Tikhomiroff,
Brazil, 2009)
Introduced by Edward Akintola Hubbard
Synopsis:
Based on a true story, Besouro (2009), directed by
João Daniel Tikhomiroff, is a martial arts epic that tells the tale of
legendary capoeira fighter Manuel Henrique Pereira, a.k.a “Besouro Mangangá”
and his struggle for freedom against the tyranny of white oppression in
post-slavery Brazil.
Set in 1920s Bahia, in the northeast of the country,
the film paints a vivid portrait of a manumission that had brought little
change to the status of Afro-Brazilians. Blacks were still treated as beasts of
burden, constantly terrorized, and many of their cultural practices outlawed –
including and especially the deadly art of capoeira, a martial art developed by
slaves in the 16th century that combines music, dance and acrobatics.
In the film, Colonel Venâncio (Flávio Rocha), a
plantation owner, is furious when he discovers that one of his black overseers,
Master Alípio (Macalé dos Santos), had been secretly teaching capoeira to the
black youth on the plantation. On the Colonel’s orders, Master Alípio is
fatally shot one day. As he dies, he urges his star pupil and protector,
Besouro (Aílton Carmo), to use his fighting skills to lead a revolt against the
white planter class. Besouro communes with the African gods and develops his
capoeira skills to the point where they defy gravity and even physicality.
With touches of magical realism, and with the action
choreography of Ku Huen Chiu (Romeo Must Die, Kill Bill Vols.1 and 2, The
Expendables II), director João Tikhomiroff transforms Afro-Brazilian oral
history into Hollywood blockbuster-style cinematic mythology.
Trailer:
Date: Tuesday, November 17
Time: 19.15-21.00
Location: Drift, 21 room 032
Duration: 95 min
Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako, France/Mauritania, 2014)
Introduced by Domitilla Olivieri
Not far from the ancient Malian city of Timbuktu, proud cattle herder Kidane lives peacefully in the dunes with his family. In town, the Jihadists are trying to reinforce hostile rules especially towards women, but also against other faiths, arts and activities, such as football, but especially against music. Violence, arrogance, and the impact of the Islamists' rules on the everyday life of the village are some of the issues this film navigates, with a stunning soundtrack, beautiful images, poetic long takes, and an overall witty and sardonic, if also tragic, tone. Selected to compete for the Palm d'Or in the main competition section at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. It won the award of the ecumenical Jury and the François Chalais Prize. It is the first ever submission of Mauritania to the best foreign language film category of the Academy Awards. Additionally, it is the first film shot in Mauritania by a Mauritanian director to win at the Cesar film awards, where it won seven awards, thus setting the record for being the African film with the most awards ever in the competition.
Trailer:
Date: Tuesday, December 15
Time: 19.15-21.00
Location: Drift, 21 room 032
Duration film: 107 min
The
Missing Picture (Rithy Panh, Cambodia, 2014)
Introduced by Sandra Ponzanesi
Synopsis:
Following “S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine” and
“Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell,” Rithy Panh grapples with the horrors of
the Cambodian genocide on more intimately unsettling terms in “The Missing
Picture.” A sobering chronicle of Panh’s teenage years under the Pol Pot
dictatorship, the film is a brave act of witness complicated by the documaker’s
decision to re-create his experiences using clay figurines, a tricky aesthetic
device that raises fascinating and problematic questions of representation.
Sufficiently distinguished from Panh’s other fine work on the subject, and
bolstered by strong black-and-white archival footage, “Picture” would be
assured of further fest play and strong broadcast interest even if it hadn’t
won the top Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes. (http://variety.com/2013/film/global/the-missing-picture-review-1200490158/)
Trailer:
Date: Tuesday, January 12
Time: 19.15-21.30
Location: Drift, 21 room 032
Duration: 92 min
Aferim! (Radu Jude, Romania, 2015)
Introduced by Laura Candidatu
Synopsis:
Eastern Europe, 1835. Two riders cross a barren
landscape in the middle of Wallachia. They are the gendarme Costandin and his
son. Together they are searching for a 'gypsy slave' who has run away from his
nobleman master and is suspected of having an affair with the noble's wife.
Whilst the unflappable Costandin comments on every situation with a cheery
aphorism, his son takes a more contemplative view of the world. On their
odyssey they encounter people of different nationalities and beliefs: Turks and
Russians, Christians and Jews, Romanians and Hungarians. Each harbours
prejudices against the others which have been passed down from generation to
generation. And even when the 'slave' Carfin is found, the adventure is far
from over...
A moving parable about late-feudal Europe developed
from historical documents and songs: its power structures and hierarchies,
people's idea of themselves and others, interaction with minorities and the
resulting conflicts. A Balkan Western in black-and-white which brings the
cacophony of the times strikingly to life and explores the thematic arcs which
stretch into the present. (https://www.berlinale.de/en/archiv/jahresarchive/2015/02_programm_2015/02_Filmdatenblatt_2015_201508081.php#tab=video25)
Trailer:
Date: Tuesday, February 16
Time: 19.15-21.30
Location: Drift, 21 room 032
Duration: 108 min
Drone
(Tonje Hessen Schei, Norway, 2014)
Introduced by Doro Wiese
Synopsis:
As drone technology
develops infinitely more quickly than international law – meaning that the
legality of the use of drones is still a gray area – the CIA has been carrying
out drone attacks in Pakistan for years, causing huge numbers of civilian
casualties. And all while the United States isn’t even officially at war with
Pakistan. Drone tells the shocking stories of the families of Pakistani victims
of drones, of passionate human rights advocates and activists, and of drone
manufacturers and pilots. These pilots – young men who carry out deadly attacks
they can hardly even comprehend from the Nevada desert – are actively recruited
in the gaming world. “It was just point. And click.” Drone makes it clear how
drone technology has radically changed the art of war, as it makes it possible
to kill massively, invisibly and from a great distance. This film gives a voice
to the criticasters – victims and perpetrators – fighting for openness,
responsibility and justice. Although director Tonje Hessen Schei isn’t directly
present in her film as an interviewer or voice-over, Drone is a loud, clear
voice in a discussion that has hardly even begun, and she makes a convincing
case for the great urgency of a political, legal and above all moral debate on
the use of drones. (https://www.idfa.nl/industry/tags/project.aspx?id=2e2cf423-4f6a-48fa-98d2-544f218efa2c#sthash.85mDBI4F.dpuf)
Trailer:
Date: Tuesday, March 15
Time: 19.15-21.30
Location: Drift, 21 room 032
Duration: 58 min
The Act of Killing (Joshua
Oppenheimer, Indonesia, 2013)
Introduced by Susanne Knittel
Synopsis:
Medan, Indonesia. When the
government of Indonesia was overthrown by the military in 1965, Anwar and his
friends were promoted from small-time gangsters who sold movie theatre tickets
on the black market to death squad leaders. They helped the army kill more than
one million alleged communists, ethnic Chinese, and intellectuals in less than
a year. As the executioner for the most notorious death squad in his city,
Anwar himself killed hundreds of people with his own hands.
Today, Anwar is revered as
a founding father of a right-wing paramilitary organization that grew out of
the death squads. The organization is so powerful that its leaders include
government ministers, and they are happy to boast about everything from
corruption and election rigging to acts of genocide.
The Act of Killing is about
killers who have won, and the sort of society they have built. Unlike ageing
Nazis or Rwandan génocidaires, Anwar and his friends have not been forced by
history to admit they participated in crimes against humanity. Instead, they
have written their own triumphant history, becoming role models for millions of
young paramilitaries. The Act of Killing is a journey into the memories and
imaginations of the perpetrators, offering insight into the minds of mass
killers. And The Act of Killing is a nightmarish vision of a frighteningly
banal culture of impunity in which killers can joke about crimes against
humanity on television chat shows, and celebrate moral disaster with the ease
and grace of a soft shoe dance number.
In The Act of Killing,
Anwar and his friends agree to tell us the story of the killings. But their
idea of being in a movie is not to provide testimony for a documentary: they
want to star in the kind of films they most love from their days scalping tickets
at the cinemas.
The filmmaking process
catalyzes an unexpected emotional journey for Anwar, from arrogance to regret
as he confronts, for the first time in his life, the full implications of what
he’s done. As Anwar’s fragile conscience is threatened by the pressure to
remain a hero, The Act of Killing presents a gripping conflict between moral
imagination and moral catastrophe. (http://theactofkilling.com/synops/)
Trailer:
Date: Tuesday, April 19
Time: 19.15-21.30
Location:
Duration: 115 min
PCI Lecture Series 2015-2016
October
9
|
Writing
Transcultural Adoption
John McLeod (University of
Leeds, UK)
|
October
13
|
Discursive Mangroves in the Contemporary Caribbean Imaginary
Odile Ferly
(Clark University, USA)
|
November
17
|
Ghost
Cities and Ruin Lust
Christoph Lindner
(University of Amsterdam, NL)
|
John McLeod, University of Leeds, UK
“Writing Transcultural Adoption”
John
McLeod is Professor of Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures in the School of
English, University of Leeds, UK. He is
the author of “Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption (Bloomsbury, 2015),
Beginning Postcolonialism” (MUP, 2nd ed. 2010) and “Postcolonial London:
Rewriting the Metropolis” (Routledge, 2004).
Abstract:
“Adoptions that cross the lines of culture, race and nation are a major
consequence of conflicts around the globe, yet their histories and
representations are rarely considered. While acknowledging the sobering
inequalities which engender transcultural adoptions and the lasting upset of
sundered relations, John McLeod considers the transfigurative and creative
propensity of imagining transcultural adoption in recent literary texts as
radically calling into question ideas of biogenetic attachment, racial
genealogy, cultural identity and normative family-making. How might the
predicament of ‘being adopted’ transculturally enable the transformative agency
of ‘adoptive being’ for all?”
Date:
October 9
Time:
13.15-15.00
Location: Kromme Nieuwegracht (KNG) 80, room 0.06
Odile Ferly, Clark University, USA
“Discursive Mangroves in the Contemporary Caribbean Imaginary”
Odile Ferly is Associate Professor of Francophone Studies at Clark University in
Massachusetts. She is the author of A Poetics of Relation: Caribbean Women Writing
at the Millennium (2012), which focuses on the francophone and hispanophone
regions. Her current research examines cultural politics in the French Caribbean.Abstract: “As the breeding ground of numerous fish, birds, crabs and other indigenous fauna and flora, the mangrove is synonymous with life in the Caribbean. Standing out far above ground, its rhizomic trees pick up the brackish water and use it for their growth after exuding the salt. The mangrove therefore symbolizes fertility, growth, and purification. At the same time, the mangrove is what Bhabha would call a Third Space, marine and terrestrial, at once both and neither. An extension of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s regenerating rhizome and of Edouard Glissant’s Relation, the mangrove has inspired many Caribbean intellectuals, shaping their conception of identity. It is also a metaphor for the female discourse in the Caribbean, which represents a reinvigorating force in the regional canon. The mangrove thus figures as the common creative matrix from which the aesthetic projects of many Caribbean writers, especially women, have emerged.”
Date: October 13
Time: 11.00-12.30
Location: Drift, 21 Sweelinkzaal
Convenors: Birgit M. Kaiser (Dept of Comparative Literature), and Christine Quinan (Graduate Gender Programme)
The lecture is part of the lecture series New Directions in Literary Postcolonial Studies, organized by Terra Critica together with the Postcolonial Studies Initiative PCI.
Together with the lecture, Odile Ferly will also be participating in a session of ReadingRoom, organized by the research initiative Terra Critica together with Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory Utrecht. We will read passages from Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1990) and from Odile Ferly’s book A Poetics of Relation: Caribbean Women Writing at the Millennium (2012). Our discussion will be followed by a screening of a documentary film on Glissant, One World in Relation (2010) by Manthia Diawara. The ReadingRoom will take place on Monday, 12 October 2015, 17:00-21:30. For more information, please email: info@terracritica.net.
Convenors: Birgit M. Kaiser (Dept of Comparative Literature), and Christine Quinan (Graduate Gender Programme)
Together with the lecture, Odile Ferly will also be participating in a session of ReadingRoom, organized by the research initiative Terra Critica together with Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory Utrecht. We will read passages from Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1990) and from Odile Ferly’s book A Poetics of Relation: Caribbean Women Writing at the Millennium (2012). Our discussion will be followed by a screening of a documentary film on Glissant, One World in Relation (2010) by Manthia Diawara. The ReadingRoom will take place on Monday, 12 October 2015, 17:00-21:30. For more information, please email: info@terracritica.net.
Christoph Lindner, University of Amsterdam, NL
“Ghost Cities and Ruin Lust”
Christoph
Lindner is Professor of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam, where
he writes about cities, globalization, and visual culture. His books include
Imagining New York City: Literature, Urbanism and the Visual Arts (Oxford
University Press, 2015), and the edited volumes Global Garbage (Routlege,
2015), Inert Cities (I.B. Tauris, 2014), Cities Interrupted (Bloomsbury,
forthcoming 2016).
Abstract:
Moving between Detroit, Mumbai, London, and Amsterdam, this talk addresses the
ways in which contemporary ruin aesthetics associated with postindustrial decay
and urban poverty travel between cities in the era of globalization. The focus
is on how transnational ruin aesthetics produce various forms of spectral
urbanism, become enmeshed in the visual and institutional imaginaries of art
museums, and contribute to gentrification and urban branding.
Date: November 17
Time: 15.15-17.00
Location: Kromme Nieuwegracht (KNG) 80, room 0.06
For
more information and updates please visit www.postcolonialstudies.nl and like us on facebook at facebook.com/postcolonialstudiesinitiative, or email Prof.Sandra Ponzanesi at S.Ponzanesi@uu.nl
Admission
to the screenings and to the lectures is free of charge.
The
PCI is sponsored by and connected to Utrecht University's research focus area
Culture, Citizenship and Human Rights
The PCI film series 2014-2015
On September 16, 2014, the Postcolonial
Initiative PCI Utrecht starts its fifth postcolonial film series
with a selection of films shown monthly that draw on a variety of different contexts in our
postcolonial world. The series is organized annually and invites all interested
in our European postcolonial present and the representation of its political,
cultural and aesthetic realities and challenges. We want to explore, through
visual representations and cinematographic narratives, how these realities are
analyzed and re-imagined in contemporary film. Each film will be introduced
briefly by scholars connected to the PCI.
The PCI is sponsored by and connected to Utrecht University's research focus area Culture, Citizenship and Human Rights
The
postcolonial film series 2014-1015 screens on:
September 16: The Stuart Hall Project (John Akomfrah,
UK, 2013, 95 min.)
Introduced by Domitilla Olivieri
October 14: District 9 (Neill
Blomkamp, USA/South Africa, 2009, 112 min.)
Introduced by Kári Driscoll
November 18: The Secret Sharer (Peter
Fudakowski, UK/Poland/China/Thailand, 2014, 103 min.)
With the special participation of Peter Fudakowski.
Introduced by Gene Moore (UvA)
December 9: Mosquita y Mari (Aurora Guerrero, USA, 2012, 85 min.)
Introduced by Christine Quinan
January 13: Terraferma
(Emanuele Crialese, Italy, 2011)
Introduced by Birgit Kaiser
February 17: Concerning
Violence (Göran
Olsson, Sweden/USA/Denmark/Finland,
2014, 85 min.)
Screening to be Confirmed. Introduced by Doro
Wiese
March
3: Half of a Yellow Sun (Biyi Bandele, Nigeria/UK, 2014)
Introduced by Sandra Ponzanesi
March
10: Queen (Vikas
Bahl, India, 2014, 146 min.)
Introduced by Barnita Bagchi
The series opens with a tribute to Stuart
Hall, the father of cultural studies, who passed away this year at the
age of 82 (3 Feb, 1932- 10 Feb 2014)
THE STUART HALL PROJECT (John Akomfrah, UK, 2013, 95
min)
Introduction: Domitilla Olivieri (Utrecht University)
John
Akomfrah's film is a tribute to Stuart Hall, the founder of the New Left Review
and pioneer of cultural studies. Filmmaker John Akomfrah uses the rich and
complex mood created by Miles Davis’s trumpet to root a masterful tapestry of
newly filmed material, archival imagery, excerpts from television programs, home
movies, and family photographs to create this lyrical and emotionally powerful
portrait of the life and philosophy of this influential theorist. Akomfrah
finds a new and quietly moving significance in Hall's own life story: a man who
came from Jamaica – which Hall elegantly calls the "home of
hybridity" – and found himself not really at home there, nor in the
postwar UK in which he began a brilliant academic career at Oxford. It is a deeply considered project that
reconsiders culture and identity for those excluded from the circles of power through
race, gender and class.
Tuesday 16 September
Location: Drift 21, room 0.32
Time: 19.15
Admission is free
_____________________________________________________________________________
PCI LECTURE SERIES 2014-2015
The first lecture series will be offered in collaboration with the Gender Programme, UU
PCI/Doing Gender Lecture
Thursday September 25, 2014
Time: 16.00 – 17.30 hrs
Location: Drift 21, room 0.05
Raka Shome
White Femininity and Cosmopolitan Healing
Raka Shome's talk on Thursday September 25 will focus on new
formations of white femininity in the millennium (and contemporary post
millennial years) that are articulated through particular logics of
borderlessness of privileged white women. This borderlessness is
organized around a discourse of cosmo-spirituality, well-being, and
healing, and frequently incorporates the ethos of Asian-inflected
therapeutic practices of inner wellness, planetary connectivity, and
“finding yourself.” Astrology, reflexology, acupuncture, ayurveda,
Asian herbal medicines, colonic irrigation, homeopathy, meditation,
yoga, spiritual retreat packages, reiki, tai chi, and so on have emerged
as technologies for recrafting and healing the white (usually female)
subject of contemporary neoliberalism. This talk will explore the
implications of such “cosmo-healing” of privileged white femininity in
which white women become (seemingly) connecting to, and radiate, a
global soul and “life flows.” We see this particularly articulated
through female celebrities. The talk will also address how a politics
of global justiceseems to be replaced by a discourse of global wellness
in such transnational (healing) connections of privileged white
femininity.
Dr. Raka Shome is a Media,
Communication, and Feminist Cultural Studies scholar who writes on
postcolonial cultures and transnational feminism. Currently based in New
York, Dr. Shome has published numerous articles in leading journals and
anthologies in the field of Media, Communication and Cultural
Studies. Some of her essays have been reprinted in key texts in the
field of global communication and media studies. She is the author of Diana and Beyond: White Femininity, National Identity, and Contemporary Media Culture (University
of Illinois Press, 2014)—a book that examines how new sets of
postcolonial relations in contemporary western cultures are mediated
through images of white femininity. Under her co-guest editorship, the
first-ever special issue on “Postcolonialism” was published in the field
of Communication Studies in the International Communication Association
journal Communication Theory (August, 2002). She recently also guest edited a special issue on “Asian Modernities” (2012) in the (Sage) journal Global Media and Communication, which included several articles focused on the question of what it means to be “modern” outside of liberal western frameworks.
Her current research interest is in the logics of non western modernities. She is currently guest editing an issue of Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies journal (Sage Publication) on ‘Gender/colonialism/nationalism and Twenty First Century’ and is co-planning a special issue of the journal Postcolonial Studies on ‘Postcolonial Media Studies.’
She is also a primary organizer of the first ever international conference on Postcoloniality and Communication that will take place in Villanova University in March 2015. See link (http://wfi2015.vucommdept.com/).
Her current research interest is in the logics of non western modernities. She is currently guest editing an issue of Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies journal (Sage Publication) on ‘Gender/colonialism/nationalism and Twenty First Century’ and is co-planning a special issue of the journal Postcolonial Studies on ‘Postcolonial Media Studies.’
She is also a primary organizer of the first ever international conference on Postcoloniality and Communication that will take place in Villanova University in March 2015. See link (http://wfi2015.vucommdept.com/).
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Postcolonial Film Series (starting Dec 3, 2013)
On December 3, 2013, the Postcolonial
Initiative PCI Utrecht starts its fourth postcolonial film series
with a selection of films that draw on a variety of different contexts in our
postcolonial world. The series is organized annually and invites all interested
in our European postcolonial present and the representation of its political,
cultural and aesthetic realities and challenges. We want to explore, through
visual representations and cinematographic narratives, how these realities are
analyzed and re-imagined in contemporary film. Each film will be introduced
briefly by scholars connected to the PCI
The postcolonial film series 2013
screens on
December 3: Mani Ratnam, Dil Se (From the Heart) India, 1998,
163 min)
Introduced by Sandra Ponzanesi
January 7: Elia
Suleiman, Divine Intervention (UK, 2011, 124 min)
Introduced
by Babs Boter
February
11: Jack Hill, Coffy (USA, 1973, 91 min)
Introduced by Doro Wiese
March
4: Ari Folman, Waltz with Bashir (Israel, 2008, 87
min)
Introduced by Susanne
Knittel
March
25: Rachid Bouchareb, Hors-La-Loi (Outside the Law) (France, 2010, 138 min)
Introduced by Emmanuelle
Radar
May 6: Mira Nair, Monsoon Wedding (India, 2001, 114 min)
Introduced by Marta Zarzycka
TIME:
18.00
LOCATION:
Drift 21, room 32
For more information see: http://www.postcolonialstudies.nl
Or contact s.ponzanesi@uu.nl
Considered to be
a film about doomed love sets against the background of terrorism and female involvement
in combat Dil Se is a powerful film on
nationalism and the call of god set in stunning outdoor locations (Kashmir,
Assam, Ladakh, Kerala, Delhi, Buthan). Since becoming a crossover success in
Hindi with NAYAKAN ("Boss," 1987, a dubbed version of his
award-winning Tamil film starring Kamal Haasan) South Indian director Mani
Ratnam has made a series of controversial mainstream films that touch on potent
contemporary issues: the bloody Kashmir secession conflict (ROJA, 1992) and the
Bombay Hindu-Muslim riots of 1993 (BOMBAY, 1994). His fourth Hindi film, DIL
SE, is a spectacular and disturbing romance set against a background of
insurgent and counter-insurgent violence in the eastern Himalayan region, and
the threat of national disintegration, especially following the 1991
assassination of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by a female suicide-bomber. The film casts
megstar Shahrukh Khan and Manisha Koirala in lead roles while Preita Zinta (in her film debut) appears in a supporting role. The film is considered an
example of Indian Parallel Cinema. The highly stylized film, with camerawork of
Santosh Sivan, and music by A. R. Rahman won awards for cinematography,
audiography, choreography, and music, among others.
Palestinian lovers separated by checkpoints between Ramallah and
Jerusalem try to get round the obstacles in their way. Elia Suleiman's film, ''Divine Intervention,'' is subtitled ''a chronicle
of love and pain.'' But the description is also a little misleading: those
large emotions -- and a smoldering political anger about Palestinian life under
Israeli occupation, as well -- are refracted through a series of quick, mordant
vignettes, some of which are like cinematic riddles and visual puns, delivered
in elegant deadpan. ''Divine Intervention'' is divided into three sections,
each devoted to a spot on the troubled map of Israel and the Palestinian
territories and linked by the hero's suffering and the director's cool,
observant camera. This is a deadpan comedy of sorts, almost silent, with
touches of Tati and Keaton - and certainly quite unlike anything you'll see
about the Middle East on the news (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian).
The film was nominated for the "Palme d'Or"
award at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, the film's consideration as
candidate
for Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards was an occasion for
considerable controversy,
based on the rumors that the Academy Motion Picture did not recognize
Palestine
as a state according to their regulations. The film was considered for
an Oscar the following year as the committee decided to treat Palestine
as an exception.
Coffy is one of the best-known
blaxploitations films of the 1970ies. Pam Grier plays Coffy, a seemingly
virtuous nurse, who, next to her work, mingles with pimps and drug dealers to avange
her sister's drug addiction. Like all exploitation films, Coffy (the
film) steps over the boundaries of good taste. Pam Grier, who enjoyed late fame
in Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown, incorporates in the film several
stereotypes at once. Coffy is a virtuous woman who plays the vamp to get what
she wants -- namely revenge. Coffy is sexy -- or dynamite, as the soundtrack
lets us know. Yet Coffy is more than a sexualized character. Coffy knows what
she wants, how to get it, and how to defeat evil forces within her community.
The film makes fun of all kind of stereotypes about black people that
circulated at its time, from black criminality (pimping, drug selling) to
hypersexualized black masculinity and feminity. Through humour, the film
thereby comments upon the racializing discourses of its time, without taking
away any kind of visual pleasure from the viewers.
Waltz With Bashir is a powerful
testimony to the damages of war, the workings of memory and repression, and the
challenges they post to representation and narrative. Written and directed by
Ari Folman, it is an animated, semi-autobiographical film about his attempts to
recover the lost memory of his experience as a soldier in the 1982 Lebanon War.
Composed largely of nightmares and flashbacks, Waltz
With Bashir has been called an “animated documentary,” yet it does not make
any overt claim to historical accuracy. Instead it is an investigation into the
human psyche, focusing on long-term traumatic effects on some Israeli soldiers,
and, by definition, to some extent also on Israeli society in general.
The film won, among others, a Golden Globe Award for
Best Foreign Film, the César, and was nominated for the Palme d’Or and an
Academy award for Best Foreign Language Film. It is officially banned in
Lebanon.
Rachid Bouchareb offers a gripping insight into the
Algerian independence struggle through the lives of three brothers -- The Observer May 8, 2011
A true classic of a Bollywood cinema, Monsoon Wedding (2001) depicts romantic entanglements during a
traditional Punjabi Hindu wedding in Delhi. The movie follows the events in the
large Verma family of Delhi, as their daughter Aditi prepares to marry Hemant,
a computer programmer from Houston. He is an "NRI" (non-resident
Indian), who has returned to meet the bride selected by his parents for an
arranged marriage. However, Aditi has agreed to the arranged marriage partly
out of impatience with her married lover's vague talk about someday divorcing
his wife. The extended family of both parties comes together from all corners
of the globe including India, Australia, Oman, and the United States to attend
the wedding, everyone bringing their emotional baggage along.
Monsoon Wedding won the Golden Lion as the best film at Venice 2001 and has been
praised by critics and global audiences alike for its vibrant colors and the
energy of a Bollywood spectacle. Currently, a musical adaptation is being made
by the same director.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PCI
Fall Lecture 2013 – Doing Gender Lecture
Prof. Bishnupriya
Ghosh (University of California, Santa
Barbara, USA)
Professor
of English
The lecture is organised by the Postcolonial Studies
Initiative (PCI) hosted by the Centre for the Humanities and jointly organised with
the Gender Studies Programme at Utrecht University.
“The Saint of the Gutters": Mother Teresa as Corporeal Aperture
·
Date: Thursday November 21, 2013
·
Time:
16.00 - 18.00 hrs
·
Location: Utrecht University, University Hall (Aula), Domplein 29
·
Chair: Dr. Sandra Ponzanesi
In
this lecture Prof. Dr. Bishnupriya Ghosh will revisit Mother Teresa as
Corporeal Aperture. The customary critique of Mother Teresa reads her image as
a compromised mass commodity, the anointed saint who habitually produces the
“third world” as her necessary gutter. While it is certainly the case that
global icons of her ilk lure consumers into commodity fetishism, isolating them
from social relations, we see these recursive images routinely deployed in
challenges to hegemonic institutions all over the world; reassembled culturally
familiar icons surface in the new negotiations over global modernity, often
making the news when they instigate outbreaks of iconophobia or iconomania.
These iconoclashes suggest there is more to the story of mass stupefaction told
in the iconoclastic critique. What better way to think beyond this promissory
skepticism than to relocate the scholarly gaze to a global region replete with
rich cultural histories of icon veneration? Mother Teresa, then, provides an
exemplary instance of a general social phenomena: the periodic outbreaks of
anger, grief, even riots, around highly visible public figures (a Lady Diana, a
Barack Obama, or an Eva Perón) circulating as icons in mass media. Looking
closely at her eruption as popular saint in Kolkata, the talk argues for a
reconstituted theory of the icon properly attentive to the mass commodity’s
sudden volatilization into a magical technology of the popular.
BIO:
With a doctorate from Northwestern University, Bishnupriya Ghosh is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she teaches postcolonial theory and global media studies. Much of her scholarly work interrogates the relations between the global and the postcolonial; area studies and transnational cultural studies; popular, mass, and elite cultures. While publishing essays on literary, cinematic, and visual culture in several collections and journals such as boundary 2, Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Public Culture and Screen, in her first two books, Ghosh focused on contemporary elite and popular cultures of globalization. When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (Rutgers UP, 2004) addressed the dialectical relations between emerging global markets and literatures reflexively marked as “postcolonial,” and Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular (Duke UP, 2011) turned to visual popular culture as it constitutes the global. Research is underway for a third monograph, The Unhomely Sense: Spectral Cinemas of Globalization that tracks the relations between globalization and cinematic/post-cinematic images.
With a doctorate from Northwestern University, Bishnupriya Ghosh is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she teaches postcolonial theory and global media studies. Much of her scholarly work interrogates the relations between the global and the postcolonial; area studies and transnational cultural studies; popular, mass, and elite cultures. While publishing essays on literary, cinematic, and visual culture in several collections and journals such as boundary 2, Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Public Culture and Screen, in her first two books, Ghosh focused on contemporary elite and popular cultures of globalization. When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (Rutgers UP, 2004) addressed the dialectical relations between emerging global markets and literatures reflexively marked as “postcolonial,” and Global Icons: Apertures to the Popular (Duke UP, 2011) turned to visual popular culture as it constitutes the global. Research is underway for a third monograph, The Unhomely Sense: Spectral Cinemas of Globalization that tracks the relations between globalization and cinematic/post-cinematic images.
Public lecture by
Ato Quayson
University
of Toronto
Date: Monday,
7 October, 2013
Time: 12.00-14.00
Location: Sweelinckzaal, Drift 21,
Utrecht
Convenors:
Birgit M. Kaiser (Dept of Comparative Literature)
Emmanuelle Radar (Dept
of French)
Lecture Postcolonialism and the
Diasporic Imaginary
While the two fields of Postcolonial and
Diaspora Studies overlap in interests and even methods, it is very rare that
they are actually brought into serious conversation. Prof. Quayson’s
lecture will demonstrate, first, that this impasse is due to the fact that
while Postcolonial Studies is dominated by the epochal relation of the
nation-state (its colonial formation, its post-colonial anxieties, and the
manner of its uneven insertion into transnational and global realities),
Diaspora Studies has been concerned primarily with the experience of spatial
discontinuities in various guises (multiple and simultaneous identification
with the homeland and hostnation, the unheimlich
of home, post-memories of exile, etc.). Prof. Quayson will then proceed to
illustrate the differences between the two fields with reference to
methodological nationalism and the diasporic imaginary, elaborating its three
essential components of place, nostalgia, and genealogical accounting.
Together with the lecture, Ato Quayson will
also be teaching a masterclass for advanced MA and PhD students on Literary spaces and Spatial Theories in Postcolonial Literature. The masterclass will
take place on Friday, 4 October 2013 (16.00-18.30 at Utrecht University). For
more information, please email: OSL-fgw@uva.nl
Ato Quayson is Professor of English and Director
of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of
Toronto, where he has been since
August 2005. He did his BA at the University of Ghana and took his PhD from
Cambridge University in 1995. He then went on to the University of Oxford as a
Research Fellow, returning to Cambridge in September 1995 to become a Fellow at
Pembroke College and a member of the Faculty of English where he eventually
became a Reader in Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies.
Prof.
Quayson has published widely on African literature, postcolonial studies and in
literary theory. His book publications include the
Blackwell
Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism Studies, ed.with
Girish Daswani (in press, New York: Blackwell, 2013); The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, ed., 2
volumes. (Cambridge University Press, 2012); Labour
Migration, Human Trafficking and Multinational Corporations (with
Antonela Arhin; New York: Routledge, 2012); Fathers
and Daughters: An Anthology of Exploration, ed., (Oxford: Ayebia
Publishers, 2008); Aesthetic Nervousness:
Disability and the Crisis of Representation (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2007); African Literature: An
Anthology of Theory and Criticism (with Tejumola Olaniyan; Oxford:
Blackwell, 2007); Relocating
Postcolonialism (with David Theo Goldberg; Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).
He also wrote the Introduction and Notes to the Penguin Classics edition of Nelson Mandela's No Easy Walk to Freedom (London: Penguin, 2002) and is General Editor of the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry. Prof. Quayson has just completed a book on the urban history of Accra told from the perspective from a single street, forthcoming with Duke University Press under the title of Oxford St., Accra; Urban Evolution, Street Life and Itineraries of the Transnational (in press, 2014).
He also wrote the Introduction and Notes to the Penguin Classics edition of Nelson Mandela's No Easy Walk to Freedom (London: Penguin, 2002) and is General Editor of the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry. Prof. Quayson has just completed a book on the urban history of Accra told from the perspective from a single street, forthcoming with Duke University Press under the title of Oxford St., Accra; Urban Evolution, Street Life and Itineraries of the Transnational (in press, 2014).
The lecture is part
of the lecture series New Directions in Literary Postcolonial
Studies, organized by Birgit M. Kaiser and Emmanuelle Radar with the
Postcolonial Studies Initiative PCI and the Center for the Humanities (Utrecht
University), together with the Research Institute for History and Culture OGC,
and the Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies OSL.
Earlier speakers in
the series were Emily Apter (NYU) in June 2011 and Réda Bensmaïa (Brown) in
October 2012.
Masterclass with Ato Quayson
Date: Friday,
4 October, 2013
Time: 16.00-18.30
Location: Janskerkhof 13, zaal 0.06, Utrecht
Literary
spaces and Spatial Theories in Postcolonial Literature
The masterclass for advanced MA students and
PhD students will look into the general intersections between Spatial Theory
and Literary Space with special emphasis on postcolonial literature. Ato
Quayson has just completed a book on the urban history of Accra told from the
perspective from a single street for Duke UP (forthcoming), coming out of his
work on how to apply spatial theory (such as Henri Lefebre’s The Production of Space) to the
understanding of space in literature. Prof. Quayson has been approaching the
question with a focus that is more literary critical than sociological, thus
less interested in questions of marketing, the global market place of
judgement, etc. and primarily concerned with how we detect and describe space
when we see it as either a thematic or a description in literature.
The background readings for the masterclass
are:
Quayson, Ato. 2012a. “Introduction:
Postcolonial Literature in a Changing Historical Frame.” In The Cambridge
History of Postcolonial Literature, Vol. 1., edited by Ato Quayson, 1-29.
Cambridge; Cambridge University Press.
Quayson, Ato. 2012b. “Periods vrs Concepts:
Space Making and the Question of Postcolonial Literary History.” PMLA, 127(2):
349-356.
Lefebre, Henri, Chapters 1 and 2 of Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time, and Everyday Life. New
York: Continuum International, 2004.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1986. “The Bildungsroman
and its Significance in the History of Realism”, in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas
Press, 10-59.
Moretti,
Franco. 1987. “Bildungsroman and Symbolic Form,” in The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture,
London: Verso, 3-13.
In order to register for the masterclass,
please email: OSL-fgw@uva.nl
Walter Mignolo
(Duke
University, USA)
PCI public Lecture
Dewesternization,
Rewesternization and Decoloniality:
the Racial Distribution of Capital and
Knowledge
Monday
May 13, 2013
Location: U-Theather Kromme Nieuwegracht 20
Time: 15.00-17.00
The
"return" of China and Turkey, the economic presence of BRICS
countries and the economic growth of Indonesia and Malaysia have already
established a radical shift in the five hundred years of history marked by the
emergence, consolidation and expansion of Western Civilization since 1500. It
is the first time in 500 years that capital and knowledge controlled by Western
European states (from Spain and Portugal, to Holland, France, Germany, England
and the US), is in the hands of "people of color" as President
Sukarno of Indonesia defined the Bandung Conference (1955). In his
configuration, "Left" and "Right" are obsolete terms as
they are all description of changes prefaced by "Post."
"Post" is Western indicator of changes in linear and imperial
conception of time. Now we have entered in the spatial domain of co-existing
temporalities: Dewesternization, Rewesternization and Decoloniality help us to
understand that there is more than "one" time, the
"universal" time of Western modernity and the Greenwich Meridian.
Walter
Mignolo is William H. Wannamaker Professor of
Literature at Duke University and has joint appointments in Cultural
Anthropology and Romance Studies. Since 2000, he has directed the Center for Global Studies
and the Humanities, a research unit within the John Hope Franklin Center for
International and Interdisciplinary Studies. Professor Mignolo has also been
named Permanent Researcher at Large at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar in
Quito, Ecuador.
He received his Ph.D.
from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris. Before coming to Duke in January, 1993,
he taught at the Universities of Toulouse, Indiana, and Michigan. He has
published extensively on semiotics and literary theory, and has in the past
years been working on different aspects of the modern/colonial world and
exploring concepts such as global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge,
transmodernity, border thinking, and di/pluriversalities.
His recent publications
on these latter topics include: The Idea of Latin America (2005), Writing
Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes,
co-edited with Elizabeth H. Boone (1994), and The Darker Side of the
Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, Colonization (1995) which won the
Katherine Singer Kovacs prize from the Modern Languages Association. He is also
author of Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges
and Border Thinking (1999) and editor of Capitalismo y geopolítica del
conocimiento: El eurocentrismo y la filosofía de la liberación en el debate
intelectual contemporanáneo (2000) and The Americas: Loci of
Enunciations and Imaginary Constructions (1994-95). His current interests
include colonial expansion and nation building at the end of the nineteenth and
beginning of the twentieth centuries. See also: http://waltermignolo.com/
Attendance is free but
please register by sending an e-mail to s.ponzanesi@uu.nl
________________________________________________________
PEN, Postcolonial Europe Network
Utrecht University, 18-19 April 2013
thank you to all speakers for a fantastic conference
for pics go to:
PEN, Postcolonial Europe Network
(Funded by NWO
internationalization in the Humanities)
Second annual conference
Utrecht University, 18-19 April 2013
Postcolonial Transitions in Europe:
Conflict, Transitional Justice and
Cosmopolitanism
In collaboration with:
Postcolonial Studies Initiative (PCI);
Centre for the Humanities (CfH), Graduate
Gender Programme (GGeP)
Convener: Sandra
Ponzanesi
to download the FLYER please click here
This conference focuses on the
relevance of postcolonial theories for the understanding of world-systemic transformations
and the shifts in geopolitics in terms of conflict, transitional justice and
cosmopolitanism. New crises such as conflicts, terrorism, trafficking, and
human rights violation go beyond the boundaries of the nation state and
European frontiers and require new analytical tools for the understanding of
these rapid transformations.
By investigating culture with the
innovative, interdisciplinary and transcultural tools of postcolonial critique Europe
emerges as a complex space, which is often imagined and oblivious of its
politics of inclusion and exclusion towards migrants, asylum seekers and
refugees, as well as of its take on internal conflicts, political transitions
and cosmopolitan imaginary. In order to tackle the new crises that plague Europe
and beyond, this conference will bring together the complementary and
synergizing expertise of postcolonial scholars who work across different
disciplinary fields such as conflict studies, law, ethics, memory studies,
human rights and international relations as well as the arts, visual culture,
music and digital platforms. The goal is to inform a new wave of young scholars
and academics on how to assess the emergencies and transitions of the present
through an ability to acknowledge the working of the past and rethink Europe as
a new possible cosmopolitan space.
The conference will focus on
conflict, transitional justice and cosmopolitanism examining the narrative that
walks the line between, before and after, memory and truth, compensation and
reconciliation, justice and peace. Some of the participants will examine
communities ravaged by colonialism and the harm that colonial and postcolonial
economic and social disparities cause. The comparative and interdisciplinary
exchanges will generate a better understanding of difficult pasts to present
communities, questioning the many possible trajectories from disruption to
truth, reconciliation and healing, with particular focus on Europe.
Keynote Speakers:
Gurminder K. Bhambra:
Postcolonial Cosmopolitanism in an Austere Europe
(Warwick University, UK):
Rosemarie Buikema:
Transitional Justice, Dialogical Truth and
the Arts
(Utrecht
University, NL)
Kate Mackintosh
Development of International Criminal Justice.
The Example of the International Criminal Tribunal of the Former Yugoslavia
(ICTY, International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, NL)
Neil Lazarus
Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of
World-Literature
(Warwick
University, UK)
Bruce Robbins
Cosmopolitanism
in Deep Time
(Columbia
University, USA)
Robert Young
Late Postcolonialism
(New
York University, USA)
The final programme is now available please go to the PEN website: www.postcolonialeurope.eu
For information and registration please mail: s.ponzanesi@uu.nl
PCI FILM SERIES 2013
On January 8, 2013, the
Postcolonial Initiative PCI Utrecht starts its third postcolonial
film series with a selection of films that draw on a variety of different
contexts in our postcolonial world. The series will be organized annually
between January and June and invites all interested in our European
postcolonial present and the representation of its political, cultural and
aesthetic realities and challenges. We want to explore, through visual
representations and cinematographic narratives, how these realities are
analyzed and re-imagined in contemporary film. Each film will be introduced
briefly by scholars connected to the PCI and we hope to chat in the bar
afterwards.
The postcolonial film
series 2013 screens on:
January 8: Deepa Mehta, Earth(India/Canada,
1998, 110 min).
Introduced by Amrita
Das (VU)
February 12: John Madden, The
Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (UK,
2011, 124 min)
Introduced by
Barnita Bagchi (UU)
March 19: Icíar Bollaín, Even the Rain (También la
lluvia, Spain, 2010, 103 min)
Introduced by Susanne Knittel (UU)
April 9: Denis Villeneuve, Incendies (Canada, 2010, 130 min)
Introduced by Emmanuelle Radar
May 7: Miguel Gomes,
Tabu
(Portugal, 2012, 118
min)
Introduction by Paulo de Medeiros (UU)
June 4: Michael Winterbottom, Trishna (UK,
2011, 117 min)
Introduced by Sandra Ponzanesi (UU)
TIME:
18.00
LOCATION: U-theater Studio T, Kromme Nieuwegracht 20
All screenings are free of charge.
Or contact PCI.gw@uu.nl
or s.ponzanesi@uu.nl
-->
It's
1947 and the borderlines between India and Pakistan are being drawn. A young
girl bears witnesses to tragedy as her ayah is caught between the love of two
men and the rising tide of political
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel follows
a group of British retirees who decide to "outsource" their
retirement to less expensive and seemingly exotic India. Enticed by
advertisements for the newly restored Marigold Hotel and bolstered with visions
of a life of leisure, they arrive to find the palace a shell of its former
self. Though the new environment is less luxurious than imagined, they are
forever transformed by their shared experiences, discovering that life and love
can begin again when you let go of the past.
Even the Rain sets up an intriguing
dialogue about Spanish imperialism through incidents taking place some 500
years apart, while examining the personal belief systems of the members of a
film crew headed by director Sebastian (Gael Garcia Bernal) and his producer
Costa (Luis Tosar) who arrive in Bolivia to make a revisionist film about the
conquest of Latin America. Set in February and March of 2000 when real-life
protests against the privatization of water rocked the nation, the film
reflexively blurs the line between fiction and reality in what Variety calls
"a powerful, richly layered indictment of the plight of Latin America's
dispossessed.
This powerful movie connects war in the
Middle East (Lebanese Civil War, Jordan, Syria) with the life of children of
immigrants from that region in the western world (Quebec). It is the story of a
twin brother and sister living in Montreal whose dead mother – a Middle East
immigrant - asked them in her will to give a letter to their father and brother
– two people they did not know existed. The plot is built on the quest for
origins, the revelation of family mystery and the uncovering of a past full of
war and revolution. As the mystery is revealed only at the end, the narration
succeeds in keeping the viewer’s attention while the almost unbearable realism
of the story combined with the symbolism of the mythological representation makes it a memorable film.
A temperamental old woman, her Cape
Verdean maid and a neighbour devoted to social causes live on the same floor of
a Lisbon apartment building. When the old lady dies, the other two learn of an
episode from her past: a tale of love and crime set in an Africa straight from
the world of adventure films.
Based on Thomas Hardy's classic novel
Tess of the D'Urbervilles, 'Trishna' tells the story of one woman whose life is
destroyed by a combination of love and circumstances. Set in contemporary
Rajasthan, Trishna (Freida Pinto) meets a wealthy young British businessman Jay
Singh (Riz Ahmed) who has come to India to work in his father's hotel business.
After an accident destroys her father's Jeep, Trishna goes to work for Jay, and
they fall in love. But despite their feelings for each other, they cannot
escape the conflicting pressures of a rural society which is changing rapidly
through industrialisation, urbanisation and, above all, education. Trishna's
tragedy is that she is torn between the traditions of her family life and the
dreams and ambitions that her education has given her.
PCI FILM SERIES 2013
On January 8, 2013, the
Postcolonial Initiative PCI Utrecht starts its third postcolonial
film series with a selection of films that draw on a variety of different
contexts in our postcolonial world. The series will be organized annually
between January and June and invites all interested in our European
postcolonial present and the representation of its political, cultural and
aesthetic realities and challenges. We want to explore, through visual
representations and cinematographic narratives, how these realities are
analyzed and re-imagined in contemporary film. Each film will be introduced
briefly by scholars connected to the PCI and we hope to chat in the bar
afterwards.
The postcolonial film
series 2013 screens on:
January 8: Deepa Mehta, Earth(India/Canada,
1998, 110 min).
Introduced by Amrita
Das (VU)
February 12: John Madden, The
Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (UK,
2011, 124 min)
Introduced by
Barnita Bagchi (UU)
March 19: Icíar Bollaín, Even the Rain (También la
lluvia, Spain, 2010, 103 min)
Introduced by Susanne Knittel (UU)
April 9: Denis Villeneuve, Incendies (Canada, 2010, 130 min)
Introduced by Emmanuelle Radar
May 7: Miguel Gomes,
Tabu
(Portugal, 2012, 118
min)
Introduction by Paulo de Medeiros (UU)
June 4: Michael Winterbottom, Trishna (UK,
2011, 117 min)
Introduced by Sandra Ponzanesi (UU)
TIME:
18.00
LOCATION: U-theater Studio T, Kromme Nieuwegracht 20
All screenings are free of charge.
For more information see: http://www.postcolonialstudies.nl
Or contact PCI.gw@uu.nl
or s.ponzanesi@uu.nl
-->It's
1947 and the borderlines between India and Pakistan are being drawn. A young
girl bears witnesses to tragedy as her ayah is caught between the love of two
men and the rising tide of political and religious violence.
-->
-->
-->
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel follows
a group of British retirees who decide to "outsource" their
retirement to less expensive and seemingly exotic India. Enticed by
advertisements for the newly restored Marigold Hotel and bolstered with visions
of a life of leisure, they arrive to find the palace a shell of its former
self. Though the new environment is less luxurious than imagined, they are
forever transformed by their shared experiences, discovering that life and love
can begin again when you let go of the past.
-->
Even the Rain sets up an intriguing
dialogue about Spanish imperialism through incidents taking place some 500
years apart, while examining the personal belief systems of the members of a
film crew headed by director Sebastian (Gael Garcia Bernal) and his producer
Costa (Luis Tosar) who arrive in Bolivia to make a revisionist film about the
conquest of Latin America. Set in February and March of 2000 when real-life
protests against the privatization of water rocked the nation, the film
reflexively blurs the line between fiction and reality in what Variety calls
"a powerful, richly layered indictment of the plight of Latin America's
dispossessed.
-->This powerful movie connects war in the
Middle East (Lebanese Civil War, Jordan, Syria) with the life of children of
immigrants from that region in the western world (Quebec). It is the story of a
twin brother and sister living in Montreal whose dead mother – a Middle East
immigrant - asked them in her will to give a letter to their father and brother
– two people they did not know existed. The plot is built on the quest for
origins, the revelation of family mystery and the uncovering of a past full of
war and revolution. As the mystery is revealed only at the end, the narration
succeeds in keeping the viewer’s attention while the almost unbearable realism
of the story combined with the symbolism of the mythological representation
(Oedipus, Moses, Romulus & Remus) makes it a memorable film.
-->
A temperamental old woman, her Cape
Verdean maid and a neighbour devoted to social causes live on the same floor of
a Lisbon apartment building. When the old lady dies, the other two learn of an
episode from her past: a tale of love and crime set in an Africa straight from
the world of adventure films.
-->
Based on Thomas Hardy's classic novel
Tess of the D'Urbervilles, 'Trishna' tells the story of one woman whose life is
destroyed by a combination of love and circumstances. Set in contemporary
Rajasthan, Trishna (Freida Pinto) meets a wealthy young British businessman Jay
Singh (Riz Ahmed) who has come to India to work in his father's hotel business.
After an accident destroys her father's Jeep, Trishna goes to work for Jay, and
they fall in love. But despite their feelings for each other, they cannot
escape the conflicting pressures of a rural society which is changing rapidly
through industrialisation, urbanisation and, above all, education. Trishna's tragedy
is that she is torn between the traditions of her family life and the dreams
and ambitions that her education has given her.
PCI Fall Lecture 2012 – December, 18, 2012
Prof. Elleke Boehmer (University of Oxford, Wolfson College)
Professor of World Literature in English
Topic: Girl
Power: How women’s interventions propelled the internationalisation of
Scouting
Place: U-Theather, Kromme Nieuwegracht 20
Time:16.00-18.00
On 18 December, Prof. Elleke Boehmer (Oxford University) will be giving the annual PCI Lecture/Doing Gender Lecture, titled: ‘Girl Power: How women’s interventions propelled the internationalisation of Scouting.’ Her paper presents a study in gendered book history which, though its setting is colonial, carries postcolonial and global implications.
When in the years following its first publication Robert Baden-Powell’s primer Scouting for Boys (1908) generated the soon-to-be global Scout movement, intended in part to secure the empire, it also disseminated principles of brotherhood and fellowship around the world. These principles, which the Father of Scouting, a convinced British imperialist, had derived from like-minded thinkers like Cecil John Rhodes and Rudyard Kipling, he alchemised through the medium of his charismatic text.
Interestingly, one of the audiences to which his primer strongly appealed and who both registered and amplified its charisma, differed markedly from the book’s target male addressees. They were girls and young women, the daughters of the New Woman generation of the 1890s, who found that many of Scouting’s core activities and values related to the ideas of bodily liberation, self-assertion and female independence that motivated them.
This lecture will consider how the perceived interpellation and involvement of women strengthened and widened Scouting’s networks in the years leading up to the First World War. It will round off by exploring how women in the Anglophone world and beyond not only contributed to the internationalisation of Scouting in these years, but also helped to heighten its culturally subversive and democratising effects.
About Elleke Boehmer
Internationally known for her research in postcolonial writing and theory and the literature of empire, Elleke Boehmer (BA(Hons), MPhil(Oxon), DPhil(Oxon)) currently works on questions of migration, identity and resistance in both postcolonial literature and writing of the colonial period, in particular of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. A Rhodes Scholar (1985-88), she is Professor of World Literature in English, a Professorial Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College, and Deputy Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson. Elleke writes both fiction and non-fiction, cultural history and criticism. Her best-selling short biography of Nelson Mandela (OUP VSI series) has been translated into Arabic, Thai and Portuguese (Brazil region).Among her publications are: Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford UP, 1995; 2nd edn 2005), Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890-1920 (Oxford UP, 2002; paperback 2004), Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation (Manchester UP, 2005). She has co-edited Terror and the Postcolonial (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), J.M. Coetzee in Context and Theory (Continuum, 2009), The Indian Postcolonial (Routledge 2011) and The Postcolonial Low Countries (Lexington Books, 2012). She has also published four widely acclaimed novels, Screens Against the Sky (1990: shortlisted David Higham Prize); An Immaculate Figure (1993), Bloodlines (2000: shortlisted Sanlam Prize), and Nile Baby (Ayebia, 2008), as well as a number of short stories in journals, magazines, and anthologies.
POSTCOLONIAL FILM SERIES
Starting on January 17, 2012,
Postcolonial Initiative PCI Utrecht
launches its 2nd postcolonial film series with a
selection of films that draw on a variety of different contexts in our postcolonial world. Each film will be introduced briefly by scholars connected to the PCI.
TIME:18.00
LOCATION: U-theater Studio T, Kromme Nieuwegracht 20, Utrecht
____________________________________________________________
Public Lecture: February, 17
Dr. Ankhi Mukherjee
(University of Oxford, Wadham College, UK)
Title: “"From English Literature to Literatures in English"
Date: 17 February 2012
Time: 10.00-12.30
Place: Drift 21, Sweelinckzaal room 0.05
synopsis: My talk examines the emergence of English as a global—and englobing—vernacular with reference to Anglophone literature from South Asia, focusing attention on language rather than nation as its creative principle. The lecture draws on the history of the transformation of English Literature to “Literatures in English,” a continental drift which, according to Gauri Viswanathan, signals a deterritorialization of the national implications of English literature
Dr. Ankhi Mukherjee is CFU Lecturer and Fellow in English at Wadham College Oxford University. Her areas of research include critical and cultural theory, particularly psychoanalysis; intellectual history; postcolonial studies; Victorian literature and culture; British modernism; contemporary British and South Asian Anglophone fiction. She is working at the moment on a book project entitled, What is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting, Repetition, and Invention of the Canon (forthcoming, 2012) which examines the residual influence of the Eurocentric literary canon in the age of world literature and emergent formations of canons and classics. Among her other publications are: Aesthetic Hysteria: The Great Neurosis in Victorian Melodrama and Contemporary Fiction (Routledge, 2007); A Companion to Psychoanalysis and Literature (Blackwell Publishers, 2010) with Laura Marcus; ‘This Traffic of Influence’: Derrida and Spivak,” Parallax 60 (Summer 2011); “‘What is a Classic?’: International Literary Criticism and the Classic Question,”PMLA (October 2010)
PCI/Doing Gender Lecture: March 15
Prof. Inderpal Grewal
Professor, Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies (Yale University)
Title: “Outsourcing Patriarchy: National anxieties, Transnational mediations”
Time: 16.00-18.00
Place: Domplein 4, Marnixzaal (Utrechts Centrum voor de Kunsten)
Synopsis: My paper concerns the recent uses of the term "honor killing" in the newspapers in India. I examine how and why such a term emerges in the context of transnational media in India and the implications of this for feminist media research.
Professor Inderpal Grewal is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. She is the author of among others Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel (1996) and has written and edited (with Caren Kaplan) Gender in a Transnational World: Introduction to Women’s Studies (2001, 2005) and Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational: Feminist Practices (1994). Currently she is working on a book length project on the relation between feminist practices and security discourses.
One –day conference – June 7, 2012
Postcolonial Cinema Studies
In collaboration with Culture and Identities
Location: Drift 21, Sweelinckzaal room 0.05
Time: 9.30-17.00 + drinks
Organised by Sandra Ponzanesi
Connected to the launch/presentation contributions of the new book
Postcolonial Cinema Studies (Sandra Ponzanesi and Marguerite Waller (eds.), Routledge, 2011. See link: http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415782296/
With the participation of Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, Mireille Rosello, Paulo de Medeiros, Shohini Chaudhuri, Sandra Ponzanesi, Marguerite Waller.
Shohat will participate in the conference and present the film (in which she features)
Forget Baghdad, Samir, 2002 (Jury Prize Locarno 2002)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PCI Public Lecture/June 8
(Doing Gender Lecture)
Title: Race in Translation. Cultural War Around the Postcolonial Atlantic
Time: 14.00-16.00
Location: Drift 21, Sweelinckzaal room 0.05
Ella Shohat/Robert Stam
Race in Translation. Cultural War Around the Postcolonial Atlantic (forthcoming NYU Press, 2011)
Stam and Shohat trace the literal and figurative translation of these multidirectional intellectual debates, seen most recently in the emergence of postcolonial studies in France, and whiteness studies in Brazil. The authors also interrogate an ironic convergence whereby rightist politicians like Sarkozy and Cameron join hands with some leftist intellectuals like Benn Michaels, Žižek, and Bourdieu in condemning “multiculturalism” and “identity politics.” At once a report from various “fronts” in the culture wars, a mapping of the germane literatures, and an argument about methods of reading the cross-border movement of ideas, the book constitutes a major contribution to our understanding of the Diasporic and the Transnational.
“Race in Translation is a masterpiece, an extraordinarily bold and brilliant book rich with erudition and insight.”
—George Lipsitz, author of How Racism Takes Place
“A deeply researched, provocative synthesis of the ways in which race has been conceptualized in Brazil, United States and France. This is a balanced, thoughtful and clearly written work that should be used widely in university classrooms.”
—Françoise Vergès, Goldsmiths College, London
While the term “culture wars” often designates the heated arguments in the English-speaking world spiraling around race, the canon, and affirmative action, in fact these discussions have raged in diverse sites and languages. Race in Translation charts the transatlantic traffic of the debates within and between three zones-- the U.S., France, and Brazil.
Ella Habiba Shohat is Professor of Cultural Studies and Middle Eastern studies at New York University, and is also affiliated faculty with NYU Abu Dhabi. Since the 1980s, she has lectured and written extensively on issues having to do with Eurocentrism, Orientalism, Postcolonialism, transnationalism, and diasporic cultures. More specifically, Professor Shohat’s work has focused on Orientalism in American popular culture, the analogies between the representation of Arabs in Hollywood in Israeli cinema, as well as on the analogies between the images of Native Americans and Palestinians, not he one hand, and Blacks and the Arab-Jews/Mizrahim on the other. She has developed critical approaches to the Zionist discourse and to the study of Arab-Jews. Her books include: Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Duke University Press, 2006); Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (University of Texas Press 1989; new updated edition with a new postscript chapter was recently published by I.B. Tauris, 2010); Le sionisme du point de vue de ses victimes juives: les juifs orientaux en Israel, which is based on a 1988 Social Text essay, dialoguing with Said's essay, "Zionism from the Standpoint of iTs Victims" (La fabrique editions, Paris, 2006); Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age (MIT & The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998); Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives (co-edited, University of Minnesota Press, 1997); and with Robert Stam, the Katherine Singer Kovacs book award winner, Unthinking Eurocentrism (Routledge, 1994); Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality and Transnational Media (Rutgers University Press, 2003); Flagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism (Routledge, 2007); and Race in Translation: Culture Wars around the Postcolonial Atlantic (forthcoming from NYU Press, 2012). Her co-edited volume (with Evelyn Alsultany), The Cultural Politics of the Middle East in the Americas is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press. She has also co-edited a number of special issues for the journal Social Text, including “Edward Said: A Memorial Issue, ” “Palestine in a Transnational Context,” and “911-A Public Emergency?” Her work has been translated into numerous languages, including: Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Polish, Japanese, Dutch, and Italian. Shohat has also served on the editorial board of several journals, including: Social Text, Middle East Critique, Meridians, Interventions, and Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. She is a recipient of such fellowships as Rockefeller and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, where she also taught at The School of Criticism and Theory. In 2010, she was awarded a Fulbright research/lectureship at the University of São Paulo, working on the cultural intersections between the Middle East and Latin America. Recently, together with Sinan Antoon, she was awarded the NYU Humanities Initiative fellowship for their work on Narrating Iraq: Between Nation and Diaspora
Robert Stam is University Professor at New York University. He has taught in France, Tunisia, and Brazil, and his work has been translated into French, Italian, Greek, Farsi, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, German, Hebrew, Arabic, Estonian,, and Serbo-Croatian. His books include Francois Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality, and the Art of Adaptation (Rutgers, 2006); Literature through Film: Realism, Magic and the Art of Adaptation (Blackwell, 2005); Film Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell, 2000); Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture (Duke University Press, 1997); Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard. (UMI, 1985, Reprinted Columbia Press, 1992), and Brazilian Cinema (with Randal Johnson, Columbia University Press, 1995). With Ella Shohat, he co-authored Unthinking Eurocentrism (Routledge, 1994), Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality and Transnational Media (Rutgers University Press) and Flagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism (Routledge, 2007). The present essay is taken from (co-authored with Ella Shohat): Race in Translation: Culture Wars in the Postcolonial Atlantic (NYU, May 2012).
Final Programme now available online
Wired Up Final conference 28-30 June 2012
The
conference will the orqanised for the closing of the 5 year
international and interdisciplinary High Potential project (funded by
the CvB):
Wired Up: Digital Media as Innovative Socialization Practices for Migrant Youth
The
participation of the PCI will involve the invitation of a postcolonial
scholar who is prominent in the field of digital culture and diaspora,
in particular Lisa Nakamura.
Invited Keynote speakers
Shakuntala Banaji
London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
Kirsten Drotner
University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
Radhika Gajjala
Bowling Green State University, USA
Eva Lam
University of Northwestern, USA
Lisa Nakamura
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA
Liesbet van Zoonen
Loughborough University, UK and Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands
For more info: www.digitalcrossroads.nl
PCI FILM SERIES 2012 (Jan-June 2012)
The Postcolonial Film Series: (starting January 17, 2012)
On January 17, 2012, the Postcolonial Initiative PCI Utrecht starts its second postcolonial film series with a selection of films that draw on a variety of different contexts in our postcolonial world. The series will be organized annually between January and June and invites all interested in our European postcolonial present and the representation of its political, cultural and aesthetic realities and challenges. We want to explore, through visual representations and cinematographic narratives, how these realities are analyzed and re-imagined in contemporary film. Each film will be introduced briefly by scholars connected to the PCI and we hope to chat in the bar afterwards.
The postcolonial film series 2012 screens on
January 17: Vénus noire /Black Venus (Abdellatif Kechiche, France and Belgium, 2010, 152
mins.)
Introduced by Rosemarie Buikema
February 21: Un trabajo limpio (Mieke Bal & Gary Ward, 2007, 22 mins);
Colony (Mieke Bal, Gary Ward, Zen Marie and Thomas Sykora, 2066, 33 mins); Becoming Vera (Mieke Bal, Alexandra Loumpet Galitzine & Michelle Williams Gamaker, 2008, 54 mins)
Introduction by Mieke Bal
March 20: Lagaan. Once Upon a Time in India (Ashutosh Gowariker, India, 2001, 224
mins)
Introduction by Barnita Bagchi
April 10: The Seawall Un barrage contre le Pacifique/ (Rithy Panh, France, Cambodia,
Belgium, 2008, 115 mins).
Introduced by Emanuelle Radar
May 15: Angola: Saudades de Quem te Ama/ Angola: Saudades from the One Who Loves You (Richard Pakleppa, South Africa, Namibia, 2005, 60 mins).
Introduction by Paulo de Medeiros
June 7: Conference on Postcolonial Cinema Studies (9.30-17.00)
Forget Baghdad Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arab, the Iraqi Connection (Samir, Germany, Switzerland, 2002, 112 mins)
Introduction by Ella Shohat (New York University)
TIME: 18.00
LOCATION: U-theater Studio T, Kromme Nieuwegracht 20
All screenings are free of charge.
For more information contact PCI.gw@uu.nl
For more information see www.postcolonialstudies.nl or mail PCI.gw@uu.nl
Tuesday 17 January;
- Vénus noire /Black Venus (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2010)
- Introduced by Rosemarie Buikema
Tuesday 21 February;
- Un trabajo limpio (Mieke Bal & Gary Ward, 2007, 30mins);
- Colony (Mieke Bal, Gary Ward, Zen Marie and Thomas Sykora, 2066, 33 mins)
- Becoming Vera (Mieke Bal, Alexandra Loumpet Galitzine & Michelle Williams Gamaker, 2008, 54 mins)
- Introduction by the filmmakeer Mieke Bal
Tuesday 20 March;
· Lagaan. Once Upon a Time in India (Ashutosh Gowariker, India, 2001, 224 mins)
· Introduction by Barnita Bagchi
Tuesday 10 April;
- The Seawall Un barrage contre le Pacifique/ (Rithy Panh, France, Cambodia, Belgium, 2008, 115 mins).
- Introduced by Emanuelle Radar
Tuesday 15 May;
· Angola: Saudades de Quem te Ama/ Angola: Saudades from the One Who Loves You (Richard Pakleppa, South Africa, Namibia, 2005, 60 mins).
Introduced by Paulo de Medeiros
Thursday 7 June;
Symposium on Postcolonial Cinema Studies
(Location: Drift 21, Sweelinckzaal room 0.05; Time: 9.30-17.00 + drinks)
Organised by Sandra Ponzanesi
With the participation of Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, Mireille Rosello, Paulo de Medeiros, Shohini Chaudhuri, Sandra Ponzanesi, Marguerite Waller).
- Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arab, the Iraqi Connection (Samir, Germany, Switsrland, 2002, 112 mins)
- Introduced by Ella Shohat (New York University) time 18.00 hour
PLEASE NOTICE ALSO THE FOLLOWING EVENTS ORGANIZED BY THE CENTRE FOR THE HUMANITIES:
UTRECHT SCHOOL OF CRITICAL THEORY 2012
ORGANIZED BY THE CENTRE FOR THE HUMANITIES
January 17 – February 4, 2012
G-local Cosmopolitanism: the Social Responsibility of the Artists, the Academics, and the Media
For more information click here
***************************************************************************************************************************
PAST EVENTS
***************************************************************************************************************************
Launch of the Postcolonial Studies Initiative (PCI), Utrecht University
15 September 2011 – Paul Gilroy
The Centre for the Humanities and the organizers of the Postcolonial Studies Initiative, Prof. Paulo de Medeiros and Dr. Sandra Ponzanesi, cordially invite you to the official launch of the Postcolonial Studies Initiative (PCI) 15 September 2010, 16:00-18:00.
The Postcolonial Studies Initiative (PCI) at Utrecht University is intended as a platform for research into postcolonial issues, specifically focused on their application within Europe. The PCI organizes activities such as lectures, film series, masterclasses and seminars, striving for greater interaction with society at large. As such it brings together a number of researchers from diverse areas and disciplines, both from Utrecht University and from other universities in the Netherlands as well as from other international partner universities.
We hope you will join us 15. September 2010, 16:00-18:00 in the Sweelinckzaal, Drift 21, Utrecht.
Yours sincerely, Centre for the Humanities and the Postcolonial Studies Initiative
The occasion was marked by a public lecture by Prof. Paul Gilroy, entitled: "From Double Consciousness to Public diplomacy: the end of the black Atlantic?". The lecture revisited Prof. Gilroy’s seminal work on the Black Atlantic and put it into the context of recent developments within postcolonial studies, specifically on the issue of European postcolonialism.
The lecture was followed by responses from the fellows of the PCI, Prof. Paulo de Medeiros, Sandra Ponzanesi, Birgit Kaiser and Emanuelle Radar who replied to Gilroy's talk attending to the mission of the PCI. This consists in investigating issues concerning postcolonial Europe drawing from different expertises and disciplinary backgrounds by exploring different historical and geopolitical constellations within Europe with a focus on current affairs and political events.
The Postcolonial Studies Initiative (PCI) at Utrecht University is intended as a platform for research into postcolonial issues, specifically focused on their application within Europe. The PCI organizes activities such as lectures, film series, masterclasses and seminars, striving for greater interaction with society at large. As such it brings together a number of researchers from diverse areas and disciplines, both from Utrecht University and from other universities in the Netherlands as well as from other international partner universities.
We hope you will join us 15. September 2010, 16:00-18:00 in the Sweelinckzaal, Drift 21, Utrecht.
Yours sincerely, Centre for the Humanities and the Postcolonial Studies Initiative
****************************************************************************************************************************
PCI annual lecture (fall)
Friday, December 10, 2010 – Marlene van Niekerk
Speaker: Marlene van Niekerk
Response by Rosemarie Buikema
Date: December 7
Location: Sweelinckzaal, Drift 21, Utrecht
Time: 16.00 - 18.00
Response by Rosemarie Buikema
Date: December 7
Location: Sweelinckzaal, Drift 21, Utrecht
Time: 16.00 - 18.00
Lecture: The life and times of the outsider in South-Africa:
notes on Michael K. (J. M. Coetzee) as a conceptual persona
notes on Michael K. (J. M. Coetzee) as a conceptual persona
Synopsis:
This talk will be about the significance of John Coetzee's book. The Life and Times of Michael K. for past and current South African contexts of racism, xenophobia, state ideology and political grand narrative. It will be a writer's (as opposed to a literary theoretician's) close reading of the text with reference to Deleuze's and Guattari's notion of the conceptual persona in their book What is
philosophy.
Bios:
Marlene van Niekerk holds the Africa Chair for regioncommission Southern Africa. She is a South African author who is best known for her novels Triomf and Agaat, both translated into Dutch. Her graphic and controversial descriptions of a poor Afrikaner family in Johannesburg brought her to the forefront of a post-apartheid society, still struggling to come to terms with all the changes in South Africa. Agaat deals with race and power in intimate relationships in a higher middle class context. She studied Languages and Philosophy at Stellenbosch University and obtained an MA with the thesis: Die aard en belang van die literêre vormgewing in 'Also sprach Zarathustra' in
1978 . She furthered her studies in philosophy and cultural anthropolgy at the University of Amsterdam where the focus was on the notions of myth in the work of Ricoeur and Levi- Strauss.
She is currently writer-in-residence at the University of Stellenbosch where she teaches creative writing.
Rosemarie Buikema holds the chair of Art, Culture and Diversity at Utrecht University. She is the director of the Graduate Gender Programme and Head of the department of Media and Culture Studies. Her publications are on the interface between Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies and Gender Studies. One of her main expertises is post-apartheid South African literature and culture.
Workshop
Postcolonial Europe: Phantasmatic Spaces, Imagined Identities.
Speakers:
Mireille Rosello (UvA), Paulo de Medeiros (UU), Sandra Ponzanesi (UU), Birgit Kaiser (UU), Emmanuelle Radar (UU)
Mireille Rosello (UvA), Paulo de Medeiros (UU), Sandra Ponzanesi (UU), Birgit Kaiser (UU), Emmanuelle Radar (UU)
Date: March 17
Time: 9.30-17.00
Location: Drift 21, Sweelinckzaal/from 15.30 Ravenstijnzaal
In collaboration with OSL/NOV
Synopsis:
The scope of this workshop is to apply the tools of postcolonial critique to specific historical and geo-political formations in Europe, which have remained a blind spot in postcolonial critique. We will discuss what makes Europe postcolonial and why the notion of Europe is more contested than ever, both internally (through the proliferations of ethnic, religious, regional differences) and externally (Europe expanding its boundaries but closing its borders). Major debates in contemporary Europe on citizenship, migration, secularism and multiculturalism will be explored from a variety of perspectives and disciplinary backgrounds.
Programme:
9.30-12.30
In the morning there will be five different interventions from PCI Members. The morning is open to all participants.
Mireille Rosello (UvA)
Border Aesthetics and European Incomplete Multilingualism: Teaching and (un)Learning
I propose to analyze the ways in which recent European films represent conversations between migrants and nationals. One of the challenges is to account for how subjects communicate across languages rather than in the (national) language. Each dialogue invites us to rethink what it means to learn or know a minority or national idiom, and to ascertain whether linguistic and cultural ignorance or mastery constitutes power.
Birgit Kaiser (UU)
Living in Düsseldorf: but where on earth is that? Transnational lives and phantasmatic spaces
My contribution looks at Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s collection of short stories Der Hof im Spiegel (2001), where we find a performance of phantasmatic spaces which foreclose any easy attempt to anchor these spaces either in any underlying referential space, or in the life of an empirical person. In her work, Özdamar draws on her specific transnational experience of having left Turkey and having moved to Germany, but – as in all of her texts – these experiences are transformed into literary topologies: moving and dynamic spaces of remembrances, citation, and imagination, in which encounter-events within a lived transnational space are transformed into phantasmatic time-space-habitats that permit the co-existence of the absent and the present, the living and the dead. These latter are humorously and lovingly assembled, in the eponymous opening story of Der Hof im Spiegel in the mirror central to the story, alluding to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. By means of this phantasmatic assemblage, the story weaves a network of poetic and personal references and demonstrates how processes of orientation and identification, as physical and psychological processes within space and through time, are open-ended and relational. Özdamar’s story pursues this by explicitly sketching the narrator’s “personal city-map”, and her text thus offers, as Leslie Adelson had suggested for the poetry of Zafer Şenocak, sites of reorientation. Her texts draw maps which showcase multilayered temporalities and imaginary, hybrid spaces, and might in turn permit us to reorient our thinking and terminology in regard to “transnational” lives.
Sandra Ponzanesi (UU)
Europe in Motion: Migrant Cinema and the Politics of Encounter
My intervention focuses on the contested notion of the (new) Europe from the vantage point of migrant cinema. The aim is to explore how cinematic language offers alternative modalities of representation and subjectification in relation to migration, gender and identity. The emphasis of this analysis is on the politics of encounter: how the presumed strangers to Europe are figurations of Europe’s othered self while also embodying the material practices of exclusion. The politics of encounter is explored in recent films made by European filmmakers.These visual and ideological commentaries participate in the redefinition or abolition of the notion of Europe by proposing the representations of the strangers within not from original and unexpected positions but by highlighting the transformation of the ‘European subject’ through the politics of encounter.
Paulo de Medeiros (UU)
Phantasmatic Border
As Marx famously put it, “Everything that is solid melts into air”. European borders have always been mutable but at the present they have become phantasmatic, seemingly disappearing only to resurface someplace else, be it within the Schengen area itself, be it in the detention camps in Africa and Asia. By looking at a series of photographs by Sophie Riestelhueber and tracking several actual conditions as reported by the press and reports of the European Union, an attempt is made to sketch a view of European political developments that is likewise phantasmatic and threatening to the very ideals Europe purports to affirm.
Emmanuelle Radar (UU)
Angkor and another “Europe”
My contribution deals with representations of the Cambodian Khmer ruin of Angkor in French and Franco-Cambodian cultural productions (literature and film). The presence of these ruins in narratives from the last decade in France is all the more intriguing in that they often seem to be a passage open and hospitable to what they cannot determine; another “Europe” as analyzed in Derrida by Gasché. At the same time, these ruins are often associated with European history (the colonial past, exclusion of immigrants in postcolonial Europe, the failing of Europe and its values, e.g. during the Red Khmer period). A phantasmatic encounter between immigrants of the Cambodian disapora, Europeans, between past-present-future, etc. often takes place during the visit to the ruin. That the encounter should be transferred by a Khmer ruin –not a European structure – might be a way of contesting the existence of a new Europe, as well as a way to call for its emergence. I will focus the analysis on works by Jean-Luc Coatalem (Le Dernier roi d’Angkor, 2010), Raphael Aubert (La Terrasse des éléphants, 2009), Rhity Panh (Gens d’Angkor, 2003) and Jean-Baptiste Phou (Cambodge me voici, 2010).
14.00-17.00
In the afternoon participants of the workshop (Research Master Students and PhD students are welcome) will present their research projects in relation to the topics of Postcolonialism with relation to Europe dealt with in the morning and the literature provided in the reader. Please submit a 500-750 words abstract of your project a week in advance. Feedback will be given by the PCI members who have presented in the morning and the workshop colleagues.
A Reader will be distributed upon registration: Please mail: OSL-fgw@uva.nl
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On January 27, 2011, the Postcolonial Initiative PCI Utrecht has launched its postcolonial film series with a selection of films that draw on a variety of different contexts in our postcolonial world. The series will be organized annually between January and June and invites all interested in our European postcolonial present and the representation of its political, cultural and aesthetic realities and challenges. We want to explore, through visual representations and cinematographic narratives, how these realities are analyzed and re-imagined in contemporary film. Each film will be introduced briefly by scholars connected to the PCI and will be followed by drinks.
The postcolonial film series 2011 screens on
The postcolonial film series 2011 screens on
January 27: Michael Haneke, Hidden (Caché) (2005, 117 min.)
introduction by Emmanuelle Radar
February 25: Fatih Akin, The Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite) (2007, 116 min.)
introduction by Birgit Kaiser
March 10: Giuliano Montaldo, A time to Kill (Tempo di Uccidere) (1989, 110 min.)
introduction by Sandra Ponzanesi
April 8: Margarida Cardoso, The Murmuring Coast (A Costa dos Murmúrios) (2004, 115 min.)
introduction by Paulo de Medeiros
June 6: Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionnaire, (2008, 120 min.)
introduction by Barnita Bagchi
TIME: 19.00
LOCATION: U-theater Studio T, Kromme Nieuwegracht 20
All screenings are free of charge, but please register via cfh@uu.nl
Throughout the academic year a series of six postcolonial films are shown. Each film is introduced by a specialist and at the end of each session there is public discussion.
January 27: Michael Haneke, Hidden (Caché) (2005, 117 min.)
Introduction by Emmanuelle Radar
Michael Haneke’s Hidden (Caché, France/Austria/Germany/Italy/USA, 2005, 117 min.) is a stunning thriller played by two renowned French actors, Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche. This postcolonial film involves remembering and reflecting on the colonial past and its consequences today. It is set in Paris in the 21st century where Georges (Daniel Auteuil), a TV journalist settled in a comfortable life, receives mysterious packages that terrorise his family and reveal the haunting of a hidden past. France, Algeria, brotherhood and guilt are intertwined in Georges’ search for the origin of the messages. What is Georges’ responsibility for the past and for the present? What is ours as viewers?
February 25:
Fatih Akin, The Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite)
(2007, 116 min.)
Introduction by Birgit Kaiser
Auf der anderen Seite (Fatih Akin, Germany/Turkey, 2007, 116 min) is the second part of acclaimed film-maker Fatih Akin’s “Love, Death and Devil” trilogy, after his award-winning Gegen die Wand (2004). It is a story of love across and despite boundaries. The film weaves a delicate web of entanglements in the Turkish-German present: the young, successful and sad Turkish-German professor Nejat’s love for his aging father Ali, Ali’s love for Yeter, the prostitute he invites to live with him and accidentally kills, Lotte’s love for Ayten, human rights activist and Yeter’s daughter, Susanne’s love for her daughter Lotte, whom she follows from Hamburg to Istanbul in search of Ayten. Ayten’s political activism got her deported from Germany and into prison in Turkey, and Susanne and Nejat end up navigating Istanbul side by side. Auf der anderen Seite is about migration, intercultural communication, and the entangled histories of Germany and Turkey, but it is also about love and death in times of our postcolonial present.
March 10:
Giuliano Montaldo, A time to Kill (Tempo di Uccidere) (1989, 110 min.)
introduction by Sandra Ponzanesi
Giuliano Montaldo, A time to Kill (Tempo di Uccidere) (1989, 110 min.)
introduction by Sandra Ponzanesi
A Time to Kill (Giuliano Montaldo, Italy, 1989, 110 min) is based on the Italian award winning novel of the same title Tempo di Uccidere written by Ennio Flaiano (1947). The novel is set in the 1930’s at the time of the Italian fascist occupation of Abyssinia and the war against Ethiopia. The film starring great actors such as Nicolas Cage, Ricky Tognazzi, Patrice-Flora Praxo and Giancarlo Giannini among others is faithful to the novel and effectively depicts the torments of colonial guilt and the rise of postcolonial consciousness of an Italian soldier who unwillingly commits a crime which will lead him towards an odyssey of atonement and postcolonial awareness.
April 8, 2011:
Margarida Cardoso. The Murmuring Coast (A Costa dos Murmúrios) (2004, 115 min.);
Margarida Cardoso. The Murmuring Coast (A Costa dos Murmúrios) (2004, 115 min.);
Introduction by Paulode Medeiros
The Murmuring Coast (Margarida Cardoso,2004) is an intensely dramatic film about the end of the Portuguese empire, the pervasive violence of the colonial regime and the colonial war that engulfed Mozambique for more than a decade. Based on the critically acclaimed novel by Lídia Jorge (A Costa dos Murmúrios), the film questions traditional views of history and memory while showing the strict correlations between collective and personal tragedy. Narrated from the perspective of Evita, the wife of one of the soldiers, years after his death, the film traces back her struggle to resist corrupting her ideals and the dissolution of their marriage. The film calls for reflection on today’s Europe and the need to address the hauntings of history in order to imagine a different polity.
June 6: Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionnaire, (2008, 120 min.)
introduction by Barnita Bagchi
'Slumdog Millionaire' (Danny Boyle, UK, 2008, 120 min), tells the story of Jamal Malik, an 18 year-old orphan from the slums of Mumbai, who is just one question away from winning 20 million rupees on India’s version of the TV show “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” When the show breaks for the night, police arrest him on suspicion of cheating; how could a street boy know so much? Jamal then tells the story of his life in the Mumbai slum where he and his brother grew up, of their adventures together on the road, of vicious encounters with local gangs, and of Latika, the girl he loved and lost. Each chapter of his story reveals the key to the answer to one of the game show’s questions. With music by India's A.R. Rehman, with a British director, and with the pulsing, ambition-driven, postcolonial city of Mumbai as almost a protagonist, the Oscar-winning 'Slumdog Millionaire' is a very hybrid, post-globalization, postcolonial film
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Speaker:
Prof. Iain Chambers (Professor of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies, Oriental University , Naples , Italy
Date: May 30
Time: 15.00-18.00
Location: Drift 21, Sweelinckzaal
Title: The Mediterranean and maritime criticism
Responses: dr. Monica Jansen (UU, DMT Italian Studies) and
Prof. Emile Wennekes (UU, MCW, Musicology)
Dr. Barbara Titus, Assistant Professor of Musicology, UU
Abstract
Thinking the Mediterranean in a multifold complexity of ‘overlapping territories and intertwined histories’ (Edward Said) encourages a critical journey that abandons the securities of territorial homelands for the open and less guaranteed routes of intercultural travel. Taking the sea as a composite archive and site of historical and cultural crossings, this talk, further encouraged by the critical affectivities of contemporary literatures, music and the visual arts, will propose some historical and cultural perspectives on a postcolonial Mediterranean .
Bio
Iain Chambers is presently Professor of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies at the Oriental University in Naples where he has been Director of the Centre for Postcolonial Studies, and presently coordinates the PhD programme in ‘Cultural and Postcolonial Studies of the Anglophone world'. Iain Chambers is internationally known for his interdisciplinary and intercultural work on music, popular and metropolitan cultures. More recently he has transmuted this line of research into a series of postcolonial analyses of the formation of the modern Mediterranean .
Professor Chambers has a degree in History and American Studies from Keele University , and subsequently acquired an MA at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham Naples since 1976, and has held visiting professorships at Hunter College (CUNY) in 1990, the University of Oslo in 1992, in Emphasis in Critical Theory, University of California , Irvine in 1995, and at the University of California , Santa Cruz University of California , Santa Cruz in 1994; been invited as Visiting Scholar at the Getty Institute, Los Angeles for the year 1996-7; and been a Humanities Research Institute Fellow at the University of California , Irvine
He is author of Urban Rhythms: pop music and popular culture (Palgrave Macmillan,1985), Popular Culture: The metropolitan experience (Routledge,1986), Border dialogues: Journeys in postmodernity (Routledge, 1990), Migrancy, culture, identity (Routledge, 1994), Hendrix, hip hop e l'interruzione del pensiero (with Paul Gilroy) (Costa & Nolan, 1995), Culture after humanism (Routledge, 2001); and most recently, Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (Duke University Press, 2008). He is also editor with Lidia Curti of The Post-colonial question: Common skies, divided horizons (Routledge, 1996) and the volume Esercizi di Potere. Gramsci, Said e il postcoloniale (Meltemi, 2006). Several of these titles have been translated into various languages, including Italian, Spanish, German, Japanese and Turkish. In addition Professor Chambers has served on the editorial boards of Formations, Popular Music, Cultural Studies, Communal Plural, New Formations, Postcolonial Studies, and Third Text.
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Translating the 'World' in World Literature
(in collaboration with Birgit Kaiser and Emanuelle Radar)
Speaker: Emily Apter
Synopsis: The talk focuses on the "littérature-monde" debate in postcolonial francophone studies.
Date: 20 June 2011
Time: 10.00-13.30
Round Table: Hans Bertens (UU); Robert Folger (UU); Theo D'Haen (Leuven)
Location: Drift 21, Sweelinckzaal
Synopsis: The talk focuses on the "littérature-monde" debate in postcolonial francophone studies.
Date: 20 June 2011
Time: 10.00-13.30
Round Table: Hans Bertens (UU); Robert Folger (UU); Theo D'Haen (Leuven)
Location: Drift 21, Sweelinckzaal
Emily Apter Masterclass with OSL
Date: 21 June 2011.
Time: 11.00-13.30
Location: Jansekerkof 13, room 006:
Synopsis:
The masterclass will discuss central positions of Emily Apter's new book Against World Literature? The Politics of Untranslatability in Comparative Literature (forthcoming). The book engages in a critique of recent efforts to revive World Literature models of literary studies (Moretti, Casanova, Damrosch, Dimock) arguing that they construct their curricula on the assumption of translatability. As a result, incommensurability and what she calls the “untranslatable” are, according to Apter, insufficiently built into the literary heuristic. Drawing on philosophies of translation developed by Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Sam Weber, Barbara Johnson, Abdelfattah Kilito and Edouard Glissant, the aim of the new book is to activate "Untranslatability" as a theoretical fulcrum of Comparative Literature and sound its bearing on approaches to world literature, literary world systems and literary history, and the poetics of translational difference. In the masterclass, students will discuss texts from the new book as well as selected texts from the earlier publication The Translation Zone (2006).
In preparation of the master class, students are invited to send in focused questions beforehand.
Time: 11.00-13.30
Location: Jansekerkof 13, room 006:
Synopsis:
The masterclass will discuss central positions of Emily Apter's new book Against World Literature? The Politics of Untranslatability in Comparative Literature (forthcoming). The book engages in a critique of recent efforts to revive World Literature models of literary studies (Moretti, Casanova, Damrosch, Dimock) arguing that they construct their curricula on the assumption of translatability. As a result, incommensurability and what she calls the “untranslatable” are, according to Apter, insufficiently built into the literary heuristic. Drawing on philosophies of translation developed by Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Sam Weber, Barbara Johnson, Abdelfattah Kilito and Edouard Glissant, the aim of the new book is to activate "Untranslatability" as a theoretical fulcrum of Comparative Literature and sound its bearing on approaches to world literature, literary world systems and literary history, and the poetics of translational difference. In the masterclass, students will discuss texts from the new book as well as selected texts from the earlier publication The Translation Zone (2006).
In preparation of the master class, students are invited to send in focused questions beforehand.
Bio:
Emily Apter teaches at NYU since 2002, after having taught in French and Comparative Literature at UCLA, Cornell University, UC-Davis, Penn and Williams College. At NYU she teaches in the departments of French, English and Comparative Literature, specializing in courses on French Critical Theory, the History and Theory of Comparative Literature, the problem of "Francophonie," translation studies, French feminism, and nineteenth-and twentieth-century French literature. Recent essays have focused on paradigms of "oneworldedness," the problem of self-property and self-ownership, literary world-systems and the translatability of genres, and how to think about translation as a form of intellectual labor.
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Symposium: 23-24 June, 2011
Singularity: Diffracted Memories in Transnational Literature
Organised within the Transnational Memories research line of the Utrecht focus area Cultures & Identities (convenor: Birgit Kaiser).
In contemporary Western societies, recollections, according to which positions of articulation and identities are constructed and upon which literary fictions draw, are increasingly diffracted. That is, they are dispersed and transnational because they exceed any limited national framing and draw on a variety of imaginations that pertain to different locales and different personal inflections. As Jean-Luc Nancy holds, our increasing heterogeneity and cultural diversity in postcolonial Europe allows us to realize that being means “being singular plural”, it means that we realize that “not only are all people different but they are also all different from one another” (Nancy 8), unique and singular. At the same time, we also recognize that we share precisely this.
This symposium wants to investigate ‘singularity’ as a way to study practices of writing that perform this heterogeneity and diffraction of memories and help to envision a “we”, which takes the coexistence of each and every singularity into account. Nancy calls such a “we” a “being-with” that affirms the “infinite plurality of origins and their coexistence” (10) and a “necessarily plural, diffracted” (14) world, in which each singular articulation constitutes one expression of this plurality. With this in view, the symposium will examine the diffraction and (re)collection of memories in transnational literatures. We will ask, looking at different literary cases, how this comes to bear, in a unique fashion, on different texts. How do these writings challenge our categories of national identities, and how do they experiment with new forms of (re)collections and memories? Do they weave singular articulations from this? And if so, what do they look like? With the help of transnational literatures – mainly Dutch-Moroccan, Turkish-German, and French-Maghrebian literatures – we will inquire if and how we can account for cultural heterogeneity by a focus on concrete, singular, contextualized literary practices, which are embedded in networks of relations and at the same time exceed these relations by way of imagination (of the future) and memories (of the past).
link:http://www.uu.nl/faculty/humanities/NL/Actueel/Agenda/Pages/20110623-symposium-singularity.aspx
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The C&I Transnational Memory seminar in cooperation with the Postcolonial Studies Initiative is happy to invite you to a lecture by
Professor Roberto Strongman, UC, Santa Barbara
Entitled
Transcorporeality in Afro-Cuban Diasporic Religion
Date: Thursday, 15 September, 16.00-18.00
Place: Janskerkhof 13, room 0.06
All those interested are cordially invited to attend.
Information: Gw_cultures@uu.nl.
Abstract:
“My forthcoming book Black Atlantic Transcorporealities establishes the concept of transcorporeality as the distinct Afro-Diasporic cultural representation of the human psyche as multiple, removable and external to a body that functions as its receptacle. This unique view of the body, preserved in its most evident form in African religious traditions on both sides of the Atlantic, allows the regendering of the bodies of initiates who are mounted and ridden by deities of a gender different than their own during the ritual ecstasy of trance possession. Through discussions of novels, paintings, films and interviews, my book assembles and interprets a representative collection of such transcendental moments in which the commingling of the human and the divine produces subjectivities whose gender is not dictated by biological sex. In so doing, it demonstrates that while transcorporeality is rooted in the religious practice of trance possession, its effects spill over into the every day life of participants and observers of these religions and becomes a leading feature of nearly every aspect of Afro-Diasporic cultural production.
My presentation in Utrecht will focus on how this concept of transcorporeality functions in the Cuban religion of Lucumí / Santería. It narrates my interaction, observations and conversations with Fran, a Cuban Lucumí initiate, as he reflects on the role that the religion acquires in the Cuban Diaspora in the United States. My presentation provides a diasporic ethnography of Lucumí through this informant and the work and life of queer Cuban anthropologist Lydia Cabrera, followed by an extended discussion on the role of the body in the work of Cuban surrealist artist Wifredo Lam.”
Biography
Roberto Strongman is Associate Professor in the Department of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California, San Diego in 2003. Dr. Strongman's interdisciplinary approach encompasses the fields of Religion, History, and Sexuality in order to further his main area of research and teaching: Comparative Caribbean Cultural Studies. Dr. Strongman's trans-national and multi-lingual approach to the Caribbean cultural zone is grounded in La Créolité, a movement developed at L'Université des Antilles et de La Guyane in Martinique, where he studied as a dissertation fellow. In addition to his research in Martinique, Dr. Strongman has conducted archival research in Aruba, Colombia and Haiti in connection to his ongoing interest in the literatures of Creole languages. His articles have appeared in Journal of Haitian Studies, Journal of Caribbean Studies, Journal of Caribbean Literatures, Callaloo, Kunapipi, Wadabagei, and the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. Dr. Strongman is currently preparing his Black Atlantic Transcorporealities for publication.
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Public Lecture
Prof. Dr. John McLeod (Professor of Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures School of English University of Leeds Leeds, UK)
Title:
Transnationalism, Cosmopolitanism and the Postcolonial
Date: 22 September, 2011
Time: 14.00-15.30
Place: Drift 21, Sweelinckzaal
Place: Drift 21, Sweelinckzaal
abstract:
‘This presentation explores the current vogue for challenging the legitimacy of postcolonialism in debates about globalisation and cosmopolitanism. I consider critically the emerging critical enthusiasm for these concepts (by thinkers such as Kwame Anthony Appiah) and suggest that they do not necessarily offer the most productive means for bearing witness to the difficult conversations which globalised cultures engender. Drawing upon the wisdom of postcolonial thought, too easily dismissed these days as of decreasing value, I argue contrariwise for a standpoint which sounds both the standpoints and silences of cultural interaction, and which recognises the ongoing challenges of conducting conversations at cultural thresholds. Drawing upon a couple of recent literary examples, ultimately I argue that the necessity of attending to the inexpressibility of cultural singularity is too quickly bypassed in some important influential criticism –a matter to which the notion of cosmopolitanism needs productively to attend.’
Bio:
John McLeod is Professor of Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures at the University of Leeds, UK. His books include Postcolonial London (2004) and, as editor, The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies (2007). A second edition of his well-known book Beginning Postcolonialism appeared in 2010. He is an Associate Member of the Centre d'Études et de Recherches sur les Pays du Commonwealth (CERPEC) at the Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier III, France, and on the Advisory Board of the Nordic
Network of Literary Transculturations based at the University of Bergen, Norway.’
Invites you to the
International Masterclasses with
Professor Etienne Balibar
September 13 & 15, 2011
During his visit to the Centre for the Humanities coming fall, Professor Balibar will give two masterclasses. In both masterclasses, Balibar will address "citizenship" as a subject as well as its correlation to broad audience.
Etienne Balibar is Professor Emeritus in Moral and Political Philosophy at the University of Paris X- Nanterre and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. Having graduated at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Sorbonne in Paris, he later took his PhD from the University of Nijmegen (Netherlands) and has a Habilitation from Université de Paris I.
Professor Balibar has taught at the Universities of Algiers, Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne), Leiden, at the Centro Franco-Argentino de Altos Estudios de la Universidad de Buenos-Aires (Argentina) and the Columbia University of New-York. Furthermore, he is a Visiting Fellow at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, London, and is a member of Ligue des Droits de l’Homme (Paris), co-founder of Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, and acting chair of Association Jan Hus France. Professor Balibar has a permanent affiliation as visiting professor with the Centre for the Humanities of Utrecht University.
Registration:
All MA’s, RMA’s and PhD students are eligible to apply. In order to register, please send a short motivation and CV to cfh@uu.nl before September 12, 2011.
The Reading material will be made available for participants. And certificates will be rewarded.
Tuesday 13 September, 2011
Time: 11:00 – 14:00
Location: Stijlkamer van Ravenstijn
Masterclass I: Citizenship as de-democratization, from the City-State to the Global-Market
Suggested readings:
- Aristotle: The Politics, Books III and IV (any good scholarly edition)
- Wendy Brown: “Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy” (in Edgework. Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics, Princeton University Press, 2008, chapter III, pages 37 to 59)
Thursday, 15 September, 2011
Time: 12 - 15
Location: Stijlkamer van Ravenstijn
Masterclass II: Citizenship as democratization of democracy, from “Illegitimate Domination” to “post-liberal” emancipatory struggles.
Suggested readings:
- Max Weber: The City (1914), The Free Press, 1968; or as part of Economy and Society, vol. II (University of California Press, 1978) (especially section 4: “The Plebeian City”).
- Boaventura de Souza Santos (ed.): Democratizing Democracy. Beyond the Liberal Democratic Canon (Verso 2007), Introductions, pages xvii to lxxiv.
International Masterclasses with
Professor Luisa Passerini
October 4 & 6, 2011
During her visit at the Centre for the Humanities coming fall, Professor Passerini will give two masterclasses. The first masterclass will be on History and psychoanalysis, the other on Memories of death and mourning.
Registration:
All MA’s, RMA’s and PhD students are eligible to apply. In order to register, please send a short motivation and CV to cfh@uu.nl before September 12, 2011.
The Reading material will be made available for participants. And certificates will be rewarded.
Tuesday October 4
Time: 15-18
Location: Sweelinckzaal 0.05, Drift 21, Utrecht
Masterclass: History and Psychoanalysis
This class will be based on presentations and discussions of the readings done by the students as well as by the professor. Students should send a brief description of their research interests and motivations for their participation in the seminar, as well as an indication of the book which they might wish to present.
Readings:
· Sigmund Freud, Screen Memories (1899), in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 3: 299-322.
· Joy Damousi and Robert Reynolds (eds), History on the Couch. Essays in History and Psychanalysis, Melbourne University Press, Carlton 2003.
· Luisa Passerini, Europe in Love, Love in Europe: Imagination and Politics in Britain between the Wars. London: Tauris, 1999, and New York: NYU Press, 2000: pp. 1-26 and 81-104.
· Sally Alexander, “‘Do Grandmas Have Husbands?’ Generational Memory and Twentieth-Century Women’s Lives”, The Oral History Review, Summer/Fall 2009, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 159-76.
