CALL FOR PAPERS
Content Providers of the World Unite!
The Cultural Politics of Globalization
John Douglas Taylor Conference ~ Friday, October 26, 2001
Department of English ~ McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Keynote speakers: Len Findlay ~ Naomi Klein ~ Dot Tuer
Depending on which accounts of globalization one reads, culture is either
at the center of the new global economy or it has been totally eclipsed by
it. On the one hand, cultural objects and practices now appear as
absolutely constitutive of economic, political and social practices, to
such a degree that analyses of the latter that do not take culture into
account have to be treated as theoretically and empirically
impoverished. On the other, as popular culture becomes reduced to mass
culture on an intensified, global scale, the liberatory and resistant
impulses once associated, if in different ways, with both high and low
culture seem to have been almost fatally diminished.
The term "content providers" captures this paradoxical position of culture
in globalization. In the new global economy, culture has become
"content," and cultural workers and critics have become "content
providers" whose work is more essential to the operations of the economy
than ever before, but only as a content that does nothing to challenge the
structure or form of the new world order. "Content Providers of the World
Unite!" calls on critics and cultural workers to consider the challenges
that globalization poses for an adequate understanding of cultural
politics and the politics of culture at the present time. How do we make
sense of a time in which culture seems to have become both more and less
essential to the prevailing economic order, a time in which the
(older) relationship between culture and politics seems both more
difficult and necessary to maintain? Among the questions that we hope to
address at this conference are:
- In what ways is culture important to understanding globalization and
politics in the global era? How is it related to other aspects of
individual and social existence (health, economics, politics,
ecology?) (How) has its meaning shifted in response to the processes of
globalization?
- How does culture at the present time mediate between individuals and
broader structures of power (the state, the nation, stock markets, TNCs,
NGOs, etc.)? Do we need to develop new political models in order to
comprehend new forms of mediation?
- How does race and ethnicity intersect with the new conditions for
culture and politics in globalization? For example, in what ways has the
concept of cultural difference contributed to the production of ethnic
subjectivities and the ethnicization of the political?
- What new form or forms do/should cultural politics take at the present
time?
- Is there any role left for an artistic or cultural avant-garde?
- What theoretical concepts do we need to abandon, invent or re-invent
with respect to contemporary circumstances? Does it, for example, make
sense to speak of ideology in a "post-political" era?
- In the global era, should we re-consider our suspicions about
universalist or totalizing categories?
- What is the role of the university-and particularly of the humanities-in
developing forms of cultural critique adequate to the process of
globalization? Does the attenuation of the public sphere inhibit the
production of culture in general, and politically progressive culture in
particular, or is it a necessary complement to the generation of new
venues of critical cultural production (e.g., the streets of Seattle)?
- What constitutes an adequate pedagogy of culture? Can ideology critique
continue to be the primary mode by which we teach students to be critical
of culture?
- Is it still possible to imagine new forms of political community? How
does/can culture help us to imagine new forms of political community? What
might a global democracy or civil society look like?
Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words and should be mailed on or by
MAY 31, 2001.
Send abstracts/queries/suggestions to:
Susie O'Brien and Imre Szeman
Department of English, McMaster University
1280 Main Street W., Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L8S 4L9
Phone: (905) 525-9140 x23724 or x23725 / Fax: (905) 777-8316
E-mail: obriensu@mcmaster.ca ~or~ szeman@mcmaster.ca
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