A Translocal World? Exploring the Postcolonial Today
A Translocal World? Exploring the Postcolonial Today, the 8th SLACLALS conference, was held on 29-30 June, 2016 at The Royal Mall, Kandy.
Keynote
G. J. V. Prasad: “Every City Mine, All People Family”
A Translocal World? Exploring the Postcolonial Today: Call for Papers
Globalization in different hues permeates all aspects of contemporary life. The global movement of capital, its rapid pace and its intrusion into the minutiae of the very fabric of society has led to postmodern geographers such as David Harvey to argue that we live in a world where time and space have become compressed. Older models of globalization, such as imperialism, or the classic Marxist center-periphery model, seem unable to cope with this new reality and thinkers such as Arjun Appadurai propose that we now inhabit a world where culture flows ‘translocally’. Appadurai’s proposal is that rather than viewing globalization as an exclusively top-down hegemonic process we need to be attentive to how there is a global movement of things (people, ideas, objects) at an intimate local level, generating ‘translocal’ realities.
For postcolonial literary and language studies, these developments have a number of implications. Much postcolonial work from the 1980s to the 1990s was framed by the nation, either implicitly or explicitly. The idea of the ‘translocal’, however, implies that we need to now think and feel beyond the nation. This conference invites papers that reflect on our contemporary postcolonial reality from a translocal focus. How does contemporary fiction, poetry and drama engage with the idea of the translocal? How do current practices in language reflect translocal trends? Is the translocal a conceptual category that we can extend to the past or is it confined to the contemporary moment? Does the translocal mean that we can abandon the nation or does the nation still need to figure in our critical vocabulary? Can the translocal hide or suppress the hegemonic realities of globalization? These are some of the questions, among many potential others, which this conference hopes to explore. We invite papers from literature, language studies and cultural studies which look at the various ways in which postcolonial literature is relevant to these changing social and cultural realities. While the translocal is the main thematic focus many different strands of postcolonial literary studies can potentially feed into this concept. A few topics are suggested below. Other relevant subjects are also welcome.
Postcolonial literature, the nation and the world, Gender postcoloniality and the translocal, Globalisation and postcolonial literatures, Glocalisation and postcolonial literatures, Conflict, international human rights and literature, Diasporas, nations and localities, thinking and feeling beyond the nation, Literary forms, hybridity and local realities.
Globalization in different hues permeates all aspects of contemporary life. The global movement of capital, its rapid pace and its intrusion into the minutiae of the very fabric of society has led to postmodern geographers such as David Harvey to argue that we live in a world where time and space have become compressed. Older models of globalization, such as imperialism, or the classic Marxist center-periphery model, seem unable to cope with this new reality and thinkers such as Arjun Appadurai propose that we now inhabit a world where culture flows ‘translocally’. Appadurai’s proposal is that rather than viewing globalization as an exclusively top-down hegemonic process we need to be attentive to how there is a global movement of things (people, ideas, objects) at an intimate local level, generating ‘translocal’ realities.
For postcolonial literary and language studies, these developments have a number of implications. Much postcolonial work from the 1980s to the 1990s was framed by the nation, either implicitly or explicitly. The idea of the ‘translocal’, however, implies that we need to now think and feel beyond the nation. This conference invites papers that reflect on our contemporary postcolonial reality from a translocal focus. How does contemporary fiction, poetry and drama engage with the idea of the translocal? How do current practices in language reflect translocal trends? Is the translocal a conceptual category that we can extend to the past or is it confined to the contemporary moment? Does the translocal mean that we can abandon the nation or does the nation still need to figure in our critical vocabulary? Can the translocal hide or suppress the hegemonic realities of globalization? These are some of the questions, among many potential others, which this conference hopes to explore. We invite papers from literature, language studies and cultural studies which look at the various ways in which postcolonial literature is relevant to these changing social and cultural realities. While the translocal is the main thematic focus many different strands of postcolonial literary studies can potentially feed into this concept. A few topics are suggested below. Other relevant subjects are also welcome.
Postcolonial literature, the nation and the world, Gender postcoloniality and the translocal, Globalisation and postcolonial literatures, Glocalisation and postcolonial literatures, Conflict, international human rights and literature, Diasporas, nations and localities, thinking and feeling beyond the nation, Literary forms, hybridity and local realities.
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