Postcolonial Mediations: Globalisation and
Displacement
Amsterdam, 26-27 October 2017
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 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.
We invite papers that explore the complexity of postcolonial mediations in
their interaction with the displacements of globalisation through theoretical
and empirical analyses.
Possible topics
- How can a postcolonial
perspective inform newer understandings of contemporary forms of cultural,
political and economic globalisation? For example, what does the
“neo-colonial” turn (Mignolo) imply for thinking globalisation’s many
dimensions today? What purchase might postcolonial perspectives (including
postcolonial self-critique) have in the context of “planetary” (Spivak)
developments, discussions of “Empire” and “Multitude” (Hardt/Negri) and
articulations of “singular” (Jameson) and alternative modernities?
- Migration in its many
forms has centralized displacement as a crucial feature of globalisation.
How might a postcolonial perspective further a contemporary engagement
with the displacements of peoples in the wake of economic globalisation,
political crises, human rights crises, and the ongoing militarization of
the globe? How can the figures of the “migrant”, the “refugee” and the
“asylum-seeker”, for example, be rethought given their contemporary
reformulations by nation-states and transnational entities such as the EU
and other multilateral deportation/resettling schemes in Asia?
- Queer theory has long
argued that gender and sexuality are not external dimensions to be “added”
onto considerations of subjectivity but intrinsic to how “human”
subjectivities are lived, transformed and theorized. How do contemporary
forms of displacement register at the level of gender and sexual politics?
And how might queer forms of thinking intervene, mediate, displace or
consolidate racist, sexist, transphobic, and hetero-normative discourses
in the wake of globalisation, often under the rubric of culture and
civilization?
- Contemporary forms of
globalisation are not only represented but also actively constructed
through forms of media engagement, from political mobilization through social
media to filmic and televisual cultural practices. These mediated forms of
global politics demand different forms of analysis while also provoking
transformations in how we theorize media themselves. How can “mediation”
be confronted and theorized given the postcolonial dimensions of
contemporary globalisation?
- The contours of
globalisation in terms of borders, the nation-states and transnational
communities are being displaced and redrawn in the content of contemporary
economic, political and military crises. How might postcolonial
perspectives furnish cognitive and affective mappings of the overlaps and
disjunctions of political and cultural cartographies?
- Given that a
“postcolonial perspective” unites competing perspectives (e.g. the
literary, the politico-economic, the Marxist, the postmodernist) rather
than a unified and homogenous body of arguments, what are the contemporary
forms of internal displacement within the field?
Contributions
Contributions from fields from across the social sciences or humanities are
invited.
Please submit an abstract (200-300 words) and short bio (max. 100 words) by
1 February 2017 to acgs-fgw@uva.nl. Notice of acceptance will be given by 1 May
2017. Conference fee: 50 Euros (25 Euros for PhD students).
Conference dinner: 25 Euros.
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)
