7th AISCLI Conference Bologna 14-15 January 2016
Postcolonial Passages into the 21st Century:
Redrawing lines of engagement across literatures
and cultures in English
confirmed keynote speaker Prof. Paul Gilroy (King’s College London)
Call for papers
Historically, the (post)colonial condition has unleashed a chain of movements, relocations and re-writings. Ethnic, racial, religious, gendered and sexual identities have been called into question, and asked to overcome more or less physical limits, to (re)define, name and re-name themselves, to find new ways to tell their stories. As Ania Loomba and others write, the postcolonial has always been a “porous identity” (Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, 2005).
In the recent decades before and after 2000, this porosity has pushed scholars and intellectuals in the field of postcolonial criticism and critical theory to develop fruitful, trans-disciplinary approaches that implied, as David Farrier writes, a move beyond established divisions “between discursive formations, and redrawing lines of
engagement” (Postcolonial Asylum, 2011). The 1990s, for example, witnessed the emergence of Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic paradigm, along with a related interest in Diaspora Studies. More recently, Gilroy promoted a diasporic ‘between-camps thinking’ aimed at connecting different vulnerable minorities (Between Camps, 2000).
Postcolonial Passages into the 21st Century intends to analyse the heterogeneous crossings and subsequent transformations of postcolonial writing and criticism in their encounter and overlapping with a series of discursive formations, such as globalization studies, border studies, migration studies, holocaust and trauma studies, decolonial
studies, ecocriticism, geocriticism, World literature, etc. The conference also asks to what extent one can agree with Timothy Brennan’s assertion that “postcolonial studies have done little to keep pace with the changing forms of imperialism as an actual set of strategies and developments” (“The image-function of the periphery”, 2005), and it aims to debate in what ways, and through what disciplinary encounters, postcolonial theories and practices may maintain their cutting-edge critical potential in a context of
pervasive neoliberal ideology.
We encourage paper proposals exploring the manifold relations between the postcolonial and these, and other, recent discursive fields, through theoretical reflections and/or analyses of fiction, poetry, drama and non-fiction, but also visual and performative artistic materials and experiences. A comparative, interdisciplinary approach is encouraged.
Please submit proposals for 15-minute papers (250-300 words) and a short bio profile by 30 September 2015 to both the following addresses:
info@aiscli.it<mailto:info@aiscli.it>
fcattani@gmail.com<mailto:fcattani@gmail.com>
Conference committee
Silvia Albertazzi Francesco Cattani Federica Zullo
Annalisa Oboe e il Direttivo AISCLI