[Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.] The Postcolonial Research Affiliation (PSA) presents the convention “Archipelagic Reminiscence: Intersecting Geographies, Histories and Disciplines,” to happen on the College of Mauritius, August 2-4, 2022. The deadline for proposals is March 20, 2022.
The PSA invitations contributions in English and French for 20-minute papers. For single shows, ship a 300-word summary, accompanied by a 100-word bio-note. Panel proposals (for panels of three papers) should embody: a panel title and brief description; a 300-word summary for every presentation, accompanied by a 100-word bio-note. Ship to archipelagicmemory@gmail.com.
Description: The idea of the “archipelago” has been more and more mentioned and deployed by historians, social scientists, literary and cultural research students because the second half of the twentieth century. The time period originated in classical Greece to designate the Aegean waters binding the center of European civilisation, however because the starting of the abroad exploration and colonial growth by European powers from the early fifteenth century onwards, and following a technique of metonymy and metaphor, it got here to establish any set of islands forming a coherent topographical unit.
It’s certainly from the decolonising seas of the Atlantic and Indo-Pacific oceans that new meanings and theorisations of the archipelago started to emerge from the Nineteen Fifties. Whereas the newly unbiased nations of Southeast Asia developed an “archipelagic doctrine” because the integral precept of their declare to postcolonial nation-statehood, plenty of Caribbean intellectuals mobilised the archipelago as an analytical framework for disrupting the notion of insularity and for pondering past linear narratives of historic, nationwide and cultural improvement.
For Kamau Brathwaite, the shared histories, languages and constructions of feeling of the Caribbean islands fashioned the material of a submarine unity premised on creolisation and cultural variety. Additionally insisting on interconnectedness and rejecting a imaginative and prescient of islandness as being outlined by isolation and uniformity, Édouard Glissant formulated the idea of “archipelagic pondering” as a trembling and vibrant epistemological various pivoted on the idea of relation, and never essentially contingent on the fabric geographies of island groupings, for continents too, certainly the entire world, may be archipelagised and creolised. Transferring from, in addition to past, the Antillean sea, Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s “meta-archipelago” equally resisted the taxonomy of centre and periphery and revealed the palimpsestic imaginaries connecting the various oceans of human expertise. Newer theoretical and methodological paradigms have additional transcended the terraqueous areas of seas and islands to hint discontinuous but interlinked geographies over a planetary scale.
The figurality inscribed within the notion of archipelago and the potential open-endedness of its corresponding theoretical frameworks invite us to take heed of what might fall by way of the fractures generated by the epistemic instability of archipelagic dynamics. Taking the Indian Ocean as a principal web site for investigating new meanings and experiences of the archipelagic, the convention will marshal and construct upon the totally different strands of archipelagic pondering within the Caribbean to discover related histories throughout oceans and seas to instigate a theoretical dialogue on memory-production encompassing the Indian, Atlantic, Pacific and Southern Oceans and their articulated spatiality.
The convention seeks to handle what it means to recollect the previous within the current and how you can think about future trajectories in particular person, collective, in addition to nationwide id in archipelagic areas and cultures. What occurs when native modes of articulating time, house and reminiscence sit aspect by aspect with Western modernity and imperialism? When the current, similar to the previous, is conflictual in nature? If archipelagos should not merely goal geography, however culturally contingent and politically constructed, then the query of by whom and for whom sure areas are conceptualised as archipelagos and others aren’t begs consideration. What has not but been considered archipelagically? What has been enabled and what has been precluded by pondering primarily by way of the mannequin of the Caribbean archipelago and its anti-mimetic patterns of repetition and distinction? What if ethnic, nationwide and archipelagic identities in addition to areas are in battle with one another, or the constructed entity of the archipelago clashes with the geological building of neighbouring islands that belong to totally different nation-states, leading to fractured archipelagic identities? The place island communities are diasporic, how does the ocean perform as an imagined house that reduces or entrenches geographical and affective distance? How, certainly, does the ocean allow an archipelagic relationship with the homeland left behind?
Concurrently, the convention addresses the probabilities supplied by an archipelagic method to reminiscence, one that’s cell and dynamic as a lot as entangled, in continental areas (the political branding of France as archipelago in 2019 by Emmanuel Macron throughout his go to to Reunion Island and by Jérôme Fourquet in his guide L’Archipel Français attests to a ubiquitous follow in sure contexts) and people geographical areas the place water our bodies act as a bridge between archipelagos and continents with oceanic or sea borders, and never least the place archipelagos have been or are desired territories for continental superpowers searching for to increase their territorial dominion to oceans.
What, in impact, is the archipelagic reminiscence undertaking and the way does it contribute to reminiscence research? If the previous is memorialised as archipelagic, a collection of fragmentary areas, cultures and histories converging in a fluid house that may act as an emblem for different, bigger connections, how can archipelagic reminiscence improve continental practices of articulating the previous, de-centre or contribute to Euro-centric approaches to reminiscence? Can reminiscence as “innumerable however shared” (in Glissant’s phrases) permit us to take heed of “the reminiscence of the opposite” in addition to partake in it? How can this “remembering collectively” create the situations for solidarity, or are these situations resisted and if that’s the case, why? How can archipelagic mnemonic initiatives be multidirectional, reparative and dedicated to justice, as a substitute of aggressive, suppressive or damaging?
This inter-disciplinary convention seeks to mobilise researchers, artists and cultural practitioners engaged on different archipelagic areas mendacity within the shadow of imperialist management from extra highly effective political entities (whether or not islands or continents, previously or current) to hint contemporary trajectories in archipelagic pondering, situating an archipelagic method to reminiscence at its very coronary heart to additional underscore the epistemic dynamism of the archipelago.
Contact: archipelagicmemory@gmail.com
Convention web site: http://www.archipelagicmemory.wordpress.com
Supply: https://archipelagicmemory.wordpress.com/call-for-papers