Conference on Margins, Globalization and the Postcolonial

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Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh

&

Indian Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Association (IACLALS), DELHI

Conference on

Margins, Globalization and the Postcolonial

February 20-22, 2014

Even as postcolonial studies continues to engage with 'margins' and 'marginalities', at the conference we would like to step back and allow time perhaps for some form of stock-taking. Historically speaking, it is true that debates around ‘local’ sites and forms of knowledge/experience have made their way from the ‘margins’ to the ‘centres’ of global cultural production. However, it is at such a comfortable conjuncture that we must undertake the task of reviewing the relevance of discourses on marginality. Our conference would effectively be a gesture towards hinting at the possible future(s) of/at the margin(s), by asking a few questions. First, having succeeded in recording the voice of a spectral ‘other’ in the annals of History, should we stop fetishizing our victimhood as the singular basis to our claims for recognition? Is such an easy identification with the need to ‘write back’ to wrongs of the colonial enterprise leading us into a complacency of martyrdom? Is it time we realise that the reclamation of the postcolony lies not in a mere export of the ‘marginal’ over to the canonical? Or – and, here lies the second question – should we rather discern in this transnational flow of ‘marginalities’ an attempt to ‘market’ them as fashionable? In this, the contemporary moment bears witness to the heightened power of capital more than ever before. As the history of capitalism would prove, the most effective logic of dominance lies in representing the interests of power as the ‘general interests’ of society at large – and in thus, co-opting the powerless or marginalized. Faced as we are with such “universalizing” tendencies of capital which conceive of people as abstract disembodied labour, perhaps the only resistance lies in re-emphasizing ‘difference’ and ‘marginality’ as the basis to our individuality. Is it left for us now to multiply our marginalisms as a political strategy to withstand the globalized forces of homogenization?

In this, the conference would also hope to urge thoughts on the nature and means of such a reiterative project of the ‘margins’. What are the literary or cultural forms that best enable a re-articulation of the politics of marginality? What is the role of the translator and of translation? Does the translation of Dalit or adivasi writing not run the risk of an ethnic proselytization? Is the autobiographical mode (in ‘impure’ literary forms like the diary, memoir, letter, etc.) a productive strategy to counter the biographical strain in dominant history-writing?  

               

The conference theme takes off from an understanding that societal change is dialectical and is always effected through arrivals, departures and crossings that continue to complicate the insider/outsider, centre/periphery and other binaries. It might be helpful therefore to move to an exploration of the variants of power, in all their contingent, contextual configurations and to see how these contest different status quoisms – even as identities within a Foucauldian understanding remain critically fluid and uncircumscribed, not always keeping to flow. We hope that a reading of the gains and impasses within the politics and praxis that have defined Poco's 'theories of margins' so far would allow for productive divergences and differences.

Some key perspectives that we seek to frame conversation around are typically those that illustrate issues of nation and nationhood, subalternity and sovereignty, literature and its canons, sociocultural groupings of caste, class, gender and sexuality, though not confined to them. The activists and the academicians, the entrepreneurs and the bureaucrats would participate in the Conference.

The conference will be co-hosted by the Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh. The secretary for the conference will be Prof Akshaya Kumar:akshayakumarg@gmail.com. You are requested to send the abstract of your paper by 05 Nov., 2013. Only registered participants would be allowed to participate and read the paper. The registration fee for the three-day Conference is Rs. 2000/-- (for Teachers/ JRFs) and Rs. 1500/ -- (for non-JRF Research scholars). 

All Ph.D. and M.Phil. scholars are expected to register for the Conference. The Conference-form is available with Dr. Surbhi Goel and Prof. Akshaya Kumar. It is also available in the Office of the Department. 

Department of English and Cultural Studies,

Panjab University, Chandigarh

&

Indian Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Association (IACLALS), DELHI

Conference on

Margins, Globalization and the Postcolonial

February 20-22, 2014

Registration Form

Name of the Participant (Write in block letters) _________________________________

Name of the Institution ________________________________

____________________________________________________

____________________________________________________

Designation:  ________________________________________

Title of the Paper (in case it has been accepted) ____________________________________

____________________________________________________________________________

____________________________________________________________________________

Address ____________________________________________

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Email ID _________________________________________

Phone No.________________________________________

Date: ______________________

Signatures

 Regards

-Deepali Agravat