We welcome proposals on any of the following topics,
or others related to the theme of the conference:
- The theoretical freedom of many postcolonialisms:
- the transformation of postcolonial paradigms under the impact of diaspora studies, globalization theory, biopolitics, contemporary ethics…
- Literatures and liberties:
- Writing rights: the freedom to write and the writing of freedom.
- Freedom and literary forms, genres, practices.
- Right words: the language(s) and rhetoric of freedom.
- The literature of commitment: political autobiographies, prison literature, and rights.
- Remembering rights: postcolonial literatures and trauma, memory, testimony.
- Contextualizing and historicizing liberties:
- Freedom as a culturally-defined vs. universal value. Is it possible to envisage alternative sets of rights that can make sense of differing value systems in the various cultures of the anglophone world?
- Slavery, independence struggles, historical reparations and reconciliations.
- Interrogating the ethics and aesthetics of resistance, the politics of liberation, and collective rights.
- Positioning human rights in the global current: how can postcolonialism join/revise the terms of the debate?
- War, imperial violence, and the cost of 'exporting' freedom.
- Comparing empires and freedoms:
- Interrogating the Italian/European postcolonial: old wrongs, new migrations, new rights?
- Genealogies of freedom and rights: are human rights a legacy of empires?
- Cosmopolitan Venice in a postcolonial perspective.
- Sacred rights:
- Religious freedom, fundamentalisms, and the postcolonial.
- Redefining "religion" and "secularism" through literature.
- The right to (changing) identities:
- Race, ethnic, gender rights …
- The right to knowledge and information:
- New media, new technologies and world communications as freedom empowering tools.
- Conditions and contradictions of free speech in the Internet.
- The right to live in a livable world:
- The postcolonial environment and eco-critical perspectives.
- Animal rights and human rights: redrawing the boundaries.
- The freedom to move:
- Discussing liberties in cosmopolitical vs. local/indigenous cultural paradigms and theories.
- Representing borders and non-places, cities and slums, camps and confinements.
- Academic freedom:
- Disciplinary freedom: the question of autonomy in research and education
- Postcolonial pedagogies: the articulation of liberties in the classroom in an increasingly uncivil public sphere.
Please send a 250-word abstract of your proposed paper and a brief CV by 1 October 2007 to Annalisa Oboe (University of Padua) and Shaul Bassi (University of Venice) at the following email address:
eaclals2008.dllags@unipd.it