Cultural ReOrientations and
Comparative Colonialities
22–24 November 2011, Adelaide
City West Campus, University of South Australia
The International Centre for Muslim and non-Muslim Understanding (the MnM Centre) was proud to host the CSAA Annual Conference on 22–24 November 2011 with the theme ‘Cultural ReOrientations and Comparative Colonialities’. A pre-conference postgraduate and early career research day was held on 21 November for all postgraduate or ECR delegates.
*Papers from the conference will be published soon.*
‘Cultural ReOrientations and Comparative Colonialities’
Over the last three decades Australasian cultural studies has established a vibrant, intellectual community committed to exposing the political threads that bind everyday culture. Yet despite several critiques of the Euro-American hegemony over cultural studies, Australian and New Zealand cultural studies continues to turn towards the West as the primary source of inspiration thus reinforcing the East-West, North-South global divide. This provocation is not to deny the efforts to incorporate Indigenous knowledges in Australian and, arguably more successfully, in New Zealand cultural studies, but it does ask us to consider posing these endeavours in new frameworks of transnational engagement. ‘Cultural ReOrientations and Comparative Colonialities’ is a call to reorientate cultural studies beyond the confines of America and Western Europe. It is a call to consider what it means for cultural studies to be oriented, disoriented and reoriented in order to see what other theoretical inspirations and political alliances are available to us at a moment when racism and racist violence resurfaces in our multicultural, globalised modernities
Cultural ReOrientations: How do we research non-western cultures without objectifying and petrifying them? How might non-western cultures shift from being simply objects of analysis to intellectual sources for re-orienting cultural studies? How do we account for the rise of racism in everyday culture (particularly in the current context against Muslims globally)? How is ‘culture’ oriented in and by multiculturalism and what does this mean politically?
ReOrienting Epistemologies: How do orientalism and/or colonialism continue to structure cultural studies through its epistemological framings and methodologies? What might a post-orientalist cultural studies look like? Given the current international political order, what would happen if we turned towards the South for new theories (South America, South Africa)?
ReOrienting Colonialities: how are the transnational flows of bodies, commodities, ideas and media different from the expansionist project of European colonialism? Does the national framework of Australian and New Zealand cultural studies mimic the nationalism it critiques? Is New Zealand cultural studies more successful in incorporating Indigenous knowledges and what lessons might be drawn from this for Australian cultural studies? How might cultural research on Australian coloniality, postcoloniality and ethnic communities benefit from a wider comparative framework with Latin America, Africa or Asia?
ReOrientating Cultural Studies: How is culture being re-orientated to respond to recent financial, security, environmental crises? How might the work of cultural studies be characterised by disorientation (spatial, temporal, political, intellectual)? How are new political and media technologies reorientating everyday epistemologies, ontologies and cultural practices? What does it mean to be sexually orientated and can desire disorientate sexual subjects? What happens when Raymond Williams’ conception of ‘culture’ is re-contextualised in the anthropological project from which it came? How is new media orientating new socio-political movements?
