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 [email protected] 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 [email protected], 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.