Conference
Fourth Annual ACGS Conference - Amsterdam 26-27 October 2017
Postcolonial Mediations: Globalisation and Displacement
Keynote speakers
- Victoria Bernal (Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine, US)
- Paula Chakravartty (Associate Professor Media, Culture and Communication, New York University, New York, US)
- Iain Chambers (Professor of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies, Oriental University, Naples, Italy)
Postcolonial Mediations
Postcolonial thinking has challenged the stability of discourses on
culture, globalisation, economics, human rights and politics.
Postcolonial thinking, as a form of mediation and displacement of
worldviews, triggered a re-evaluation of the complex connections between
culture, class, economy, gender and sexuality. This conference aims to
engage with such postcolonial displacements.
Displacement can be seen under the rubric of mobility and its many forms
today, most tellingly discernible in the forced movements of peoples in
the wake of wars, and the concomitant crises this provokes around
issues of “culture and civilization”, and its gendered, religious and
raced dimensions. The refugee crisis in Europe is an important case in
point. Cultural productions from the non-West continue to displace
received understandings of other cultures and societies (Chow, 2002,
Narayan, 1997) while contemporary political movements draw inspiration
from postcolonial struggles as they deploy new media forms, as Howard
Caygill (2013) has recently shown in his analyses of the Gandhian
non-violence movement, the continuing Maoist rebellions and their
relation to the Zapatistas and the Indignados. The shifting contours of
gender and sexual politics, and the critique of stable identities
provoked by queer politics and theory, are also producing displacements,
in the discourse and practice of the politics of rights. Local,
regional and national politics often challenge universal rights claims.
e.g. the controversies around the relevance of “Global Queer” (Altman,
1996).
The postcolonial is understood here simultaneously as a mediating and a
displacing series of interventions, which demands engagement with
contemporary understandings of globalisation.
for more information about the
programme see
here:
Organisers
Sudeep Dasgupta (University of Amsterdam), John Nguyet Erni (Hong
Kong Baptist University), Aniko Imre (University of Southern
California), Jeroen de Kloet (University of Amsterdam), Sandra Ponzanesi
(Utrecht University), Raka Shome (National University of Singapore)
Location
University Theatre
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16-18 | 1012 CP Amsterdam
+31 (0)20 525 2997
