Conceptual StatementComparative Postcolonialities: Aesthetics, History, Locality The conference will help rethink the approaches, emphases, and methodologies of Postcolonial Studies by advancing a theoretically nuanced comparative area studies. By facilitating a fuller comparatism, we seek to alleviate the anglophone bias of much theory and criticism in the field, and to ensure that theoretical generalizations about globalization and postcoloniality are adequately grounded in specific histories, regions, and languages. Moreover, we believe it is essential to engage more fully with postcolonial theories and practices that predate the institution of the discipline of Postcolonial Studies in the U.S. and Europe. What have been the agendas and emphases of such postcolonial studies that have emerged in sites other than the U.S. and Europe? The disciplines of History and a theoretically informed Comparative Area Studies are particularly well placed to take into account the discrepant histories of postcolonial studies. Despite and perhaps because of its imbrication with imperialism, Anthropology is also a significant disciplinary resource for our project, because of its particular sensitivity to locality, its emphasis on cross-cultural comparison, its theorizations and interrogations of "culture," and its archive on non-western and colonized cultures. Although we are aware of powerful existing critiques and competing versions of Postcolonial Studies, Literary and Cultural Studies, Language and Area Studies, Comparative Literature, History, and Anthropology, we believe these disciplines house archives, methods, and self-critiques that are integral to the study of postcolonial cultures. The conference will therefore feature and build on productive trends within them, thereby elaborating area-based and disciplinary comparatisms. In short, under the rubric “Postcolonial Studies” are several area-specific contents, agendas, strategies, and forms of expertise about which we need to inform ourselves, both to ensure a certain general literacy and to learn about possible resources for our own areas that may have developed under a different rubric. We hope that presentations will stage, rather than only name, the methodological and substantive directions—in which they would like to take the field. The conference will include two keynote addresses; some area-focused panels (Africa; Latin America and the Caribbean; Asia); and some explicitly cross-regional comparatist panels (Continuing Colonialisms: Ireland and Palestine; Postcolonial Visual Cultures). It will feature a panel entitled “Emergent Areas in Postcolonial Studies” to acknowledge that the “areas” that are commonly delineated within Area Studies are neither pre-given nor self-evident, and will explore the particular historical and institutional negotiations a given “area” embodies. This panel will also allow scholars to contemplate possible “areas” that have not been represented in the conference and that might be conceptualized. The Visual Culture panel will include art historians, filmmakers, film theorists, curators, and performance theorists with various areas of specialization. We hope that our three days of dialogue and modeling of scholarship will generate some new directions for the field. We will conclude with an open discussion that focuses on new directions in Postcolonial Studies, and will feature scholars specializing in different areas and disciplines, address comparatism as a methodological cornerstone, and shape the agenda of Postcolonial Studies by identifying specific challenges, urgent topics, and modes of study for future work. The conference also hopes to develop critical insights and methods in dialogue with the many vibrant aesthetic practices from around the postcolonial world. Featured at the conference will be a roundtable of creative writers who work in several languages, English being only one among them. We are also planning other performance events. We seek a sustained dialogue amongst conference participants across areas and disciplines; therefore there will be no concurrent panels. |
“Comparative Postcolonialities” will examine how
postcolonial scholarship can move beyond the political pessimism
that haunts both the discipline and our present political moment.
We think of “Comparative Postcolonialities” as seeking
a movement from a
postcolonial condition towards a future possible. Rethinking Postcolonial
Studies, thus, does not mean only critique; there has certainly
been much sustained and rigorous self-critique within the field.
More crucially, what is needed is a generative initiative about
how to proceed in the light of a radically different global context
from that which witnessed the rise of the discipline of Postcolonial
Studies in the U.S.