Power, discourse and city trajectories

Examines social theory and contemporary human geography in the context of urban development. Covers theoretical debates in political ecology, the cultural turn in the economy, social relations and scale, space and place, and colonialism and post-colonialism

A Theory's Travelogue: Post-Colonial Theory in Post-Socialist Space

This essay examines theoretical arguments surrounding the use of post-colonial theory as a way to fill in the epistemological lacuna in the studies of post-socialism. It reviews the various streams of this theoretical development and employs Edward Said’s notion of “traveling theory” to demonstrate that theoretical claims made by proponents and opponents of this particular comparative perspective are historically, socially, and geographically situated, although not fixed. Disciplinary, national, and institutional affiliations, instead of theoretical justifications, are identified as important factors in the propensity to accept or resist the introduction of post-colonial perspective on Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The essay concludes by acknowledging the potential usefulness as well as the limits of post-colonialism in the conceptualization of the post- socialist space

Katherine Mansfield as (post)colonial modernist

This talk covers the different ways in which Mansfield's life and work can be read through the double lens of post colonialism and modernism, representing two different positions that inform and intersect with each other in her work. The first half examines her early life and work in which she destabilises the dualities of gender, national identity and ethnicity in an encounter with the 'other' that includes the self as 'other', at a time when she was rejecting her origins. The second half covers the search Mansfield made in her later years to reemplace herself through memory and imagination within her homeland by reconstructing the world of her childhood as a form of life intercepted by death thus transcending the material dimension of her recreation

Space, City and Post colonialism in the Poetic Discourse of the “Independent Writers of Pernambuco”

In Altas literaturas (High Literatures), Leyla Perrone Moisés reminds us that in the scope of Catholicism the canon acquired the meaning of a "list of saints recognized by the papal authority" which "by extension came to mean the set of literary authors recognized as masters of tradition" (1988, p. 61) .That, undoubtedly, guided the literary studies in Brazil until very recently. These studies ignored non-canonical literary works. In other words, the canonical thinking was oblivious to a rich literary production which was not in accordance with a colonialist view of the academic studies developed in our universities. In this work, we intend to study the literary production of some poets in Recife (Brazil), in the 1980s in relation to the established canon. We focus on the Movement, known as “Independent Writers of Pernambuco” aiming to bring to light a literary movement forgotten by Brazilian academic community.. Our study has a postcolonial perspectives we explore the need to pay attention to literary production by writers who do not always belong to “traditional canon” (Said, 2004). The poetical works of the movement we study may play a vital role in the context of Brazil and Pernambuco. By considering the emerging social responsibilities of writers and intellectuals in an ever more interdependent world, we suggest that studying the movement and its authors who are not much explored by Brazilian scholars we may be decolonizing the knowledge on literature in Brazil. Wetake into account the movement´s relations with Brazilian Northeastern culture and its program of action, dating from 1981, the beginning of the so-called "Lost Decade." The movement had an important voice against the most conservative and traditionalist criticism at that time. We believe that by studying the movement we are offering the opportunity to rethink our Brazilian and Pernambucan literary canon

“The Many Languages of the Avant-Garde”: In conversation with Grzegorz Bral of Teatr Pieśń Kozła (Song of the Goat Theatre)

How to theorise and review avant-garde Shakespeare? Which theoretical paradigms should be applied when Shakespearean productions are multicultural and yet come from a specific locale? These and other many questions interrogating the language of performance in global avant-garde Shakespeare productions are put forward to Grzegorz Bral, the director of the Song of the Goat ensemble in the context of their evolving performance of Macbeth (2006/2008) and their Songs of Lear (2012)

The split of reason and the postcolonial backlash

Let’s not forget that 1492, one of the first landmarks of Modernity, was both the year of the conquest of the Americas and of the fall or of the Reconquista of Granada, both of inner and outer ethnic cleansing of the nation state; that the national state was a colonial state and is now a securitarian state, that colonialism was the very form of Western Modernity, that the French Revolution itself was colonial, that the leader of the first Black revolutionary independence movement, Toussaint Louverture (Haiti), died in a French prison though inspired by the French Revolution. - No-one has access to reason as whole: there is no such thing as the whole of Reason, or Reason as a whole, or the Totality of reason. Reason is patched up of disconnected bits and pieces that reside at different addresses

Valentine Moghadam. Globalizing women: transnational feminist networks. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.

Valentine Moghadam has written a much-needed text outlining the work of transnational activists concerned with women’s rights worldwide. Moghadam informs the reader that in an era characterized by heightened globalization and a restructuring of the state, there is a critical mass of educated, employed, mobile, and politically conscious women around the world, responding to the gendered process of globalization

Cosmopolitanism

This paper was presented as part of Rethinking the Postcolonial in the Age of the War on Terror joint symposium, by the MnM Centre in conjunction with the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Diasporas and Reconciliation Studies, at the University of South Australia, on 16 and 17 September 2010. The aim of the symposium was to explore the postcolonial condition in the era of the \u27war on terror\u27 and to rethink postcolonialism in order to reformulate or reinforce its critical insights. While doubtful of the premise underlying the symposium title, this paper makes a case for intellectual history and describes the recent resurgence of philosopical cosmopolitanism within post-colonial discourse