Unsettling Colonial Modernity: Islamicate Contexts in Focus

University of Alberta

April 24-25, 2015

Keynote speakers: Dr. Sherene Razack*, Dr. Parin Dossa*

The late-19th century acceleration of European colonialism in the Middle East and North Africa

gave rise to a range of cultural, sociopolitical, and socioeconomic projects seeking to restructure

Islamicate societies after modern Europe. Such Eurocentric projects were predominantly advanced

through subordinating Islamicate traditions, cultures, and identities. This traumatic historical

experience evokes the image of a Muslim other laid on the Procrustean bed of European modernity;

Islamicate traditions, cultures, and identities were either stretched out of shape or sawed off so that

they would fit the hegemonic conception of modernity.

This homogenizing conception of modernity, however, has faced serious challenges from within

and without its European bedrock. Critics have problematized the unilinear view of historical

progress in the discourse of Enlightenment modernity and its homogenizing universalism; they

have also highlighted the (in)formal colonial trajectory of European modernity in non-European

contexts. Out of these critical engagements, have emerged counterdiscourses such as “indigenous

modernities”, “multiple modernities”, and “alternative modernities”, as well as a rich body of

literature provincializing Europe, historicizing lived experiences of European modernity, and

unveiling its darker side. These critiques have opened up new possibilities for transcending false

binary oppositions of West/East, modernity/tradition, secular/sacred, and culture/nature.

The organizing committee of this interdisciplinary conference invites contributions to the current

rethinking of post-19th century identity formations and sociopolitical transmutations in Islamicate

contexts (both national and diasporic) vis-à-vis the colonial project of modernity. We are

particularly interested in examining practical implications as well as challenges and prospects of

such dialogical investigations. Topics might include, but are not limited to:

Modern nation-building and its discontents

Postcolonialism, indigeneity, and decoloniality

Narrative resistance

Feminist theories of experience and first-person knowledge

Identity politics and intersectionality

Subjectivity, theories of the self, and narrative identities

Racialization and epistemologies of ignorance

Trauma, affect, memory, and their link to identity

The return of the repressed in myth, phantasy, and neurosis

Islamophobia in the “War on Terror” era

Orientalization of diasporic identities in popular culture

Radical pedagogies in interrogating Islamophobia/orientalism

Religion, secularism, and democracy

Orientalism and occidentalism

Critical race and whiteness studies

Marxist literary criticism

Critical (ir)realism

Technophobia, eco-criticism, and post-apocalyptic literature

Post-modernism as the return of Romanticism

Globalization and socio-economic development

Contributions can take the form of papers or posters. Please send abstracts (150-200 words for

posters; 300-500 words for papers), along with a short bio of author(s), to ucmconf@gmail.com by

November 30, 2014. Decisions on selected proposals will be sent out early January 2015.

Presenters whose abstracts are accepted must submit their papers (3000-5000 words) or posters

(2-4 slides) by March 27, 2015, one month prior to the conference date.

A selection of papers presented at the conference will be published in a peer-reviewed, edited

volume. A final draft of selected papers is to be submitted within two months after the conference.

Should you have any questions or require more information, please contact us via email

at ucmconf@gmail.com, or visit http://www.ucmconf.com/.

*Dr. Sherene Razack is Professor of Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies

in Education of the University of Toronto.

*Dr. Parin Dossa is Professor of Anthropology and Associate Member in the Department of

Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, at Simon Fraser University.