Monday 17 January 2011

Registration now open for Living Beyond Theory

The Postcolonial Perspectives symposium Living Beyond Theory: Insterdisciplinary Perspectives on the Postcolonial has been extended to a two-day event on the 10th and 11th February 2011.

Registration is free but places are limited. To find out more about the event, including the programme and paper abstracts, and to register please visit http://www.york.ac.uk/hrc/events/2010-11/spring/conferences/living-beyond-theory/

We look forward to seeing you there.

Saturday 30 October 2010

Reading Group Meeting 3rd November

We're pleased to announce that the Postcolonial Perspectives reading group will hold its first meeting of the academic year from 4.30 to 6 p.m. on Wednesday 3 November, in BSB 007 (Berrick Saul Building). All postgraduates and staff with an interest in the field are invited to attend.

Our first meeting of the year will focus on the ways in which a range of disciplines have responded to Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), a seminal text in the development of postcolonial studies as a subset of literary theory. In preparation for the meeting, please read at least one of the following articles. All are available online via the Library, apart from Zeynep Çelik’s essay – photocopies of this will be available to collect beside the photocopier on the lower ground floor of the Berrick Saul Building Postgraduate Study Area. If you are unable to access this, please let us know and we can arrange to get a copy to you.

• Çelik, Zeynep. "Speaking back to Orientalist discourse" in Orientalism's Interlocutors (in library, book on visual culture)

• Head, Matthew. "Musicology on Safari: Orientalism and the Spectre of Postcolonial Theory." Music Analysis 22.1-2 (2003): 211-230.

• Sax, William S. "The Hall of Mirrors: Orientalism, Anthropology, and the Other." American Anthropologist 100.2 (1998): 292-301.

• O'Hanlon, Rosalind, and David Washbrook. "After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World." Comparative Studies in Society and History 34 (1992): 141-167.

• Abu-Lughod, Lila. "Orientalism and Middle East Feminist Studies" (Review). Feminist Studies 27.1 (2001): 101-113.

Other important events to add to your calendar are the inaugural Postcolonial Perspectives lecture on 29 November, when Dr Yael Maurer from Tel Aviv University will present a paper entitled “Rage against the machine? Cyberspace narratives in Salman Rushdie’s Fury”; and LIVING BEYOND THEORY: Interdisciplinary perspectives on the postcolonial, a one-day postgraduate symposium to be held in York on 11 February 2011.

Tuesday 26 October 2010

LIVING BEYOND THEORY: Interdisciplinary perspectives on the postcolonial

As the field of postcolonial studies has gradually enacted its own colonisation of academic departments across the humanities an escalating self-reflexive urge has become apparent. Increasingly, totalising theories of postcolonial experiences have been seen - for all their complexity – as all too simplistic accounts of the irreducible variety to be found in the experiences and actions of nominally ‘postcolonial’ peoples. As such, the future of postcolonial studies lies in an ever more concerted effort at troubling the postcolonial paradigm, rooting out points of tension, and in establishing new ways of approaching the heterogeneity of the discipline. This future is being written now and it thus falls to young academics to establish for themselves where postcolonial studies should be moving.

Living Beyond Theory is an interdisciplinary postgraduate symposium hosted by the Postcolonial Perspectives reading group at the University of York on Friday 11th February 2011. The symposium is directed towards the problematising of the postcolonial paradigm through an attempt to pay heed to the lived experience of those people who live and have lived within geographic areas affected by colonisation as well as people who, despite not being the direct descendants of colonial situations, enact identities and political positions that take much from the postcolonial project.

The symposium provides a platform for postgraduate students to share their research with a diverse range of other postgraduates in the field(s) of postcolonial studies. The symposium will involve a series of panels framed by two plenary speakers (Simon Obendorf, Lincoln and Ruth Craggs, St. Mary’s University College Twickenham) and culminating in a workshop on the future of postcolonial studies led by 3 early career academics.

While Living Beyond Theory is a conference aimed at building connections between the many disciplines that traditionally make up postcolonial studies, it also seeks to encourage engagement with disciplines that have not always fallen comfortably within those traditions. It is highly likely that the future of postcolonial studies will lie in the expansion of the discipline’s insights beyond its previously narrow boundaries.

Papers are encouraged from any current postgraduate working in the many areas of postcolonial studies and engaging with either side of the traditional coloniser/colonised dichotomy. We especially welcome papers that offer new and dynamic approaches to the space between the theoretical and the experiential.

Please send submissions of up to 300 words for papers of 20 mins as well as a brief academic bio of 50 to 100 words to the organisers (Anna Bocking-Welch, James Alexander Fraser, Isabelle Hesse, and Sarah Pett) at livingbeyondtheory@events.york.ac.uk by 22nd November 2010.

Friday 11 June 2010

Empire and Class

Our next Postcolonial Perspectives meeting will take place next Tuesday, 15 June, from 3.15-5.15 in the Treehouse in the BSB, where we will be discussing 'Empire and Class'.

Suggested reading material(available from the table next to the photocopier on the lower ground floor of the BSB or alternatively you can get the books out of the library if you can't make it to the BSB):
* Epstein, James. 'Taking Class Notes on Empire'. In Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose (eds.). At Home with the Empire.
* Dirks, Nicholas B. 'Introduction: The Modernity of Caste' In Nicholas B. Dirks Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India.

In addition to the critical texts, it would be useful if everyone could think of one or two examples from literature, film, art, .... which represents the issue of 'Empire and Class' and in how far it agrees (or disagrees) with the issues raised in the texts.

Wednesday 24 February 2010

Postcolonial Pictures

Our next meeting will be on Monday, 8 March from 4-6 pm in BSB 007.

We will be discussing colonial and postcolonial art, in particular how art relates to power and how it can be used as a way of ‘painting back’.

In keeping with the spirit of inter-disciplinary collaboration, your task is to select an image that, for you, represents the postcolonial, and to forward it to us as a good-quality jpeg or url to pocoperspectives@googlemail.com. We're particularly interested in images produced and/or appropriated by colonial powers, although images of resistance are also welcome. It would be helpful if you could also (re)familiarize yourself with the context of the image, its production, circulation, reception, and so on. We will then collate the images into a slideshow to be screened in the meeting. In order for us to do so, we need to have received your submissions by 4 p.m. on Friday, 5 March.

The readings for the next meeting are:
- Mackenzie, John. "Orientalism in Art" in Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995, pp.43-70.
- Ryan, James R. Conclusion. Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualisation of the British Empire. London: Reaktion, 1997.

They will be available to collect from the table next to the printer on the lower ground floor of the BSB from Wednesday 23 February. In case you can't make it to the BSB, both books are available from the library on short loan.

We hope to see you on the 8th!

Tuesday 2 February 2010

Reading Material (12/02/10)

The reading for the first meeting, in which we will be discussing what it means to approach our disciplines from a postcolonial perspective, is:

- Julia Bush’s 'Moving On: and Looking Back' History Workshop Journal , 36, (1993), 183-194.
http://bit.ly/dvAQPq
- Ella Shohat’s ‘Notes on the “Postcolonial”’. Social Text No.31/32 (1992), 99-113.
http://bit.ly/c0M1cL

The meeting is from 4-6pm in BSB 007 on Friday 12th Feb.

Monday 1 February 2010

Introduction

Postcolonial Perspectives is an interdisciplinary postgraduate reading group at the University of York that seeks to explore both old and new ways of thinking about the postcolonial. The reading group will meet every three weeks to read and discuss critical theory, historical texts, and cultural products. Though the reading will reflect the members' specific research interests and concerns, we intend to use these contexts as case studies from which to approach the larger issues at stake in the theorization of postcoloniality in various disciplines. This promises to be an exciting addition to postgraduate life at York, and is a great opportunity to broaden your understanding of a key critical field in the academy and beyond.