The Department of Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies

Sponsored by the Office of the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, the Program of Comparative Literature, and the Department of Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies.

Co-sponsored by the Office of the Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, the Department of English, the Office of Undergraduate Education, the Center for Latin American Studies, the Department of American Studies, the Department of Women's and Gender Studies, the Office of the Dean of International Programs, the Department of History, the Department of Anthropology, and the Transliteratures Project.

In his book Colonial Desire (1995), Robert Young argued that the work of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak constituted a particular cristalization of "colonial discourse analysis"; much has happened since then. One of the main tendencies in many fields of historical and cultural analysis has been to discuss the inadequacies of a theoretical paradigm that focuses primarily on processes of colonization and post-colonization that took place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What happens with other colonial experiences taking place before, during and after this time frame?

"Postcolonialities" takes as a point of departure the discomfort produced by postcolonial theory among cultural critics and historians specializing in the study of intellectual formation and histories of ideas produced from within colonial contexts. The title of the conference proposes an incorporation, appropriation and transformation of a series of disciplinary terms, such as colonialism, neocolonialism, decolonization, postcolonialism and coloniality. The participants will also explore the benefit and limitations of comparative work as it has been conducted in postcolonial criticism. Some of the questions explored by conference participants will be: How to define a historically specific but also diverse canon of postcolonial studies? What are some of the key terms and thinkers that are recovered or displaced by contemporary debates on postcoloniality? How can postcolonialism as a field of inquiry become decolonized, by displacing the centrality of Eurocentric and/or Anglocentric approaches to post/colonial texts? What are the sources of the discomfort and/or anxiety produced by the postcolonial paradigm and how can they be addressed in a productive manner? What is the difference between colonialism, postcolonialism, coloniality, and imperialism?

Preliminary Program:

9:00- Opening Remarks and Welcome
Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies and Comparative Literature

9:30-10:30
Caribbean Postcolonialites
Moderator: Carlos Decenas, Women Studies and Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies
Presenter: Silvio Torres-Saillant, English and Latino Studies, Syracuse University
Title: "The Caribbean and the Postcolonial: Meditations on Temporalities and Geographies of Knowledge"
Discussant: Cheryl Wall, English, Rutgers
Q & A

10:30-10:45 Coffee Break

11-12
Moderator: Herman Bennett, History, Rutgers
Presenter: Vicente Rafael, History, University of Washington
Title: "Sovereignty and Revolution in the Spanish Philippines"
Discussant: Allan Isaac, American Studies, Rutgers

12-1:30 Lunch

1:30-2:30
Moderator: Elin Diamond, English, Rutgers
Presenter: Sonali Perera, English, Rutgers
Title: "Provincializing Sri Lanka: Comparative Racialization and Cartographies of Labor"
Discussant: Ethel Brooks, Sociology, Rutgers
Q&A

2:30-2:45 Coffee break

3-4
Moderator: Dorothy Hodgson, Department of Anthropology and Institute for Research on Women, Rutgers
Presenter: Ania Loomba, English, University of Pennsylvania
Title: "The Vocabularies of Race"
Discussant: Ben. Sifuentes Jáuregui, American Studies and Comparative Literature
Q & A

4:00-5:00 Roundtable and closing remarks: Postcoloniality and Its Discontents
Moderator: César Braga-Pinto, Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature
Participants: Silvio Torres-Saillant, Vicente Rafael, Sonali Perera and Ania Loomba

What are some of the shared concerns with the problematic applicability of the postcolonial paradigm for the study of specific socio-political and cultural regions, such as the Hispanic Caribbean, the Philippines, the global South and Sri Lanka, and the Third World? How can the postcolonial debate illuminate our areas of inquiry? How can we include local and/or regional debates and concepts that have addressed colonialism and imperialism outside an Euro or Anglo-centric framework to enrich studies about colonial and decolonial experiences?