"Textures of Diaspora: On Coloniality and Historicality"
Chair: Robert Craig Baum, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities
Contact: robert_baum@hotmail.com / 802-672-1278 / P.O. Box 28 / Bridgewater,
VT 05034
Central New York Conference on Literature and Language
Convener: Dr. Emmanuel Nelson
SUNY–Cortland
October 26–28, 2003
Deadline: 7/15/03
Description: This call for papers is organized as a response that has been
directly influenced by but not necessarily limited to the work of Walter
Mignolo, a postcolonial scholar whose interdisciplinary thinking (especially
_The Darker Side of the Renaissance_ and _Local Histories/Global Designs_)
encourages readers “to think where they are” (lecture, UofMN, 4/10/00) as
well as to view the “post” in “postcolonial studies” not primarily as a
temporal marker but as a site of present(ed) rupture.
In other words, the remnants of the (American, British, French, Spanish,
Indian, Iraqi, Nigerian, etc.) colonial “past(s)” seem to prefigure a
complex, dynamic, what could be called “relational” network of social,
personal, (inter)national, local/global interaction; furthermore, Mignolo’s
work on what he calls “literacy, territoriality, and coloniality” directly
challenges the conditions governing our sense of past-present-future
relationships and the separation of the disciplines, all the while asking us
(following the Theodor Adorno of _Minima Moralia_) “to abjure such
prescribed choices.”
This panel works to align Mignolo’s “textures” (e.g., the physical act of
historiography, the material act of research, the labor of present
resistances to yesterday’s failures) with a complex array of
interdisciplinary localities (e.g., English, History, Comparative
Literature, Cultural Studies, Theatre/Drama/Performance, Philosophy,
Film/Media Studies, Modern Literature and Language, Early Modern Studies,
etc.) as well as enters into a dialogue with Homi K. Bhabha and Ashis Nandy
who persistently reminds us, respectively, that what we call “[t]he ‘social’
is always an unresolved ensemble of antagonistic interlocutions between
positions of power and poverty, knowledge and oppression, history and
fantasy, surveillance and subversion” (“Remembering Fanon” in _The Location
of Culture_) and that “all man-made (sic) suffering is one and everyone has
a responsibility” (_The Intimate Enemy_).
“Textures of Diaspora,” then, seeks abstracts of approximately 250 words for
papers, presentations, and other textual/textured performances (e.g.,
theatrical intervention, multimedia dissent, oral/aural historiography) that
offer nuanced readings of coloniality and historicality (in theory, in
practice, as an expressive network of theory/practice). The heterological
relationship this panel seeks to establish between the disciplines is broad
in design but specific in its above mentioned pedagogical focus; in other
words, please feel free to propose papers on the following topics as well as
those better representing your own political/pedagogical interests:
• Empire
• Writing/Researching/Teaching/Performing as Act of Resistance (i.e.,
Spivak)
• Hybridity / Heterology
• Postcolonial Dialectics of Enlightenment
• Emerging Postcolonial Writers/Writers of Emerging Postcoloniality
• War of/in/against/in-spite-of Iraq
• Representation/Representational Practices
• Nationalism/Postnationalism
• Posts/Isms/Ists (i.e., postmodernism, postcolonialism, poststructuralism)
• The Politics/Poetics of Hope and Despair
• Space/Place/Border Theory (e.g., more than replacing one border guard with
another)
• Labor/Production/Consumption
• Language
• Postcolonial Theory
• International/Intranational Atrocity
• The Politics/Poetics of Mourning
• The “New and Improved” Global Slave Trade of the 1990s
===============================================
From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List
CFP@english.upenn.edu
Full Information at
http://www.english.upenn.edu/CFP/
or write Erika Lin: elin@english.upenn.edu
===============================================
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Apr 30 2003 - 05:39:15 EDT