The West or the Rest?

/ Termine

The West or the Rest?

Veranstalter
Cecilia Tossounian / Stefan Rinke / Michael Goebel, Freie Universität Berlin
Veranstaltungsort
Lateinamerika-Institut, FU Berlin
Ort
Berlin
Land
Deutschland
Vom - Bis
14.06.2012 - 16.06.2012
Website
http://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/fmi/mitglieder/Wissenschaftliche_Mitarbeiterinnen_und_Mitarbeiter/goebel/English_Version2/index.html
Von
Michael Goebel, -, Graduate Institute Geneva

Ever since the penetration of postcolonial studies in the social sciences and humanities since the 1990s, a widespread uneasiness or outright confusion has reigned as to how to insert (or not) the historical experience of Latin America into postcolonial paradigms. The issue that is at stake can be illustrated best along the lines of one of the classic dichotomies of postcolonial studies, drawn upon even by scholars intent on deconstructing such binaries, namely that between ‘the West’ and ‘the rest’. Does Latin America belong to ‘the rest’, as other ‘third-world’ countries have been conceptualized by mainstream postcolonial approaches to the subject? Or does Latin America’s historical specificity foreclose the possibility of thinking about Latin America with the same categories that have been used to study Asia and Africa? These are some of the questions that this workshop aims to address.

In an older strand of historiography, Latin America was occasionally cast as “the extreme West” (Alain Rouquié), alluding to attempts to create a perfected overseas version of idealized blueprints of Iberian societies, which in the long run inflated and exacerbated, as through a magnifying lens, the inbuilt structural imbalances of “Western modernity”. This older literature, however, had been largely forgotten by the time postcolonial theory began to make inroads into the historical discipline from the 1990s. Sitting uncomfortably with the dichotomy between the West and the rest, Latin America has been largely ignored, or at best relegated to a few uneasy footnotes, by historians of other world regions indebted to postcolonial paradigms. Historians – perhaps more so than scholars of other disciplines – of Latin America, meanwhile, have for the most part remained reluctant to engage with what they identified as postcolonialism’s unwarranted universalizing impulse, which in their view was ill-suited to explain the historical specificities of “their” region.

The starting point of this conference, by contrast, is that Latin America can provide an instructive testing ground for challenging the West/rest dichotomy, which many historians identified with postcolonial theory, after all, have themselves sought to question. Our aim, therefore, is neither to point an accusatorial finger at postcolonial studies for their lack of attention to Latin America nor to ‘rescue’ a specifically Latin American tradition. Instead, we seek to create a bridge between postcolonial studies and Latin American historical trajectories. For this purpose, we aim at bringing together historians of Latin America who have critically appraised the challenges that postcolonial studies have posed for their work. More specifically, we seek scholars working on topics including, among others, alternative/multiple modernities and globalization, the condition of coloniality, hybridity/mestizaje, anticolonial nationalisms, empire and postcolonial histories, postcoloniality and gender.

Programm

Thursday, 14 June

15:30–16:00
Welcome Reception

16:00–16:15
Introductory Remarks
Michael Goebel, Stefan Rinke, Cecilia Tossounian (Freie Universität Berlin)

16:15–17:15
Opening Lecture
Mark Thurner (University of Florida): Before and After Europe: The Indies and the Americas in the Colonial and Postcolonial Imagination

17:45–19:15
Panel 1 Latin America’s Built-In Colonialisms in the longue durée

Chair: Michael Goebel (Freie Universität Berlin)
Discussant: Mark Thurner (University of Florida)

Anja Bröchler (Universität zu Köln): Postcolonial versus New Conquest History: How to Entangle Conquerors and Conquered?

Eduardo Elena (University of Miami): European Exceptionalism and Third-World Belonging: Historicizing Argentina’s Place in Latin America

Friday, 15 June

10:00–12.00
Panel 2 Old and New Paradigms in the Field of Latin American Studies

Chair: Cecilia Tossounian (Freie Universität Berlin)
Discussant: Sérgio Costa (Freie Universität Berlin)

Stefan Rinke (Freie Universität Berlin): Spatial Orders and Latin American History Writing

Claudio Lomnitz (Columbia University): Time and Dependency in Latin America today

Manuela Boatcă (Freie Universität Berlin): Postcolonial avant la lettre: Latin America from Occidentalism to its Critique

14:00–16:00
Panel 3 Knowledge, Consumption and Gender in the Building of Nations

Chair: Georg Fischer (Freie Universität Berlin)
Discussant: Claudio Lomnitz (Columbia University)

Stefanie Gänger (Universität Konstanz): Endangerment and Indigeneity in the Conquest of Araucanía, 1879–82

Ana María Otero-Cleves (University of Oxford): “Western” Consumers?: Consuming Foreign Commodities in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

Cecilia Tossounian (Freie Universität Berlin): Gendering the Nation: Gender in Anti-Colonial Nationalist Discourses (Latin America and Asia, 1900–1940)

16:30–18:30
Panel 4 Transnationalism and International Relations in the Twentieth Century

Chair: Stefanie Gänger (Universität Konstanz)
Discussant: Ricardo Salvatore (Universidad Torcuato di Tella)

Michael Goebel (Freie Universität Berlin): Latin American Anti-Imperialism in Interwar Paris

Thomas Fischer (Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt): The Sovereignty of the Weak: Latin America and the League of Nations

Corinne Pernet (Universität St. Gallen): Historicizing “Development” in Latin America: Nutrition, Food Policy and the Transfer of Expertise

Saturday 16 June
9:30–11:00
Panel 5 Immigration and Nationalism in Postcolonial Brazil

Chair: Michael Goebel (Freie Universität Berlin)
Discussant: Thomas Fischer (Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt)

Frederik Schulze (Freie Universität Berlin): German Immigration to Brazil in a Postcolonial Perspective

Georg Fischer (Freie Universität Berlin): Reconsidering Economic Nationalism: Colonial Globality and Mineral Extraction in Brazil, ca. 1900–1930

11:30–12:30
Concluding Lecture
Ricardo Salvatore (Universidad Torcuato di Tella): United States Historians and the Colonial Question in Spanish America

12:30-13:00
Final Discussion
Chair: Stefan Rinke (Freie Universität Berlin)

Kontakt

Michael Goebel
mgoebel@zedat.fu-berlin.de

http://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/fmi/mitglieder/Wissenschaftliche_Mitarbeiterinnen_und_Mitarbeiter/goebel/English_Version2/index.html
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