[ecrea] Second call for papers: Postcolonial Mediations

  Fourth Annual ACGSConference

**
*Postcolonial Mediations:*
*Globalisation and Displacement*
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*Amsterdam,26-27 October2017*
*
*
*Organisers*: Sudeep Dasgupta (University of Amsterdam), John Nguyet 
Erni (Hong Kong Baptist University), Aniko Imre (University of Southern 
California), Jeroen de Kloet (University of Amsterdam), Sandra Ponzanesi 
(Utrecht University), Raka Shome (National University of Singapore

*Keynote speakers:*
Victoria Bernal (Professor of Anthropology, University of California, 
Irvine, US)
Paula Chakravartty (Associate Professor Media, Culture and 
Communication, New York University, New York, US)
Iain Chambers (Professor of Cultural and Postcolonial Studies, Oriental 
University, Naples, Italy)
Postcolonial thinking has challenged the stability of discourses on 
culture, globalisation, economics, human rights and politics. 
Postcolonial thinking, as a form of mediation and displacement of 
worldviews, triggered a re-evaluation of the complex connections between 
culture, class, economy, gender and sexuality. This conference aims to 
engage with such postcolonial displacements.
Displacement can be seen under the rubric of mobility and its many forms 
today, most tellingly discernible in the forced movements of peoples in 
the wake of wars, and the concomitant crises this provokes around issues 
of “culture and civilization”, and its gendered, religious and raced 
dimensions. The refugee crisis in Europe is an important case in point. 
Cultural productions from the non-West continue to displace received 
understandings of other cultures and societies (Chow, 2002, Narayan, 
1997) while contemporary political movements draw inspiration from 
postcolonial struggles as they deploy new media forms, as Howard Caygill 
(2013) has recently shown in his analyses of the Gandhian non-violence 
movement, the continuing Maoist rebellions and their relation to the 
Zapatistas and the /Indignados. /The shifting contours of gender and 
sexual politics, and the critique of stable identities provoked by queer 
politics and theory, are also producing displacements, in the discourse 
and practice of the politics of rights. Local, regional and national 
politics often challenge universal rights claims. e.g. the controversies 
around the relevance of “Global Queer” (Altman, 1996).
The postcolonial is understood here simultaneously as a mediating and a 
displacing series of interventions, which demands engagement with 
contemporary understandings of globalisation.
We invite papers that explore the complexity of postcolonial mediations 
in their interaction with the displacements of globalisation through 
theoretical and empirical analyses.
*Possible topics include*:
1. How can a postcolonial perspective inform newer understandings of 
contemporary forms of cultural, political and economic globalisation? 
For example, what does the “neo-colonial” turn (Mignolo) imply for 
thinking globalisation’s many dimensions today? What purchase might 
postcolonial perspectives (including postcolonial self-critique) have in 
the context of “planetary” (Spivak) developments, discussions of 
“Empire” and “Multitude” (Hardt/Negri) and articulations of “singular” 
(Jameson) and alternative modernities?
2. Migration in its many forms has centralized displacement as a crucial 
feature of globalisation. How might a postcolonial perspective further a 
contemporary engagement with the displacements of peoples in the wake of 
economic globalisation, political crises, human rights crises, and the 
ongoing militarization of the globe? How can the figures of the 
“migrant”, the “refugee” and the “asylum-seeker”, for example, be 
rethought given their contemporary reformulations by nation-states and 
transnational entities such as the EU and other multilateral 
deportation/resettling schemes in Asia?
3. Queer theory haslong argued that gender and sexuality are not 
external dimensions to be “added” onto considerations of subjectivity 
but intrinsic to how “human” subjectivities are lived, transformed and 
theorized. How do contemporary forms of displacement register at the 
level of gender and sexual politics? And how might queer forms of 
thinking intervene, mediate, displace or consolidate racist, sexist, 
transphobic, and hetero-normative discourses in the wake of 
globalisation, often under the rubric of culture and civilization?
4. Contemporary forms of globalisation are not only represented but also 
actively constructed through forms of media engagement, from political 
mobilization through social media to filmic and televisual cultural 
practices. These mediated forms of global politics demand different 
forms of analysis while also provoking transformations in how we 
theorize media themselves. How can “mediation” be confronted and 
theorized given the postcolonial dimensions of contemporary globalisation?
5. The contours of globalisation in terms of borders, the nation-states 
and transnational communities are being displaced and redrawn in the 
content of contemporary economic, political and military crises. How 
might postcolonial perspectives furnish cognitive and affective mappings 
of the overlaps and disjunctions of political and cultural cartographies?
6. Given that a “postcolonial perspective” unitescompeting perspectives 
(e.g. the literary, the politico-economic, the Marxist, the 
postmodernist) rather than a unified and homogenous body of arguments, 
what are the contemporary forms of internal displacement within the field?
Contributions from fields from across the social sciences or 
humanitiesare invited.
*Please submit an abstract (200-300 words) and short bio (max. 100 
words) by 1 February 2017 to **(acgs-fgw /at/ uva.nl)* 
<mailto:(acgs-fgw /at/ uva.nl)>*. Notice of acceptance will be given by 1 May 
2017. Conference fee: 50 Euros (25 Euros for PhD students). Conference 
dinner: 25 Euros*.


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