NYU Postcolonial Colloquium
 open to all those with an interest in postcolonial studies

Postcolonialism and the Hit of the Real
Conference 6-8 March 2008
New York University

CONFERENCE PROGRAM

SHORT SCHEDULE
THURSDAY MARCH 6TH
Venue: Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, 24 West 12 St, New York
4:00-5:30 Registration
5:30-7:00 Conference Welcome
Keynote: SIMON GIKANDI: “Looking Back on Realism: Was it a Postcolonial Form?”

7:00-9:00 Reception, hosted by Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies

FRIDAY MARCH 7TH
9:00-9:30 Registration/Breakfast (Jurow Hall, Silver Building, Washington Square)
9:30-11:00 Panel Sessions 1
11:00-11:30 Coffee break
11:30-1:00 Keynote: ALOK RAI: “Past Recovery : Postcolonialism, the view from India”
(Jurow Hall, Silver Building, Washington Square)

1:00-2:30 Lunch (on your own)
2:30-4 :00 Panel Sessions 2
4:00-4:15 Coffee break
4:15-5:45 Panel Sessions 3
5:45-6:00 Break
6:00-7:30 Keynote: PHENG CHEAH: “The Force of the Real: World Literature in a Postcolonial Frame” 
(Deutsches Haus) 

7:30-9:00 Reception, hosted by the Deutsches Haus, NYU (Deutsches Haus)

SATURDAY MARCH 8TH
8:30-9:00 Registration/Breakfast (Jurow Hall, Silver Building, Washington Square)
9:00-10:30 Panel Sessions 4
10:30-11:00 Coffee break
11:00-12:30 Panel Sessions 5
12:30-2:00 Lunch (on your own)
2:00-3:30 Panel Sessions 6
3:30-4:00 Coffee break
4.00 Plenary Panel Discussion (Ireland House)
The Ethnicity of Englishness and the Hit of the Irish Real
Panel discussion of Robert JC Young’s The Idea of English Ethnicity (Blackwell, 2008)
Simon Critchley (New School); David Lloyd (Univ. of Southern California);
John Waters (NYU); Robert JC Young (NYU)
followed by a Book Launch Reception for The Idea of English Ethnicity, hosted by Blackwells Publishers


FULL PROGRAM

THURSDAY MARCH 6TH

 Venue: Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimo, 24 West 12 St, New York
 4:00-5:30 Registration

 5:30-7:00 Keynote
 Chair: Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (NYU)
 Conference Welcome: Robert JC Young (NYU)
 
 SIMON GIKANDI (Princeton University)
“Looking Back on Realism: Was it a Postcolonial Form?”

7:00-9:00 Reception, hosted by Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies


 FRIDAY MARCH 7TH

 9:00-9:30 Registration/Breakfast (Jurow Hall, Silver Building, Washington Square)

9:30-11:00 Panel Sessions 1

Panel 1a
GREAT ROOM, 19 University Place
9:30-11:00:
Gender, Authenticity and the Real
Chair: Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (NYU)

•“Who's Story Is It? Authorship, Appropriation, and the Politics of ‘Cultural Authenticity’ in Autobiographies on Female Genital Cutting”
Daniela Hrzán (Humboldt University)

• “ ‘Realizing’ Comfort Women: Postcolonial Historiography, Militarism, and Gender”
You-me Park (Georgetown University)

• “Colonial Chorus: Subduing the Discordance of Violence”
Pashmina Murthy (Independent Scholar, PhD University of Southern California)


Panel 1b
19 UNIV PL. RM 102
9:30-11:00:
Imagining Sites of the Political
Chair: Anupama Rao (Barnard College)

•“Being political: Rethinking Self and Reservations in India”
Siva Arumugam (Columbia University)

•“‘Not measures but a man:’ Elwin, NEFA and the Anthropological Management of Tribes” 
Poornima Paidipaty (Columbia University)

•“Shaping Sovereignty for a Militant Gujarati: ‘Sardar’ Patel and Practicing Emancipation, 1930-1940”
Arafaat Valiani (Williams College)


Panel 1c
JUROW HALL, Silver Building
9:30-11:00:
Postcolonialism and The Second World
Chair: Jini Kim Watson (NYU)

•“Postcolonial Studies and Stalinism” 
Eric Owens (Duke University)

•“Ritual, Realism, and Revolution: The Role of Women in Colonial Vietnam” 
Ben Tran (UC Berkeley)

•“Cultural Alliances: Alex la Guma and the Eastern Bloc”
Monica Popescu (McGill University)


11:00-11:30 Coffee break


Venue: JUROW HALL, Silver Building
11:30-1:00 Keynote
Chair: Toral Gajarawala (NYU)


ALOK RAI (Delhi University)
“Past Recovery : Postcolonialism, the view from India”


1:00-2:30 Lunch (on your own)


2:30-4 :00 Panel Sessions 2

Panel 2a
GREAT ROOM, 19 University Place
2:30-4 :00:
 The ‘Real’ Orient:
 Referentiality and Framing in Orientalist Discourse
Chair: Edward Ziter (NYU)

•“The Aesthetics of Alterity: Rationalizing the Other in Nineteenth-Century Britain” 
Manu Chander (Brown University)

•“The Poetics of the Orientalist Footnote” 
Zak Sitter (Xavier University)

•“The ‘Real’ Asian American in the Age of Post-Identity” 
Chris Lee (University of British Columbia)


Panel 2b
19 UNIV PL. RM 102

2:30-4:00:
 Postcolonial Spaces
Chair: Una Chaudhuri (NYU)

•“Colonial Visions, Postimperial Eyes: Description and Narrative in V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival”
Stefanie Head (University of Rhode Island)

•“Literature and Underdevelopment”
Sanjay Krishnan (UC Irvine)

•“The ‘Real’ in Environmentality in/and Postcolonial Fiction”
Sangeeta Ray (Univ. of Maryland)


Panel 2c
JUROW HALL, Silver Building
2:30-4 :00:
Realism and Postcolonial Literature
Chair: Dean Casale (Kean University)

•“Post-Realist Techniques and the Material Realities in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Mũrogi wa Kagogo [Wizard of the Crow]”
Evan Mwangi (Northwestern University)

• “In Search of the Real Self: Authenticity as a Cultural Value” 
Stephen Levin (Clark University)

•“Where is the Vernacular in Postcolonial Realism? The Case of Daughter’s Daughter” 
Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar (University of Pittsburgh)


Panel 2d
DEUTSCHES HAUS
2:30-4 :00:
The German Difference
Chair: Elke Frederiksen (University of Maryland)

•“Translating Cultures: Contemporary Essayistic and Literary Travelogs from Germany” 
Paul Michael Lützeler (Washington University in St. Louis)

•“Claiming Blackness in Germany”
Sara Lennox (U Massachusetts Amherst)

•“The German Difference”
Russell Berman (Stanford)


4.:00-4:15 Coffee break


4:15-5:45 Panel Sessions 3

Panel 3a
GREAT ROOM, 19 University Place
4:15-5:45:
Italian Colonialism and Postcolonialism:
Confronting its Realities and its Perceptions
Chair: Ruth Ben-Ghiat (NYU)

•“Accounting for Celebrity: The Bodies and Biographies of Stardom in Postcolonial Italy” 
Derek Duncan (University of Bristol)

•“The African Queen and Us: Memories of Ethiopian Resistance to Italian Colonialism” 
Clarissa Clo (San Diego State University)

••“Postcolonial Italy: Real Geographies,Transnational Spaces”
Cristina Lombardi-Diop (American University of Rome)

•“A Postcolonial Italy? Anti-colonialism, Transnationalism and the Italian Left” 
Neelam Srivastava (Newcastle University)


Panel 3b
19 UNIV PL. RM 102
4:15-5:45:
Double Bind: Literary Reading and the Postcolonial
Chair: Shirley Lau Wong (NYU)

•“Modernity Against Itself: Thoughts on Primitivism in India” 
Ben Conisbee Baer (Princeton University)

•“Politics/Poetics: Making Links in Lamming and Rhys” 
Nicole Rizzuto (New York University)

•“Tarabishi, Fanon, and the Arab Literary Imaginary” 
Hala Halim (New York University)


Panel 3c
JUROW HALL, Silver Building
4:15-5:45:
Aesthetics of Diaspora
Chair: Gayatri Gopinath (NYU)

• “The function of “the Real” in the UK’s emerging cultural markets”
Sarah Brouillette (MIT)

•“Intimate Migrations: Gender, Diaspora, and Postcolonial Aesthetics”
Samantha Pinto (Georgetown University)

•“Stamped with New Designs: London’s Mutations in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane” 
Tilottama Tharoor (NYU)


5:45-6:00 Break

Venue: Deutsches Haus
6:00-7:30
Keynote
Chair: Jini Kim Watson (NYU)

PHENG CHEAH
“The Force of the Real: World Literature in a Postcolonial Frame”

7:30-9:00 Reception, hosted by the Deutsches Haus, NYU


SATURDAY MARCH 8TH

8:30-9:00 Registration/Breakfast (Jurow Hall, Silver Building, Washington Square)

9:00-10:30 Panel Sessions 4

Panel 4a
GREAT ROOM, 19 University Place
9:00-10:30:
Postcolonial Literature and Genre

Chair: Arvind Rajagopal (NYU)

•“Real Live Indigenous Fantasy”
Nadine Attewell (University of Nevada-Reno)

•“Imagineering the Future: Postcolonial S/F as New Ground of Invention”
Heather Snell (University of Winnipeg)

•“Realism and the Neo-Slave Narrative” 
Yogita Goyal (UCLA)


Panel 4b
19 UNIV PLACE,. RM 102
9:00-10:30:
Francophone Postcolonialisms

Chair: Neelam Srivastava (Newcastle University)

•“French Postcolonialism: Voicing Out a Silent Debate”
Oana Panaïté (Indiana University-Bloomington)

•“Jacques Stephen Alexis’s Marvelous Realism: Subverting a Monolingual Francophonie in Postcolonial Caribbean literature”
Chelsea Stieber (NYU)

•“Walcott, the Creolistes, and the Specter of Primitivism”
Mara de Gennaro (Bucknell University)


Panel 4c
JUROW HALL, Silver Building
9:00-10:30:
Historicity and India

Chair: Toral Gajarawala (NYU)

•“Realism in Partition Literature”
Shuchi Kapila (Grinnell College)

•“The Vexed Question of Peasant Passivity in Bengal Famine Literature: Real or Imagined?”
Rajender Kaur (William Paterson University)

•“Paralysis to Praxis: Real-izing Violence and the Angst of Responsible Postcolonialism”
Basuli Deb (Quinnipiac University) 


10:30-11:00 Coffee break


11:00-12:30 Panel Sessions 5


Panel 5a
GREAT ROOM
11:00-12:30:
Colonial Modernities and Knowledge Flows in the Japanese
Empire

Chair: Harry Harootunian (NYU)

•“Immaterial Coloniality: Marxism and the Feudal Remnant” 
Gavin Walker (Cornell University)

•“Cultural Science as Colonial Discourse, Japanese Empire 1919-1945” 
Travis Workman (Cornell University)

• “Nostalgic and Utopian Erasures of the Colony: Temporality and the Nation-State” 
Christopher Ahn (Cornell University)


Panel 5b
19 UNIV PLACE,. RM 102
11:00-12:30:
Retheorizing Postcolonial Realities

Chair: Martin Harries (NYU)

•“The ‘Thing’ from another World: Translation, Spectrality and Thinking about Difference”
Amit Rahul Baishya (University of Iowa)

• “Affect/Effect and the Dehiscence of State Failure” 
Peter Hitchcock (CUNY)

•“The Necessity of ‘Reality’ in Theories of Post-Development” 
Sanjay Ruparelia (New School for Social Research)


Panel 5c
JUROW HALL, Silver Building
11:00-12:30:
Haiti and Reconsidering CLR James

Chair: Robert J.C. Young (NYU)

•“Flights of Fantasy: C.L.R. James--Between the Magical and the Real”
Louise Bernard (Georgetown University)

•“At the Formal Limits: C.L.R. James, Moby Dick and the Politics of the Novel” 
Joseph Keith (SUNY Binghamton)

•“Between God and Modernity: Secularism and the Real in Caribbean Literature” 
Munia Bhaumik (UC Berkeley)

•“Tragedy in Haitian Revolution” 
David Brand (York University)


12:30-2:00 Lunch (on your own)

2:00-3:30 Panel Sessions 6

Panel 6a
GREAT ROOM
2:00-3:30:
Islam and Post-Postcoloniality

Chair: Dina Siddiqui

•“Literary Realities of Lived World: Sexuality, Islam and Authenticity within a Post-Colonial Context”
Shaireen Rasheed (NYU and Long Island University)

•“Theorizing the Post-Postcolonial Real: Ambivalent, Emergent, or Amorphous!”
Fawzia Afzal-Khan (Montclair University) and Waseem Anwar (Forman Christian College, Lahore)

•“The Pakistani Post-Postcolonial Real: Academic Experiences at Some Pakistani Universities” 
Fawzia Afzal-Khan (Montclair University) and Waseem Anwar (Forman Christian College, Lahore)


Panel 6b
19 UNIV PLACE. RM 102
2:00-3:30: Visuality, Performance and Exhibition

Chair: Elaine Freedgood (NYU)

•“Black Skin, White Masks and/as Theater”
Keithley P. Woolward (NYU)

• “Postcoloniality and the Predicament of Painting”
Sonal Khullar (UC Berkeley)

• “Commercial Reality and the Illusory Constructions of a Former Sign Painter:
The Language of Advertising in Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas”
Yi-Ping Ong (Harvard)


Panel 6c
JUROW HALL, Silver Building
2:00-3:30:
Cinema and Postcolonial Realisms

Chair: Nira Gupta-Casale (Kean University)

•“‘Combative’ realism and ‘Hit’ Indian Cinema: Have we entered the third phase?” 
Amith Kumar P.V. (Portland State University and Banaras Hindu University)

•“Mother India: The Aesthetics of a National Cinema” 
Richard Allen (NYU)

•“’Statist Realism’ and ‘New Cinema’ in India: The Example of Shyam Benegal’s Films”
Anuradha Dingwaney Needham (Oberlin College)


Panel 6d
IRELAND HOUSE
2:00-3:30:
Postcolonial Ireland

Chair: Patrick Deer (NYU)

•“The Rocky Road to Postcolonial Realism: the problem of form in The Rocky Road to Dublin (Dir. Peter Lennon, 1968/2004)”
John Waters (NYU)

•“Time Passante: From Forensic to Interrogation Modernity”
David Lloyd (University of Southern California)

•“Postcolonial Concepts of Nation and Nationality in the Realist Northern Irish Novel”
Maeve Eileen Davey (University of Ulster)


3:30-4:00 Coffee break

Venue: Ireland House
4.00 pm
Chair: Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (NYU)

Plenary Panel Discussion:

Englishness and the Hit of the Irish Real

Panel discussion of Robert JC Young’s The Idea of English Ethnicity (Blackwell, 2008)

Simon Critchley (New School for Social Research)

David Lloyd (University of Southern California)

John Waters (NYU)

Robert JC Young (NYU)



followed by Book Launch Reception for The Idea of English Ethnicity
hosted by Blackwells Publishers

Program subject to change







 

Images: Dancers celebrating a wedding, Southall, London, June 2007