Cfp: "Historicising Narrative Theory." JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE THEORY.

The Journal of Narrative Theory (JNT) seeks submissions for an upcoming special issue, "Historicizing Narrative Theory."

Essays (max. 10,000 words) should address themselves to the relationship(s) of contemporary narrative theory to ethnic and/or postcolonial studies, and may examine both literary and cultural texts (visual and digital mediums, music, ethnographies, tourism guides, etc).

Structuralist, or classical, narrative theory – in the vein of Roland Barthes, Gerard Genette, and Tzvetan Todorov – sought to articulate a taxonomy of narrative, taking as its principle examples canonical texts of European and American literature, e.g. Genette on Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. While feminist narrative theorists, such as Susan Lanser and Robyn Warhol, have demonstrated that gender and sexuality are constitutive considerations of texts, rather than simply extra-formal considerations, similar theoretical engagements with narrative theory in terms of race, capital, imperialism, and class still need to take place. Narrative theory remains only partly decolonized despite the increasing globalization of the contemporary novel, in form and content as well as production, distribution, and consumption. We know that race, nation, and class matter to literary form, but how and why do we account for it in narrative theory? And how does narrative theory have to change/reconsider itself in order to truly decolonize?

What would a “postcolonial” or “marxist” narratology look like? Is an “ethnic,” “postcolonial,” or “marxist” narrative theory even possible or desirable? What are the dangers/pitfalls of ghettoization and/or co-optation in engaging classical narrative theory? What kinds of questions does narrative theory need to ask in order to be historicized? For example, Dan Shen, Ming Dong Gu, and others have sought to articulate Chinese narrative theory that takes into account both specific Chinese aesthetic and cultural histories as well as considers mutual artistic and theoretical influences with the West. In his work on Latino comics and postcolonial writing, Frederick Luis Aldama argues for the universality of not only the narrative tools available to writers and graphic novelists, but also the very cognitive processes that inform our subjectivity and creativity. Michael McKeon’s 2000 anthology, Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach, treats narrative historically but focuses only on fiction and includes only three essays on postcolonial writing.

We are looking for essays that engage with the limitations/possibilities of current narrative theory(s), either through explicit theoretical engagement with narrative theory and/or the practice/revisiting of it through innovative interpretations of texts.

Information about the journal can be found at the following address: http://www.emich.edu/english/jnt.

Contributors should follow the MLA style (7th edition), with footnotes kept at a minimum and incorporated into the text where possible.

Please send a copy of the submission by email attachment to each of the editors – Sue J. Kim (skim666@gmail.com) and Priyamvada Gopal (pg268@cam.ac.uk) – by July 15, 2011.

Cfp: "Empowerment and the Sacred," Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Leeds, June 24-26, 2011.

Keynote Speakers:

Kim Knott (University of Leeds);
Bart Moore-Gilbert (Goldsmith’s University);
Neil L. Whitehead (University of Wisconsin)

​Discussing international responses to the ‘resurgence of religion’ in our time, Talal Asad has argued: ‘If anything is agreed upon, it is that a straightforward narrative of progress from the religious to the secular is no longer acceptable’ (Asad, 2006). In the ‘straightforward narratives’ of which Asad talks – and in Enlightenment discourses of ‘reason’, ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’ more generally - religion, spirituality and the sacred have customarily been pitted against empowerment and emancipation, in political, cultural and intellectual terms. At this present historical juncture, then - when the secularist orientation of global futures is increasingly being called into question - a vital need presents itself for cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary debate about the role that the sacred has, does and can play in our understanding of the possibilities of personal and collective agency, power and change.

​This conference will bring together scholars, professionals and arts-practitioners to investigate the ways in which sacred traditions - in diverse cultural and historical contexts - have shaped discourses, practices and narratives of empowerment, emancipation, social change, resistance and survival. We ask: How do different sacred discourses and practices frame and/or extend the possibilities of agency - socially, spiritually, imaginatively and corporeally? What variant conceptions of the spheres of activity have they produced – whether temporal, spatial, cultural, cosmic, public and/or private? And what role have religious and spiritual traditions played in political discourses and counter-discourses of class, gender, race, sexuality, cultural identity, humanism and human rights? Where sacred traditions have challenged the limits of secular reason, what alternatives have they suggested for cognition, representation, and even rationality? And how have they ‘empowered’ different artistic practices? Does the ‘commitment to social justice’ necessitate the ‘translation’ of sacred realities into ‘disenchanted histories’, in order to maintain dialogue with modern institutions (Dipesh Chakrabarty)? Or does a ‘conception of creativity in dialogue with the sacred’ enable an interrogation of ‘forbidden territories within ourselves’ as well as ‘the sacrosanct territories of our institutions’ (Wilson Harris)? Do sacred traditions themselves provide the premises for imaginations of cross-cultural and inter-faith community that differ from secular multiculturalism?

We welcome papers, especially from postgraduates and early career researchers, that address issues of the sacred and empowerment inrelation to topics which may include, but are by no means limited to:

•Concepts of agency: God, gods, spirits and the divine; thehuman/extra-human; identity and ‘imagined communities’; actors,heroes/anti-heroes, role-models and leaders; somatic/spiritual powers.
•Performances of power: artistic, cultural, political, ritual; protest and activism; violence/non-violence.
•Histories and historiography: colonialism and the postcolonial; globalization; materialism; memory.
•Sacred texts and authority: interpretation, translation,intertextuality; secular/religious criticism; freedom of speech, blasphemy, and taboo.
•Place, space and environment: sacred sites and land rights; nature, geography, topography, archaeology.
•Difference and dialogue: orthodoxy/the unorthodox; syncretism, inter-faith and cross-culturalism.
•Justice and judgment: ethics, morality, legality; sacred-secular/inter-faith arbitration.
•Secular/sacred powers and the state: private/public spheres; policy-making and pedagogy.
•Re/conceptualizations: ‘sacred’, ‘secular’, ‘post-secular’, ‘religion’, ‘magic’, ‘spirituality’, ‘myth’ etc.
•Action, motivation and practice: choice, desire, sacrifice and faith; freedom/constraint.
•Epistemologies and aesthetics: faith, rationalism and science; representation and the unrepresentable.

Please submit 300 word abstracts, accompanied by a 100 word biography, for 20 minute papers to the conference organisers, Shivani Rajkomar and Lori Shelbourn, atorganisers@empowermentandthesacred.com.

The deadline for submissions has been extended to the 30th of March 2011. Further details can be found on our website: http://www.empowermentandthesacred.com/.

Prizes: University of Kentucky Eighth Annual Prize Essay Competition in European Philosophy from Kant to the Present.

QUESTION: Has Western philosophy been built on the exclusion of certain groups of people?

This topic may be addressed historically, systematically, or through any combination of these two approaches. The winning essay will receive a prize of $1000 and, upon recommendation of the selection committee, be published in Inquiry. The author of the winning essay will also be brought to the University of Kentucky in the Fall of 2011 to present it.

Essays will be judged by a process of blind review. Submissions should be appropriately formatted for such a process, with the author's name and other identifying information appearing only on a separate cover sheet. Essays should be double spaced, in English, and no more than 8000 words in length. Past and present faculty and students at the University of Kentucky are ineligible to compete. Submissions should not have been previously published or submitted for publication.

The deadline for submissions is March 1, 2011. Essays should be submitted in triplicate in typed (hard copy) form to Ms. Katie Barrett, Department of Philosophy, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506-0027 USA. No electronic submissions please.

Cfp: "New Geographies of Postcoloniality and Globalisation," University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, March 24-27, 2011.

With a conviction to articulate alternative directions for postcolonial studies within a globalised world, we invite paper proposals on a wide range of topics related to postcolonial theory and globalization studies. One of the aims of this conference is a rigorous scrutiny of what it may mean to ‘re-think’ the ongoing ‘critiques of postcolonialism’. Postcolonial studies has been steadily and rapidly energized by cross-disciplinary investigations thereby re-configuring critical paradigms of thought and contributing to contemporary understandings of the world as being dominated by transnational capital flows, rapid and extensive globalisation and an unprecedented surge of technology and information. At the conference, we propose to work with a more flexible understanding of postcolonial studies that can reveal new perspectives on the ideological, political and socio-cultural dimensions of the contemporary world order. Given the context and geographical locality of the conference, we are very keen to receive paper proposals that move beyond the West / non-West structure which inevitably involve a critique of Eurocentric thought. We thus invite proposals that are historically and geographically extensive and that seek to problematize facile divisions in an increasingly mobile and interconnected world. Within this context we are particularly interested in situating postcolonial studies and globalisation with the Caribbean context.

We particularly invite submissions dealing with new geographies including power relations within the Global South. We are also interested in debates about whether or not we have reached the decisive end of postcolonialism or/and the juncture where postcolonial theory and studies should be pushed beyond its current parameters and if so, what this might imply.

We are pleased to announce that the opening keynote address for this conference will be delivered by Prof. Arjun Appadurai. We are also delighted to have Guy DesLauriers at the conference and to screen his film followed by a post-screening Q & A session with the filmmaker himself.

Papers can be submitted in both; English and French. Selected papers will be published in an edited volume.

Possible areas of interest for paper presentations may include but are not restricted to:

• New Geographies of power: how can postcolonial theory account for the multiple heterogeneity and the various, contested voices and positions that make up the global South?
• Travelling cultures: postcolonial take on mobility and transnational connections
• The politics of radicalization in the globalizing world of the 21st century
• Thinking beyond binaries (self/other, colonial/postcolonial, silence/voice and so on.)
• Agency, cultural representation and communicative practices
• The relationship between the notion of history and the term ‘postcolonial’
• Technology , digital divides and Globalisation; globalization and localization of technologies within old and emerging configurations of power
• Identity and Eurocentric discourse
• Sex, sexualities and the rise of religion in the 21st century
• Ethnicity, class and conflict
• Environment, postcolonialism and the Globalised World

Please send abstracts (of 250 words or less) to postcolandglobal@gmail.com. Inquiries and panel suggestions are welcome via email. Deadline for submission is Oct 31, 2010. Please include full contact information--including affiliation, and a brief 50 word biography with your abstract submission.

Richardson, Edmund. Review of William W. Cook, et al., AFRICAN AMERICAN WRITERS AND CLASSICAL TRADITION. BMCR (August 2010).

Cook, William W., and James Tatum.  African American Writers and Classical Tradition.  Chicago:  U of Chicago P, 2010.

The beginning must be uncertain, a note half-heard. For here is a story of the edges of memory – unquiet, Protean, astonishing. In their exploration of the richness of African-American engagements with the ancient world – from the poetry of Phyllis Wheatley to the satire of Fran Ross – Cook and Tatum have produced one of the most important and enchanting books ever written in the field of classical reception.

(And if that has the heavy finality of conclusion, it still must serve as opening gambit – such is the scope of this work.)

Wisely, the authors have not attempted an all-encompassing narrative. Instead, each of the book’s eight chapters is focused around one complex, suggestive figure, or literary strategy. The Ciceronian speech of Frederick Douglass – seized from his self-proclaimed ‘betters’ – leads into the troubled Odyssey of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, where the Cyclops lies in wait in an American psychiatric ward, and the allusive, quicksilver verse of Melvin Tolson, the ‘Pindar of Harlem.’ The chapters’ progression is broadly chronological – beginning in eighteenth-century Boston, ending in the present day and a glance, half-longing, towards times to come.

Grand narrative this is not, in any conventional sense. The past is fragile, here – hard to reach, harder still to make one’s own. While still a slave, Douglass had to ‘steal knowledge’ (58) from under the nose of his master, by persuading his white childhood friends to give him lessons. Wheatley’s antiquity is structured by loss (46). Even when past and present do meet on solid ground, the result – as in W.E.B. Du Bois’s Quest for the Silver Fleece – is often far from triumphant; ‘just because you start interpreting everything allegorically,’ as the authors remark, ‘[it] doesn’t mean you’ll be any better off’ (134). These are discourses which many conventional approaches to reception would be hard-pressed to narrate – where remembrance becomes ‘a dream as frail as those of ancient time’ (Tennyson, quoted 229). . . .

Read the rest here: http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2010/2010-08-63.html.

"Kant and Colonialism: Historical and Critical Perspectives," University of Oxford, September 30-October 2, 2010.

Centre for the Study of Social Justice, Department of Politics and International Relations.

The conference will explore the relevance of Kant's critique of colonialism to an appropriate reconstruction of Kant's cosmopolitan theory in recent global justice debates. The focus will be on Kant's unusually critical stance towards European colonialism on the one hand and the uneasy relationship between contemporary liberal theory and its colonial heritage on the other. In considering Kant’s cosmopolitanism within the context of his critique of colonialism and related anthropological reflections, the conference will query the tendency among many current liberal cosmopolitans to interpret Kant's account as a version of their own favoured unrestrained ‘moral universalism’. A philosophically and historically more nuanced reading of Kant's cosmopolitan thinking against the background of emergent European colonialism may encourage a more modest, more self-critical liberal approach to current global issues, such as fair trade, migration, and humanitarian intervention.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Prof. Dr. Pauline Kleingeld, University of Leiden, “Kant on race and economic globalization: On just trade and free trade”
Prof. Dr. Peter Niesen, Technische Universität Darmstadt, “Restitutive justice in international and cosmopolitan law”
Prof. Sankar Muthu, University of Chicago, “World citizenship and global connections in Enlightenment political thought”
Prof. Howard Williams, “Tensions in Kant's theory of colonialism”

If you would like to give a paper, please submit electronic copies of the title and a summary (350-500 words) of your proposed contribution to Lea Ypi (Lea.Ypi@nuffield.ox.ac.uk) and Katrin Flikschuh (K.A.Flikschuh@lse.ac.uk); please also include an abbreviated CV with your submission. Analytical and historical approaches to the conference theme are equally invited. The deadline for submission is 31 May 2010. We aim to reach a decision within 6 weeks of the deadline.

Rasmussen, Andrew. "Americanising the Global Mind." STATS March 15, 2010.

Watters, Ethan. Crazy Like Us: the Globalization of the American Psyche. New York: Free Press, 2010. Watters’ central thesis goes something like this: by expanding their realm through the forces of globalization, American mental health professionals are harming other societies by introducing Western symptoms into the way people in other cultures express their distress and replacing the local explanations for mental health problems with Western scientific models. He begins by introducing readers to a fact that many of us who study mental health globally know well: the expression of and explanation for mental illness depend in part upon the culture in which the individuals afflicted reside. In the language of the field, they are “culturally-mediated.” Watters provides several good examples of this in Crazy Like Us, but the clearest articulation comes from McGill Unversity Professor, and Editor of Transcultural Psychiatry, Laurence Kirmayer who is interviewed at length. Kirmayer explains that most cultures have an experience of isolation and decreased motivation that we, in the United States, typically, would call depression. In India this might be characterized by a feeling that the heart is physically descending in the body, in Nigeria by reports of a peppery feeling in the head, and in Korea by “‘fire illness’… a burning in the gut.” Readers interested in hearing a compendium of foreign mental illnesses will not be disappointed. Most of these have analogs in the West (as with depression), but others do not. The most infamous of these is koro of Southeast Asia, or the sudden feeling that one’s penis is decreasing in size or disappearing altogether. If this sounds amusingly off-beat, an outbreak of a similar condition in the 1990s in a number of West African countries resulted in mobs beating and killing several women suspected of witchcraft. These psychological phenomena are real in that they have real behavioral consequences. These “indigenous” disorders are being displaced by Western concepts primarily, Watters claims, by unwitting journalists in the developing world who defer to Western experts and by adventurous Western mental health professionals out to do good. Westerners introduce ideas of how mental health problems should be expressed – or, more accurately, how they are expressed in Western culture – and sufferers hear about these and mimic them. . . . Read the rest here: http://stats.org/stories/2010/americanizing_global_mind_3_15_10.html.

Watters, Ethan. "The Americanization of Mental Illness." NEW YORK TIMES January 8, 2010.

Watters, Ethan, Crazy Like Us: the Globalization of the American Psyche. New York: Free Press, 2010 (forthcoming). AMERICANS, particularly if they are of a certain leftward-leaning, college-educated type, worry about our country’s blunders into other cultures. In some circles, it is easy to make friends with a rousing rant about the McDonald’s near Tiananmen Square, the Nike factory in Malaysia or the latest blowback from our political or military interventions abroad. For all our self-recrimination, however, we may have yet to face one of the most remarkable effects of American-led globalization. We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of mental health and illness. We may indeed be far along in homogenizing the way the world goes mad. This unnerving possibility springs from recent research by a loose group of anthropologists and cross-cultural psychiatrists. Swimming against the biomedical currents of the time, they have argued that mental illnesses are not discrete entities like the polio virus with their own natural histories. These researchers have amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that mental illnesses have never been the same the world over (either in prevalence or in form) but are inevitably sparked and shaped by the ethos of particular times and places. In some Southeast Asian cultures, men have been known to experience what is called amok, an episode of murderous rage followed by amnesia; men in the region also suffer from koro, which is characterized by the debilitating certainty that their genitals are retracting into their bodies. Across the fertile crescent of the Middle East there is zar, a condition related to spirit-possession beliefs that brings forth dissociative episodes of laughing, shouting and singing. The diversity that can be found across cultures can be seen across time as well. In his book Mad Travelers, the philosopher Ian Hacking documents the fleeting appearance in the 1890s of a fugue state in which European men would walk in a trance for hundreds of miles with no knowledge of their identities. The hysterical-leg paralysis that afflicted thousands of middle-class women in the late 19th century not only gives us a visceral understanding of the restrictions set on women’s social roles at the time but can also be seen from this distance as a social role itself — the troubled unconscious minds of a certain class of women speaking the idiom of distress of their time. “We might think of the culture as possessing a ‘symptom repertoire’ — a range of physical symptoms available to the unconscious mind for the physical expression of psychological conflict,” Edward Shorter, a medical historian at the University of Toronto, wrote in his book Paralysis: the Rise and Fall of a ‘Hysterical’ Symptom. “In some epochs, convulsions, the sudden inability to speak or terrible leg pain may loom prominently in the repertoire. In other epochs patients may draw chiefly upon such symptoms as abdominal pain, false estimates of body weight and enervating weakness as metaphors for conveying psychic stress.” In any given era, those who minister to the mentally ill — doctors or shamans or priests — inadvertently help to select which symptoms will be recognized as legitimate. Because the troubled mind has been influenced by healers of diverse religious and scientific persuasions, the forms of madness from one place and time often look remarkably different from the forms of madness in another. That is until recently. For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science, believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. That is, we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental illness. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html?em.

"The Idea of Europe: Memories and Postcoloniality," Utrecht University, October 29-30, 2009.

THE IDEA OF EUROPE: Memories and Postcoloniality is a two-part event to discuss how Europe can be rethought from a postcolonial and postsecular perspective. The first day brings together memory thinking, heritage practice and postcolonial theory to explore challenges and potentialities in the making of a new European memory which can account for its multicultural past. The second day discusses from different intellectual traditions and perspectives the idea of Europe as an imagined and actual space. It focuses in particular on the relationship between ‘Occidentalism, Orientalism, and the idea of a postcolonial Europe’ which requires a further understanding of the contemporary postsecular climate both within and beyond Europe’s borders. Thursday 29 October, 2009 "The Ethics of European Memory: what is to be done?" Chair: Ann Rigney (Utrecht University, on behalf of Culture and Identities) Keynote Speaker: Luisa Passerini (Prof. Cultural History, Turin University, Italy) Discussion Speaker: Luisa Passerini, Irit Rogoff (Prof. Cultural History, Turin University, Italy & Prof. of Visual Cultures, Goldsmith University, UK) Friday 30 October, 2009 "Occidentalism, Orientalism, and the Idea of a Postcolonial Europe" Chair: Sandra Ponzanesi (Utrecht University, on behalf of AHRC, UK) Keynote Speakers: Avishai Margalit (Kennan Professor, Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton University/ Schulman Professor of Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem) and Paul Gilroy (Anthony Giddens Professorship in Social Theory, London School of Economics, UK) Respondents: Max Silverman & John McLeod (Professor of French, University of Leeds & Reader in Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures, University of Leeds) Discussion Speakers: Luisa Passerini & Simon Glendinning (Prof. Cultural History, Turin University, Italy & Reader in European Philosophy, London School of Economics, UK).

Porter, Bernard. "The Anglo World of Settlers, not Dominators." TLS September 23, 2009.

Belich, James. Replenishing the Earth: the Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World. Oxford: OUP, 2009. Writing history is largely a matter of what filters you use. Different-coloured filters bring out different patterns. For most recent chroniclers and analysts of the Anglo-Americanization of the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the filters used have been those that show up the “imperialism” of the process. The most startling novelty of James Belich’s Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World is that it scarcely mentions imperialism at all, except to marginalize it (“with all due respect to the rich scholarship on European imperialism, in the very long view most European empires in Asia and Africa were a flash in the pan”); yet it still makes a pretty convincing job of explaining the huge and important process that is its subject. Even where it does not totally convince, it is immensely illuminating, as new filters invariably are. This is one of the most important works on the broad processes of modern world history to have appeared for years – arguably since Sir Charles Dilke’s pioneering Greater Britain introduced a concept very like Belich’s “Anglo-world” to his Victorian contemporaries in 1868. Dilke’s book was written before the word “imperialism” came into vogue, at least in connection with British overseas expansion. Empire carries essential connotations of power, or domination, whose major manifestation in Britain’s case was India – which again finds no place in Belich’s book, and hardly featured in Dilke’s either. Dilke was interested in something else: the migration of the British people over the globe, including North America; with the aid of some state power, certainly – the general protection afforded by the Royal Navy, occasional military expeditions to pull the migrants out of trouble, charters and treaties – but not in order to dominate anyone. Rather, the aim was to reproduce British-type “free” societies, usually freer than Britain’s own, in what were conveniently regarded as the “waste” places of the earth. Belich calls this “cloning”. It was an entirely different process from the more dominating sort of “imperialism”, representing a different philosophy, involving different social classes, and mainly affecting different regions of the world. Belich believes that it was a far more important influence than what is generally understood as imperialism on the whole course of modern history. Belich’s approach brings out two further features obscured by conventional models. First, “settlerism” was transnational, in several senses, quite apart from the obvious one that it pushed beyond national frontiers. Other peoples did it besides Britons or even northern Europeans: Belich has interesting sections on Iberian, Chinese and Russian movements of settlement, the last-named mainly in Siberia, uncannily similar in many ways to the great “Anglo” ones. Or, rather, the “Anglo” one; for Belich is insistent that the British colonization of Canada and Australasia, and the Americans’ opening up of their West, were not merely similar but essentially the same phenomenon, umbilically linked, to a far greater extent than national accounts of each of them – and especially the myth of American “exceptionalism” – would lead one to believe. That is the first thing you discover when the imperial element is filtered out. The second is that this kind of colonization was not necessarily a case of the centre “exploiting” the periphery. Settlers positively sought out “oldland” goods and capital rather than having them forced on them. They arguably gained more from the exchange than the metropoles did. At the very worst, “exploitation was mutual”. The cultural ties between them were also voluntary. It was the Australians who wanted to retain their British identity, rather than its being forced on them, and Britain which eventually cut the tie between them (by joining the Common Market). Resentment over their rejection by Britain led Australians to reconfigure themselves thereafter, fashionably, as colonial victims; but for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Australians and Californians preferred to regard themselves as “co-owners” of the great British and American enterprises – even as superior partners: fitter, more democratic, less debilitated by “civilization”, “Better Britons” (or Americans) – rather than marginal to them. Some even dreamt of shifting the metropolises of their worlds to their new lands: to Bismarck, North Dakota, for example, which one optimist in the 1880s “predicted seriously would someday be the centre of Western civilization”. It was this kind of process and feeling that created what Belich calls the “Anglo-world”, and contributed – more than a more one-sided “imperialism” could possibly have done – to its success. . . . Read the rest here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article6845826.ece.

Varadarajan, Tunku. "Seeking Pleasure Far from Home." WALL STREET JOURNAL June 9, 2009.

Bernstein, Richard. The East, the West, and Sex: a History of Erotic Encounters. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. The East, the West, and Sex is the best sort of book about sex: it is replete with anecdotes from history that titillate as they inform and observations on human nature that amuse as they illuminate, all delivered in language and tone that is broadly moral without being moralizing and certainly far from prudish. To his credit, Mr. Bernstein strives hard to avoid prurience, or even the suggestion of it, although occasionally he does drop his guard, as when he writes of Western men being "powerfully drawn to the slim, small-boned, black-haired women of Asia, more plumlike than melonlike of breast, spare rather than full of buttocks and hips." Mr. Bernstein's survey of Westerners in the fleshpots of the East -- ranging from the 17th century to the present -- is actually cultural history with a point, an attempt to show that nonmonogamous sex in the Orient (at least for men in power) long carried no contingent connotation of sin and was, in fact, a natural part of the masculine condition. While Christian scolds of old viewed such easy sexual possibility as clinching proof of Eastern degeneracy, the more worldly among Western men saw in the East an opportunity for liberation -- for a breaking of the shackles they wore, perforce, in London, Lisbon or Rotterdam, before the West's own sexual revolution. . . . Mr. Bernstein is right to characterize the West's historical relationship with the East as one, largely, of an assertion of political power. And with conquest and colonization (or with modern-day military interventions such as America's in Vietnam) the wielders of authority could satisfy their sexual desires in the East if they chose to do so. But Mr. Bernstein cautions against Manichaean conclusions that would have us condemn this behavior -- as well as the activities of today's Western men who go east, with their bulging wallets, for some casual "boom-boom" -- as a form of sexual colonization. There may have been -- and may still be -- an inequality of bargaining power in many of the sexual transactions in question. But as distasteful as some Western arbiters may find such relations, seeing them as merely predatory and cruel, many Eastern women regard a few hours with a fat German tourist who'll pay them well as a perfectly reasonable professional option -- in the circumstances. And their circumstances, let us remember, are not the fault of the fat German tourist. . . . Read the whole review here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124416693109987685.html.

Cfp: "From Lifeworld to Biopolitics: Empire in the Age of Obama," Third Annual TELOS Conference, New York, January 16, 2010.

In the context of a dramatic reorganization of the relationships among state, market, and society, the 2010 Telosconference will turn its attention to competing accounts, both theoretical and empirical, of the new modalities of administration, domination, and power. Facing the authoritarian state and a politicized market, how does one “defend society”? The conference will address the extension of politicized control into ever greater realms of social life. What theoretical tools are available? How can we trace the process historically? Classical Critical Theory of the mid-twentieth century described a “totally administered society” in which an elaborate bureaucracy combined with a “culture industry” in order to eliminate spontaneity. Yet some viewed the era of deregulation (and the paradigms of postmodernism) as a rollback of administration and homogeneity. Do we now face the return to the strong state and a repoliticization of society in the name of left populism in the United States? Or has it been the transition from the old mass media to the Internet that has reshaped the dynamic of politics and culture? Meanwhile, the brief moment of a presumed single superpower and unilateralism is shading into an international disorder of multiple power conflicts among strong states, no longer confronted with human rights expectations or a democratization agenda. The resurgent control of society has taken on global proportions: China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela. How does international power operate in new forms of empire? Have “military-industrial complexes” been replaced by cultural hegemonies, defined by the spread of languages and religions? Do developments such as political Islam or Chinese nationalism indicate that “society” has been the hidden driver of state power all along? What about the shared “liberal” and “realistic” assumption that economic liberalization will produce political opening and democratization? Has state capitalism in the East responded better to the global economic crisis than market capitalism in the West? Presentation topics can include (but are not limited to) themes such as: theories of domination in Critical Theory, post-structuralism, and other traditions (e.g., Schmitt, Arendt, Agamben); phenomenology versus bureaucracy; executive authority (Schmitt) and the defense of society against “biopolitics” (Foucault); “civil rights” or “human rights”?; terrorism, the war on terror, and continuities from Bush to Obama; the structural transformation of the press and of public criticism; new technologies and power; populism, elites, and the new class; “smart power” and the role of intellectuals; traditions, religion, and resistance. Proposals (one-page abstract) for twenty-minute conference papers are due by October 1 at telospress@aol.com. (Please put the words “conference proposal” in the subject line of your email.) Conference Registration Fee: $95 (before October 15), otherwise $115 (includes one-year subscription to Telos). For current holders of individual subscriptions to Telos, the registration fee is $35 until October 15 and $55 thereafter. If you have any further questions about the conference, please contact us at telospress@aol.com. Cross-posted from www.continental-philosophy.org.

Laqueur, Thomas W. Review of Richard Bernstein's THE EAST, THE WEST, AND SEX. SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE June 14, 2009.

Bernstein, Richard. The East, the West, and Sex: a History of Erotic Encounters. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. As Richard Bernstein writes in The East, the West, and Sex, his book about the erotic allure of the East for Western men, "sex was a pleasure avidly pursued by the builders of empire going places where it was readily available." This is beyond dispute if only because sex was also a pleasure avidly pursued by those who stayed at home. Maybe it was more avidly - and successfully - pursued away from the prying eyes of neighbors, kin, police and the church. In any case, sex - kinky and straight - was very much part of the encounter of two worlds. East India merchants set up house with bibis - mistresses - with whom they often lived quite respectably, but they also imitated Mogul princes by engaging dancing girls and whole teams of concubines. Gustave Flaubert could scarcely contain himself in writing about one of the young prostitutes he had in Cairo. His countryman, the 20th century novelist Henry de Montherlant, managed to live a secret life of pederasty in Algiers while enjoying a second life as a literary lion back home. The explorer and polyglot Richard Burton made available to his countrymen The Thousand and One Arabian Nights and the Indian sex guide Kama Sutra in the hope that his translation would shake Europeans loose from their uptight ways. And he did pretty much everything one can do in explorations of the East. In probably no other city of the late 19th and early 20th century was sex of all sorts more available than Shanghai - under European control but serviced by the local mob. . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/14/RVF91830P3.DTL.

Anderson, Gary. Review of Piers Brendon's THE RISE AND FALL OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE. WASHINGTON TIMES January 4, 2008.

Brendon, Piers. The Rise and Fall of the British Empire. New York: Knopf, 2008. When Gen. Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, many Britons thought it was the beginning of the end of their empire. According to Piers Brendon in his book, "The Decline and Fall of the British Empire," they were both right and wrong. Soon after Yorktown, the same Gen. Cornwallis won a military victory that destroyed the power of the Indian Empire and paved the way for British domination of all of India. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, England controlled an empire many times as large as Rome at her zenith. Yet, as Mr. Brendon points out, the doom of the empire lay in her greatest strengths. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jan/04/the-rise-demise-of-an-empire/.

Cfp: "Independence and Decolonization," Institute for Historical Studies, University of Texas, Austin, April 15-17, 2010.

Inspired by the upcoming bicentenary of Mexican independence, the symposium aims to generate dialogue among scholars from a variety of disciplines working on processes of independence, decolonization, and the reconfiguration of territorial and social borders that such processes generate. We encourage proposals that adopt an explicitly synoptic approach to the interactions between metropolitan powers and colonial/nationalist societies. We welcome proposals from scholars working on the following broad problem areas: 1. Global and local dynamics of "first wave" independence movements and decolonization in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (e.g. United States, Haiti, Spanish America); 2. Nineteenth century decolonization (e.g. Ottoman successor states, Brazil, Cuba); 3. National liberation movements and decolonization in the twentieth century. We are interested in bringing into dialogue a variety of approaches and themes which might include ethnic identities and anti-colonial movements, postcolonial state formation, and economic development of postcolonial states. Interested scholars should submit an abstract of 200-500 words and a one-page CV to Professor Susan Deans-Smith, sdsmith@mail.utexas.edu by March 1, 2009. Participants will be reimbursed for travel and lodging expenses. For further information about the Institute for Historical Studies, its programs, and fellowships see: www.utexas.edu/cola/insts/historicalstudies/.

Human Rights Watch. "This Alien Legacy: the Origins of Sodomy Laws in British Colonialism." December 17, 2008.

This 66-page report describes how laws in over three dozen countries, from India to Uganda and from Nigeria to Papua New Guinea, derive from a single law on homosexual conduct that British colonial rulers imposed on India in 1860. This year, the High Court in Delhi ended hearings in a years-long case seeking to decriminalize homosexual conduct there. A ruling in the landmark case is expected soon. Download the report here: http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2008/12/17/alien-legacy-0.

Malkin, Irad. "Review of Henry Hurst, et al., eds. ANCIENT COLONISATIONS." BMCR (November 2008).

Hurst, Henry, and Sara Owen, eds. Ancient Colonizations: Analogy, Similarity and Difference. London: Duckworth, 2005. Tthe book's subtitle reads "analogy, similarity and difference" but, except for Purcell's article, most of it reads as if the latter two words are merely implied in the first. Basically the question that interests the editors is: are analogies helpful or should the attractive ones be considered an enemy? I wonder, however, whether we are anachronistically inclined to treat ancient colonization in terms of modern imperialism and colonialism, or have we been so well trained to be suspicious of anachronism that not only do we avoid analogies but expect their existence in others’ work where it is perhaps unjustified to do so? One would expect the first task of such a book, before its contributors warn against the various dangers of analogy, is to establish whether or not the plague is rampant. Anthony Snodgrass makes a remark, typical of the book, that the examples are simply too numerous to cite, yet directs us to a rather specific article by Gillian Shepherd on marriages among Greeks and non-Greeks. In truth, when reading through its pages, one would be hard-pressed to find more than just a handful of meaningful examples of the 'anachronistic model,' at least for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.bmcreview.org/2008/11/20081108.html.

"Afterlives of Postcolonialism," Centre for Postcolonial Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London, October 25-26, 2008.

In recent times some scholars have proclaimed that postcolonial theory has exhausted its critical energies- at the very time that it has been taken up by scholars and activists not located in English or Literature departments, the area where postcolonial theory made its early impact and sometimes found an institutional home. The Centre for Postcolonial Studies at Goldsmiths is organising a conference on the “Afterlives of Postcolonialism”- the ‘after’ referring both to its life/lives after the proclamation of its death, and also to its life after/outside the study of literature. In what ways can/has postcolonial theory been taken up by artists, architects and scholars of art and architecture, by those who study politics, anthropology and sociology, and area studies, and to what effects? Does it merely provide another way of ‘reading’ texts, to does it have the potential to destabilize and reconfigure practices and disciplines? And what happens to postcolonial theory when it moves into politics, art, sociology, and area studies; what mutations does it undergo, or need to undergo? Drawing upon speakers from a range of geographical (India, the U.S., South Africa, Palestine, the U.K.) and disciplinary locations (everything from architecture to art, film, music, politics. . .), involving practitioners as well as theorists, this conference asks whether postcolonial theory still has any life in it- and what sorts of lives it is leading once it travels outside of literature. Confirmed speakers include: Harry Harootunian, History and East Asian Studies, New York University Lindsay Waters, Harvard University Press (Executive Editor of Humanities) Ivor Chipkin, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg Eyal Weizman, Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths Robert Fine, Sociology, Warwick University Sandi Hilal, UNRWA, West Bank Rangan Chakravarty, film producer, KolkotaAlessandro Petti, International Art Academy, Palestine Gurminder Bhambra, Sociology, Warwick University Paramita Brahmachari, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkota Sonia Boyce, Artist, AHRC Research Fellow, Wimbledon College of Art & Design, University of the Arts London Andrew Cross, Artist Marko Daniel, Curator of Public Programmes, Tate Modern Leon Wainwright, Manchester Metropolitan University Visit the conference homepage here: http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/postcolonial-studies/afterlives.php.

"Re-Imagining Identity: New Directions in Postcolonial Studies," Postcolonial Studies Association, Waterford Institute of Technology, May 6-8, 2009.

This inaugural conference of the Postcolonial Studies Association will focus on a broad re-consideration of the cultural, political, theoretical and practical re-imaginings of the concept of 'identity' as it relates to the field of Postcolonialism and the wider Humanities and the Social Sciences. The conference aims both to explore current understandings of 'identity' in a multicultural, globalised and conflicted world, and to encourage disciplinary self-reflexivity. We welcome papers that interrogate the conceptual category of identity itself, as well as those that relate to the ways specific identities are constructed, assigned or imagined. Questions to be asked will include: 'What is the future of Postcolonialism as a discipline?' and: 'What is the relationship between received understandings of "identity", specific formulations of key contemporary identities, and our understanding of "the postcolonial"?' The PSA invites papers from academics working in the disciplines of Literature, History, Cultural Studies, Film, Human Geography, Linguistics, Politics, Psychology, Religious Studies, Art, Music, Media & Communication and related fields. Our aim is to bring together a wide variety of scholarly interests and methodological approaches. Paper or panel topics may focus on the following conceptual intersections: § Identity, Religion and Spirituality (the secular & sacred, New Age & alternative spiritualities, the Enlightenment, sectarianism, religious symbolism, fundamentalism) § Identity and Time (history, memory, policy, repetition, development, modernity, eternity, death) § Identity and Language (language policy, seizing the pen, language as mission and calling; propaganda) § Identity and Politics (resistance, war, terror) § Identity and Space (regions, blocs, global flows, the EU and the wider world, the environment) § Identity, Theory and Disciplinary Boundaries (postcolonialism as a discipline, theoretical approaches, the policing of knowledge, multidisciplinarity, comparative postcolonialisms) Panels will normally comprise three 20-minute papers. Proposal acceptance is subject to organising committee approval. To submit a paper or panel proposal please contact: Dr Christine ODowd-Smyth - codowdsmyth@wit.ie or psa@postcolonialstudiesassociation.co.uk. Closing date for abstract submissions: 1 December 2008 For more information please contact: Dr Gerri Kimber - gerri@thekimbers.co.uk or Dr Marta Vizcaya Echano - martavizcaya@hotmail.com Visit the conference homepage here: http://www.postcolonialstudiesassociation.co.uk/id63.html.

Ouma, Steve Odero, and Aakash Singh. "Review of Mary-Jo Delvecchio, et al., eds. POSTCOLONIAL DISORDERS." MOR August 5, 2008.

Delvecchio, Mary-Jo, Sandra Teresa Hyde, Sarah Pinto, and Byron Good, eds. Postcolonial Disorders. Berkeley: U of California P, 2007. The overarching thesis, as articulated in the Editors' Introduction, is that colonialism had a distortive effect on the psyche of the colonized and that this distortion continues to manifest itself in the lives of individuals in the postcolonial world. The Editors begin by defining three key terms: subjectivity, disorders, and postcolonial. The definition of subjectivity provided is curious, however, especially given that it is the focus of the book as a whole. Although the scope of the meaning of subjectivity is at first limited to the quality of being an individual subject of a postcolony, as soon as the reader reaches the first chapter, she finds that the state is also a subject. The focus thus shifts from individual subjectivity to the subjectivity of polities, but the transition is made without the help of the copious traditional scholarly material on the topic. Quite the contrary, reference is made to the deficiencies of the literature on subjectivity, from Foucault's archaeology of the modern subject, through Lacanian analyses of political subjectivity and gender, to Judith Butler's linking of subjectivity and subjection. The irony of such an exercise is that the works referred to are theoretico-philosophical in nature and thus ought not to be measured against the essays in this book, which purport to be ethnographic instead. The term disorders puns on the clinical or psychiatric sense of a malady, as well as referring to the contradiction between the 'order' imposed throughout the colonial experience and that which has prevailed in the postcolonial era. All the authors included in the volume seem to agree on a fundamental axiom, that the contemporary postcolonial situation has been profoundly and determinatively impacted by the colonial regime, which may be characterized by violence, subjugation, appropriation, exploitation, marginalization, and so on. Thus, disorders are to be expected, and postcolonial, then, naturally gets defined in terms of traumatic memory and imposed institutional structures. . . . Read the whole review here: http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=4392.