Past Events
A talk by Walter Mignolo:
“Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option”
Thursday 5 March, 2009
6pm, Ben Pimlott Lecture Theatre, Goldsmiths, New Cross
Free and all welcome.
Walter Mignolo is a leading figure in Latin American Studies and Postcolonial Studies. He is the William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and Romance Studies, and Director of the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities, at Duke University. Mignolo's earlier work, published in Spanish, focused on semiotics, discourse analysis and literary theory. Since the 1980s he has written extensively in English and Spanish on the invention of the Americas, the coloniality of knowledge, and the political, ethical and epistemological imperative to decolonise knowledge and knowledge production. His work, which has been translated into Portuguese, French and Russian, includes The Darker Side of the Renaissance (1994 and 2003, awarded the Katherine Kovacs Singer Prize from the MLA), Local Histories/Global Designs (2000) and The Idea of Latin America (2005, awarded the Frantz Fanon Prize from the Caribbean Philosophical Association.)
This event is hosted by the Centre for Postcolonial Studies and the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths. For further information email:
Sanjay Seth: s.seth@gold.ac.uk
Francisco Carballo: cup01fc@gold.ac.uk
After Imperial Reason: Gandhi and the New Cosmopolitanism
March 3, 5-6:30 p.m., Senior Common Room, Richard Hoggart Building
Recent reincarnations of Kant's cosmopolitan meditations rest on the expansive promise of transcending thick, meaning-bearing forms of association and belonging in favour of a thin, but universal (and universalizing), commitment to humanity. The new cosmopolitanism would produce a post-Westphalian ethics in a world of strangers. A key plank of this post-secular sensibility is the evacuation of religious attachments in modernity's global march. Relying on Gandhi's critique of modern civilization, this paper challenges the lure of cosmopolitan impulse nested in secularism. Rather, the latter may impose the hegemony of imperial reason in occluding alternatives based on recognition of difference and non-hierarchical cultural agency.
Speaker: Mustapha Kamal Pasha is Sixth Century Chair and Head of International Relations at the University of Aberdeen. His principal areas of research include Critical International Relations (IR) Theory; Human Security; International Political Economy; and Islamic Studies. He is the author and co-editor of several books, and is currently working on a monograph on the confluence of Islam and IR.
Literature in a Multilingual World
A leading Indian poet and academic, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, gives a talk on Literature in a Multilingual World: Sant Kabir, Rudyard Kipling, and Vernacular English
5.00 p.m. Friday 26 February
Senior Common Room, Richard Hoggart Bldg
Arvind Mehrotra argues that while multilingualism has been a part of Indian literature for a long time, we are still looking for ways of talking about it. A common way of doing so is through the mother-tongue, nativist model. According to this model, the mother-tongue (Kannada, Tamil, whatever) lies at a deeper level than English, and Indian poets who write in English are constantly ferrying poetic material from mother-tongue to this other language. Using the work of George Steiner and examples he gives of Nabokov and Borges, Mehrotra asks if there are more sophisticated and productive ways of looking at the whole issue.
Speaker: Arvind Krishna Mehrotra was born in Lahore 1947. He has published a number of collections of poetry in English and one of translation (a volume of Prakrit love poems recently reissued in Penguin Classics). He has edited the History of Indian literature in English (New York: Columbia University Press) and The Oxford India anthology of twelve modern Indian poets (Delhi: Oxford University Press) and The last bungalow: writings on Allahabad (New Delhi: Penguin Books). Arvind was nominated for the chair of Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford in 2009
Israel and Palestine: Past and Present
Avi Shlaim, University of Oxford
309, Richard Hoggart Building
3 February 2010, 4pm
A talk about the Israel-Palestine conflict by Avi Shlaim, Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford. Avi Shlaim was born in Baghdad in 1945 and grew up in Israel. He is a renowned historian of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and is author of many books including Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement and the Partition of Palestine (1988) and The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2000) and editor of The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (2001, 2007). His latest book Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations has recently been published by Verso.
Co-hosted by the Department of Politics, Centre for Postcolonial Studies and Goldsmiths Students' Union.
A lecture by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak:
“Old Women”
Monday, 11 May 2009, 4pm in the Ian Gulland Lecture Theatre. Sponsored by Goldsmiths Centre for Postcolonial Studies, Centre for Cultural Studies, Dept Media and Comms and the Graduate School. All welcome.
Afterlives of Postcolonialism
An international conference on Postcolonial theory
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. On October 25-26 2008, the Centre for Postcolonial Studies at Goldsmiths organised 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. The participants in the conference asked the following questions, amongst others:
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, Afterlives of Postcolonialism conference asked whether postcolonial theory still has any life in it- and what sorts of lives it is leading once it travels outside of literature.
Inaugural lecture
Professor Sanjay Seth: 'Reason Unhinged: the non-western world and modern, western knowledge' Jan 13, 2009 5:30 pm
Listen to the lecture:
Reason Unhinged: the non-western world and modern, western knowledge - mp3
States, Armies and Empires: Armed Forces and Society in World Politics
A seminar by Dr Tarak Barkawi, senior lecturer in war studies at the Centre of International Studies, University of Cambridge.
Senior Common Room, Richard Hoggart Building
Wednesday 17 February 2010, 5-6:30 p.m.
This paper offers a critical inquiry into the international organization of violence. The international system of sovereign states entails certain assumptions about polities, armies and societies, assumptions that rest on Eurocentric histories and accounts of political-military relations. This paper critiques these histories and offers an alternative account which locates armed forces amid the world of flows and circulation, and which is based upon the political-military dimensions of imperialism and the co-constitution of core and periphery. Barkawi argues that ‘foreign forces’—those recruited from beyond the boundaries of the polity—have played a key role in the making of the modern world, not least in shaping civil-military relations in the West and enabling intervention and expansion outside it. Here, the international relations of armed force are seen as generative of both domestic and world orders, but not in the manner suggested by Eurocentric inquiry.
Tarak Barkawi specialises in the study of war, armed forces and society with a focus on conflict between the West and the global South. His publications include Globalization and War (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), ‘Peoples, Homelands and Wars? Ethnicity, the Military and Battle among British Imperial Forces in the War against Japan’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 46, #1 (January 2004), and, with Mark Laffey, ‘The Postcolonial Moment in Security Studies’, Review of International Studies, 32, 4 (2006).
The Politics of Knowledge: Latin American Studies and Postcolonial Theory
International Conference sponsored by the Centre for Postcolonial Studies and the British Academy’s UK-Latin American and the Caribbean Link Programme
6 and 7 of May 2010
Goldsmiths, University of London
Small Cinema
Richard Hoggart Building. (MB)
This conference examines and seeks to intervene in an ongoing debate on the politics of knowledge. For at least two centuries now, the only knowledge which has been accorded “respectable” status, whether the site of its production is London or Brasilia, is the knowledge produced within the modern human sciences, sciences that were born in Europe. In recent times intellectuals and activists, especially but not only in Latin America, have been asking whether such knowledge is in fact indubitably superior to the knowledge which it has displaced, and have asked questions about the social, political and ethical consequences of the adoption of modern western knowledge. This project aims to bring such debates in Latin America into conversation with currents discussions in the English speaking world, as a first step towards creating an ongoing dialogue between scholars from Americas and the United Kingdom.
The conference will bring a select group of internationally renowned specialists in the humanities and social sciences to Goldsmiths, University of London thanks to the generous sponsorship from the British Academy UK-Latin American and the Caribbean Link Programme. Our invited speakers have been invited mainly from the fields of anthropology, political theory, literary and cultural studies and they come from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, United Kingdom and the United States of America. They will focus on questions regarding the epistemic status of modern sciences, and the politics of knowledge production, paying special attention to the role of the university.
Confirmed participants:
Claudia Briones (Universidad de Buenos Aires)
Esteban Krotz (Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán)
Gustavo Lins Ribeiro (Universidade de Brasilia)
Walter Mignolo (Duke University)
Daniel Mato (Universidad Nacional Tres de Febrero)
Eduardo Restrepo ((Pontifica Universidad Javeriana)
John Gledhill (University of Manchester)
Nicola Miller (UCL)
Michael Dutton (Goldsmiths)
Sanjay Seth (Goldsmiths)
Steven Rubenstein (University of Liverpool)
Stephen Nugent (Goldsmiths)
Andrew Canessa (Essex)
Lucy Taylor (University of Aberystwyth)
FREE AND OPEN TO ALL
Since we have limited space we recommend that people interested in attending contact the organizers beforehand to reserve seats.
Programme: The Politics of Knowledge
For further details contact:
Francisco Carballo: aikenconrad@hotmail.com