Call for Papers
Minority States: Violence, Nation-state and Multiculturalism.
A Graduate Day Conference
Date: Friday, 18 June 2004
Venue: University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Deadline for submission of Title and Abstract: 30 May 2004
Send it to: Baidik Bhattacharya baidik.bhattacharya@wolfson.ox.ac.uk (as
part of the body of the mail, and not as attachment)
Papers are invited for a graduate conference on Minority States:
Violence, Nation-state and Multiculturalism, to be held at the
University of Oxford, 18 June 2004. The duration of the paper should
ideally be 15 minutes. Title and abstract (not more than 300 words,
including a brief bio-note) should reach the email address above (as
part of the body of the mail and not as attachment) by 30 May 2004.
In recent years, critics have interrogated several aspects of the issue
of minority as becoming minor (Deleuze and Guattari), as the idea of
minority discourse (JanMohamed and Lloyd), as the index of migrant and
minority experience in the everyday existence of the Western
metropolis (Bhabha), besides numerous studies of minority in terms of
race, class, gender and nationality. In most of these studies minority
discourse has been counterpoised against post-enlightenment grand
narratives, and the main impetus has been to explore the ways in which
minority voices have been conscripted, pre-empted and suppressed within
ideologically far more expedient narratives of majoritarianism.
Conversely, the potential quality of minority discourses to disrupt and
suspend such majority narratives has also gained much critical currency.
Several disciplines have opened up and recognized this potentiality in
their critical-methodological approaches, and the present conference
wishes to represent such an interdisciplinary approach to the issue of
minority states.
In history, for example, minority discourse has challenged the ways
professional history presumes a natural connection between facticity
and rationality. Similar examples abound in literature where the idea of
minor literature has made significant inroads in traditional
understanding of the discipline. Such challenges not only cast doubt on
the majority narrative, but creatively reinterpret the discursive and
institutional investments in the professional production of disciplinary
knowledge in the form of nation-states, civil-social institutions that
directly govern the knowledge industry, the ideological and discursive
context within which such production takes place. What Deleuze and
Guattari identified as minor in literature as part of their analysis
of Kafka, becomes a useful yardstick for most of the social sciences:
that, minority not only interrupts majoritarian discourses, it also
critiques the narratives of identity and remains creatively open-ended
by refusing to attain closed and autonomous subjectivity. Simple
inclusion of hitherto neglected groups workers, peasants, women in
the grand narratives of history and identity, or an undemanding
restoration of repressed voices lunatics, asylum-seekers, gays and
lesbians belie the radical claims of minority discourse. On the other
hand, construction of an anthropological other out of such minorities
who can be fixed and localized, and therefore appropriated in the
majoritarian ethnography of culture, civility and identity again
routinize available minor resources. The aim of this conference is to
generate interdisciplinary dialogue that would etch out the contours of
minority discourse beyond such available academic and institutional
narratives. To begin with, three major areas have been identified for
further exploration:
Violence:
Today's geo-political climate has posed new challenges to the ways in
which we theorize violence and our relationship to it. The tension
between epistemic violence and emerging modalities of warfare (e.g.
cellular, decentralized terrorism and post-globalized neo-colonial
occupation) has destabilized the preservation of any static notion of
"the violent." Clearly, it is now more critical than ever that we
metatheorize the discursive and literal space of violence, and
investigate its relationship with our present historical moment. The
panel discussion will address violence, as a problem and / or a
question, and its location in the interstices of the strategic and the
performative. Papers are required to link such a broad notion of
violence to the issues of minority.
Nation-state:
Nation-states have variously been identified as performing the violence
of straight-jacketing diverse people and identities into a homogenous
category of citizenship. Within ostensibly democratic and universalist
frames, they establish and extend the ideals of citizenship and espouse
a normative vision of the secular human being as the political subject
of modern statecraft. To interrogate such normative principle possible
topics may include, but are not limited to: nation and its minority;
national past and minority; gender and minority; minority in a
postnational world; globalization, nation-state and minority; nation and
history; nation-states and narratives;
The Representation of Ethnic Minority in British Literature:
The representation of ethnic minority in literature has always been an
issue fraught with tensions and complexities. In a multicultural country
like Britain, how do writers from varied cultural, religious and
ideological backgrounds represent the very ethnic community to which
they belong? What are the possibilities and problematics of such kind of
representation? In doing so, how do they rewrite the social, cultural,
political and literary history of Britain? And equally importantly, how
does Britain, the old empire, rewrite/remake them? The questions of
language, race, gender, religion, culture and identity would formulate
the sites of discussion while investigating the challenges of
representing the minority in literature.
For registration details and the conference programme please visit our
website (which is still under construction).
To help us keep you updated, please pre-register by emailing: Weimin
Tang <weimin.tang@jesus.oxford.ac.uk>
Enquiries to: Stuti Khanna <stuti.khanna@wolfson.ox.ac.uk>
Manmay Zafar <manmay.zafar@wadham.ox.ac.uk>
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