Overview

"Postcolonial Studies and Beyond" will bring together scholars in a variety of disciplines to consider the ways in which colonial discourse studies and postcolonial modes of thought have shaped intellectual developments in their fields and beyond.

The organizers have been careful not to try and define too narrowly the agenda of the conference. We invited a wide range of scholars working out of different contexts, disciplines and interests to either creatively interpret/re-visit any of the major debates in these fields, or ask new questions that seem important. The titles of their papers and the abstracts provided by them (available on this website) make clear the wide spectrum of methods and issues that will be discussed at the conference. The idea is not to redress or confirm existing critiques of post-colonial studies, so much as to think about the intellectual, institutional and pedagogic agendas that will define the field for the next decade and more. We have planned a compact conference with no parallel sessions, which means that all the participants will have the opportunity to engage in productive dialogues throughout the conference. Participants will think about postcolonial studies and beyond by attending to discourses of globalization, by turning "subaltern" questions to new objects of inquiry, by expanding the geographical and methodological reach of postcolonial inquiry, and by bringing optics as diverse as poetry and economics to bear on questions of core, periphery, modernism and history.

The conference grows out of our sense that even as postcolonial studies are necessarily interdisciplinary, and have been shaped by scholars in departments of literature, history, anthropology, sociology and cultural studies (and several other fields) working in different geographic contexts, debates about postcoloniality often tend to reinforce disciplinary and locational boundaries. At the same time, no matter how interdisciplinary we are as scholars, as teachers we often have to work within certain institutional and disciplinary histories and constraints. Some of these debates are ongoing, such as the one about the supposed "culturalist" bias of post-colonial studies or its conflicted relationship to "Third World" area studies. Others are relatively new, such as whether postcolonial studies has calcified concepts of modernity, and what usefulness its methods and theories may have to studies of pre-modern or early modern cultures. Yet other questions have been precipitated by the events of September 11, 2001, and by the geopolitical developments across the globe which have followed. The conference aims to generate dialogues across and about these boundaries, but also to go beyond that to consider future agendas and visions. We do not wish for facile agreement or solidarity--if anything, we hope that differences in objects of study and in methodologies will generate a genuinely critical reflection on some of the major debates surrounding the provenance and politics of what has come to be institutionalized as postcolonial studies, and to raise critical questions about the ongoing pressure it exerts in and outside of the academic disciplines.

As a lead-up to, and as preparation for, the conference, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory is hosting an on-going series of seminars during the academic year 2001-02. The seminars have been meeting roughly every two weeks since last September, and have brought together faculty and students from a wide range of departments. Each seminar has considered, via readings circulated in advance by two seminar leaders, the relationship between postcolonial studies and particular disciplines, histories or issues. We have discussed how postcolonial studies or postcolonial theory have shaped, energized or distorted ideas and practices within particular disciplines; whether or not pedagogic or institutional practices have changed as a result; what passes for postcolonial approaches and methods within the discipline, and in what ways postcolonial studies has altered or reinforced disciplinary boundaries or interdisciplinary efforts, particularly in the case of "issues" and "themes" that cannot be housed in any one discipline. We examined the intellectual histories of anthropology, history, sociology, literary studies and women's studies. Often we consider a particular issue by concentrating on a discipline or subject: thus, for example, the question of "diaspora" was addressed via a focus on Caribbean materials, the question of "area studies" by concentrating on Latin America, globalization by looking at conversations between sociologists and political economists, and the tensions between "third world" and "metropolitan" theory by examining studies of Africa. We are sure these conversations will enrich discussions at the conference itself; certainly they have brought many of us on this campus together as an intellectual community.

We plan to publish materials arising out of this conference, and we expect that the resulting volume will be a consequential intervention in the development of Postcolonial Studies. We also look forward to shared and continuing dialogues with all those who will attend the conference, as panelists or as members of their audience.

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