Call for Papers: MLA convention (6-9 Jan 2011, Los Angeles, USA),
Proposed Special Session
*We're looking for 1-2 additional panelists for Jan 2011. But also
welcome inquiries for later and other publishing projects along the
same lines (roughly: postcolonial/critical theory in relation to
East Asia, Eastern Europe or non-typical areas usually left outside
of postcolonial/cultural studies).
Consensual Empires: Orientalism as the Economy of Sameness
With the alleged end of Cold War conflicts, an epistemological shift
occurred within the discourse of Orientalism from the colonial-type
rhetoric of essential difference to the global rhetoric of desirable
sameness. Former communist countries ranging from China to Czech
Republic to Russia are now seen as caught up in a halting but
inevitable process of becoming-the-same as the West: liberal,
modern, normal. The shift reflects the transition to an era of
increasing globalization, marked no longer by overt exclusions of
difference but rather by conditional inclusions into the global
capitalist "family" based on a host of meritocratic criteria. This
panel wishes to theorize the new trajectories of imperial power
based on the discourse of enforced sameness, which reflects
capital's force and logic of abstract equivalence. It also asks how
the insistence on sameness is aided by the ubiquitous phenomenon of
self-Orientalization (or internalization of the desire to
become-the-same as the West) and by imperial regimes of consensus building.
We are interested in projects that explore historical and
epistemological connections of this discourse to the (post)Cold War
rhetoric of triumphalist capitalism and the re-education of formerly
communist societies into liberal democracies. However, this is just
one angle among many, and it by no means exhausts the wealth of
possible perspectives on the topic. We welcome a range of approaches
and lines of inquiry, including studies of literature, film,
cultural-intellectual narratives, critical theory, and political discourses.
Please submit 250-word abstracts to Natasa Kovacevic at
<mailto:(nkovacev /at/ emich.edu)>(nkovacev /at/ emich.edu) or Daniel Vukovich at
<mailto:(vukovich /at/ hku.hk)>(vukovich /at/ hku.hk) by March 19.
