Over the past year graduate students and postdoctoral scholars in the ASCA seminar group have discussed the concepts of text, subjectivity and hybridity based on the work of Mieke Bal, Stanley Fish, Clifford Geertz, Martin Fuchs, Mark Freeman, Michel Foucault, Evelyn Fox Keller, Gayatri Spivak, Mikhail Bakhtin and Homi Bhabha. More specifically, the seminar focused on ways in which text, subjectivity and hybridity have traveled as concepts between disciplines, scholars, historical periods and academic communities.
From this perspective the nature of concepts is understood in a variety of ways. For example, it is assumed that concepts are normative and programmatic rather than simply descriptive. While concepts are related to a tradition, they are not stable and their use cannot boast simple continuity. Concepts are complex and are never used in precisely the same sense, hence the ramifications, traditions and histories which are conflated in their current usages need to be unpacked and evaluated. The validity and usage of concepts is then subject to debate which proceeds by referring concepts back to the traditions and schools from which they emerged, and forward to their relevance for cultural analysis today. And because concepts travel, the Amsterdam School emphasizes the methodological implications of the interdisciplinary study of culture.
ASCA is now inviting submissions on how text, subjectivity and hybridity have traveled, as concepts, between disciplines, schools, historical periods and academic communities, and how these considerations may be brought to bear on case studies in cultural analysis. Those selected will be invited to present their work at a conference organized by ASCA at the University of Amsterdam, January 11, 12 and 13, 2000.
Proposals should be no more than 250 words in length and reach the ASCA office at the address below, by Sept 15, 1999. Those chosen will be asked to forward their completed texts of no more than 4,000 words to ASCA, by November 15, 1999.
ASCA
Spuistraat 210
1012 VT Amsterdam
The Netherlands
email: asca@hum.uva.nl
Fax: 020-525 3052