Lectures and Conferences
Urban (De)coloniality and Literature: March 03, 2016
Rutgers University Program in Comparative Literature Biennial Graduate Student Conference
Keynote Speaker: JOSÉ DAVID SALDÍVAR
Professor of Comparative Literature & Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), Stanford University
The biennial graduate student conference at the Rutgers University Program in Comparative Literature seeks to relate the theoretical production of decolonial thought with other critical discourses in the global academy. The conference invites participants to think about (de)coloniality beyond the geographical limit of the Americas, the temporal constraint of modernity, and the monolingualism of hegemonic languages and dominant disciplinary frameworks. The conference aims to address the following questions, among others: What knowledges do Ethnic Studies, Women's and Gender Studies, and Area Studies outside of Latin American and Caribbean Studies bring to Decolonial Studies? How does literature, especially fiction, and visual arts become a resource for decoloniality? How does (de)coloniality question the meaning and method of comparativity? In which ways does decolonial thought illuminate global configurations of urban life and culture?
Jeanne-Marie Jackson: November 24, 2015
Professor Jeanne-Marie Jackson (Johns Hopkins University)
Comparative Literature
Rutgers University
195 College Avenue
4:30 p.m.
Professor Jeanne-Marie Jackson (Johns Hopkins University), whose unusual comparative research stretches from Russia to Southern Africa. Jackson is the author of South African Literature’s Russian Soul: Narrative Forms of Global Isolation, which has just been published by Bloomsbury. Attached please find a copy of the first chapter of her book, which Jackson will discuss before sharing some of her exciting new work on the literatures of post-democracy. The talk, cosponsored by the Center for African Studies, a simple buffet dinner will follow.
Rei Terada: Historical Transition and Transition as Such
October 26, 2015
Rutgers Comp Lit Seminar Room
195 College Avenue
11:30am - 1:30pm
Acclaimed critic and theorist Rei Terada is the author of many important articles and books on literary history (especially Romanticism and its aftermath), philosophy, political theory, and psychoanalysis. Her works include Derek Walcott's Poetry: American Mimicry (Northeastern UP, 1992); Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the "Death of the Subject" (Harvard UP, 2001); Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno (Harvard UP, 2009); and a new book called Radical Anxiety. What follows is a precis of her Monday seminar:
Forensics, logistics, and cognitive mapping view spatiotemporal grasp as a prerequisite for historical understanding and political action. At the same time, critiques of racial modernity have pointed out, as Robert Meister has recently written, that "justice itself is an intertemporal problem (the supersession of one time by another)" which historical value and historical thinking often reinforce. Since time can only be grasped by movement in space, this situation implies that concepts of spatiotemporal movement are also involved in the problem of justice. Conceivably, historical transition already appears in transition as such--in perceptions of simple movement. Taking cinema as one of the main areas in which this question gets considered, this paper reads theories of the perception of movement in Kant, Bergson and in William Pope.L's film *Reenactment* (2012), and argues that elements of racial modernity do indeed structure perceptions of simple spatiotemporal coordination.
Please join us for what will be a memorable discussion of film, justice, historical change, and "racial modernity."
So. Asia & Theories of Avant-Garde: The Int'l. Scope of So. Asian Modernisms
Dr. Rita Banerjee
(September 24, 2015)
Alexander Library - Pane Room
169 College Avenue
Reception 4:30pm - Lecture 5:00pm
This presentation will highlight the role that translation and multilingualism played in opening up discussions and theories of modernism within the South Asian literary canons of Bengali, Hindi, and English in the early to mid-20th century. The lecture will explore the representations and international scope of literary modernisms in journals such as Kallol, Kavitā, and Krittibās in Bengali, the Nayī Kavitā journal and the Tār Saptak group in Hindi, and the Writers Workshop group in English. Theories of modernism as proposed by critics such as Dipti Tripathi and Acharya Nand Dulare Bajpai will be contrasted with manifestos of modernism, with Agyeya's defense of experimentalism (prayogvād), with theories of translation as proposed by Bhola Nath Tiwari, and with translations of foreign writers and aesthetic forms. In doing so, the presentation will note how the study of modernist practices, translation, and theory in Bengali, Hindi, and English provides insight into the pluralistic, multi-dimensional, and ever-evolving cultural sphere of modern South Asia beyond the suppositions of postcolonial binaries and monolingual paradigms.