Unsettling Colonial Modernity: Islamicate Contexts in Focus

Unsettling Colonial Modernity: Islamicate Contexts in Focus  

University of Alberta 
April 24-25, 2015

Keynote speakers: Dr. Sherene Razack*, Dr. Parin Dossa*

 The late-19th century acceleration of European colonialism in the Middle East and North Africa gave rise to a range of cultural, sociopolitical, and socioeconomic projects seeking to restructure Islamicate societies after modern Europe. Such Eurocentric projects were predominantly advanced through subordinating Islamicate traditions, cultures, and identities. This traumatic historical experience evokes the image of a Muslim other laid on the Procrustean bed of European modernity; Islamicate traditions, cultures, and identities were either stretched out of shape or sawed off so that they would fit the hegemonic conception of modernity.

This homogenizing conception of modernity, however, has faced serious challenges from within and without its European bedrock. Critics have problematized the unilinear view of historical progress in the discourse of Enlightenment modernity and its homogenizing universalism; they have also highlighted the (in)formal colonial trajectory of European modernity in non-European contexts. Out of these critical engagements, have emerged counterdiscourses such as “indigenous modernities”, “multiple modernities”, and “alternative modernities”, as well as a rich body of literature provincializing Europe, historicizing lived experiences of European modernity, and unveiling its darker side. These critiques have opened up new possibilities for transcending false binary oppositions of West/East, modernity/tradition, secular/sacred, and culture/nature.

The organizing committee of this interdisciplinary conference invites contributions to the current rethinking of post-19th century identity formations and sociopolitical transmutations in Islamicate contexts (both national and diasporic) vis-à-vis the colonial project of modernity. We are particularly interested in examining practical implications as well as challenges and prospects of such dialogical investigations. Topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Modern nation-building and its discontents
• Postcolonialism, indigeneity, and decoloniality
• Narrative resistance
• Feminist theories of experience and first-person knowledge
• Identity politics and intersectionality
• Subjectivity, theories of the self, and narrative identities
• Racialization and epistemologies of ignorance
• Trauma, affect, memory, and their link to identity
• The return of the repressed in myth, phantasy, and neurosis  
• Islamophobia in the “War on Terror” era
• Orientalization of diasporic identities in popular culture  
• Radical pedagogies in interrogating Islamophobia/orientalism
• Religion, secularism, and democracy
• Orientalism and occidentalism
• Critical race and whiteness studies
• Marxist literary criticism
• Critical (ir)realism
• Technophobia, eco-criticism, and post-apocalyptic literature
• Post-modernism as the return of Romanticism
• Globalization and socio-economic development

Should you have any questions or require more information, please contact us via email at [email protected], or visithttp://www.ucmconf.com/.

*Dr. Sherene Razack is Professor of Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. For more information about Dr. Razack please visit the Keynote page.

*Dr. Parin Dossa is Professor of Anthropology and Associate Member in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, at Simon Fraser University. For more information about Dr. Dossa please visit the Keynote page (http://ucmconf.com/keynotes/)