CALL FOR PAPERS: Re-imagining postcolonial futures: knowledge transactions and contests of culture in the African present.

The Centre for Humanities Research of the University of the Western Cape and The Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies of the Open University are calling for papers for their conference:

Re-imagining postcolonial futures:
knowledge transactions and contests
of culture in the African present.
9-11 July 2009
at Centre for Humanities Research,
University of the Western Cape

Call for Papers:
At a time of intensified political shifts and realignments, and renewed appeals to culture and indigenous knowledge, the re-imagining of the nation and society in South Africa poses challenges to the scripts of postcolonial studies. These contests and issues in debate are being felt at every level in public culture. They are also part of an emergent sense of uncertainty in many societies around the world that at the same time hold out new possibilities for redefinition and reconstitution. What are the new scripts for daily life? How might the postcolony be rendered liveable? What are the boundaries of the new nation? What are the markers of time in the African present and how is expertise being reconstituted in the humanities? Is it possible to imagine different ethical relations between knowledge projects and lived experience? And how might knowledge unravel the histories of violence in the postcolony?

This conference seeks to create a platform for ideas, engagements and analyses that are alert to the new complexities and nuances that underlie the seemingly banal expressions of politics in public life. South African scholarship needs to be placed in a critical relation to other postcolonial projects because of the danger of South African exceptionalism.

The challenges of rethinking knowledge have given rise to a substantial rearrangement of academic inquiry. Museum studies, heritage, indigenous knowledge and archival platforms are emerging as critical sites for new engagements in the humanities. The very organisation of research is being called into question as universities worldwide strive to establish research centres alongside discipline-based knowledge processes. At the same time the scripts of expertise and service to the community are increasingly called into question.

This conference will take place at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape with support from the office of the Dean of Arts. It is made possible through a partnership with and generous funding from the Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies at the Open University in UK. The conference heralds a new partnership between the CHR and the Ferguson Centre in promoting cutting-edge research in the humanities. This is an initiative in research development. We wish to bring together senior and junior scholars as well as promising graduate students. Papers are invited on the following themes:

• War and the everyday
• Heritage politics, cultural production and aesthetics
• Postcolonial memorial complexes
• Pitfalls of indigenous reworkings
• New networks and mobilities in the postcolonial city
• Forced migrations and the biopolitics of statehood
• Spirituality and the religious idiom
• Nationalism and its neo-liberal moulds

Abstracts of 150 – 200 words are due on 15 May 2009 and should be sent to Ms Lameez Lalkhen at llalkhen@uwc.ac.za, the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape. Enquiries to Premesh Lalu, plalu@uwc.ac.za or Dennis Walder, d.j.walder@open.ac.uk

Edited from email from Heather Scott, Research Centre Secretary, The Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies, Faculty of Arts, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA

Please visit the Ferguson Centre website at: www.open.ac.uk/arts/ferguson-centre