Keynote Speakers
Graham Huggan (University of Leeds, UK)
Françoise Lionnet (UCLA)
Tyler Stovall (Berkeley)
Perhaps more than any other field, postcolonial studies has, since its inception, been the site of anxious and often polemical debates about what have been perceived - even by many postcolonial practitioners themselves - as its boundaries, limits, excesses and failings. In recent years, the questioning of the boundaries and limits of postcolonial studies has taken on a new dimension, with an intriguing series of parallel and somewhat contradictory debates emerging that are concerned with the shape and future of this field of inquiry. Within its heartland in English literature departments, postcolonial studies has increasingly been challenged by new theoretical models, particularly globalization theory, together with transnational, transcultural and intercultural paradigms. At the same time, within French/Francophone Studies departments, there have been numerous attempts to draw more extensively on the postcolonial paradigm and to define more clearly the nature of Francophone postcolonial studies, simultaneously borrowing from and challenging the established 'norms' of Anglophone postcolonial criticism. Thus, on the one hand, we are presented with the latest 'crisis' in a postcolonial studies careering towards its demise, while on the other, we are offered the enabling prospect of a postcolonial studies expanding into important new spaces. It is the aim of this conference to draw together scholars engaged in these postcolonial debates on both sides of the Anglophone/Francophone divide and those attempting to bridge the gap between them, as well as those scholars who support the development of new theoretical paradigms that move beyond the postcolonial.
Conference organizers: Dr Alec G. Hargreaves (Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies), Dr David Murphy (University of Stirling, UK).
Administrative Coordinator: Sophie Romeuf (Florida State University)