2nd INTERNATIONAL 'LANGUAGE-COMMUNICATION- CULTURE' CONFERENCE

2nd INTERNATIONAL 'LANGUAGE-COMMUNICATION- CULTURE' CONFERENCE

Beja, Portugal, November 2004



CALL FOR PAPERS





Knowledge and Power: history, geography, representation, identity in
post-colonial studies



In Orientalism, Edward Said selected these two great Baconian themes  -
Knowledge and Power - as dominant in the discourse of imperial authority.
"Knowledge means rising above immediacy, beyond self, into the foreign and
distant . To have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have
authority over it". And, in Culture and Imperialism, he called for 'a
different and innovative paradigm for humanistic research', 'a way of
regarding our world as amenable to investigation and interrogation without
magic keys, special jargons and instruments, curtained-off practices', a way
through which 'the disenchantments, the disputations and systematically
sceptical investigations in innovative work . submit these composite, hybrid
identities [the caliphate, the state, the orthodox clerisy, the
Establishment] to a negative dialectics which dissolves them into variously
constructed components. What matters a great deal more than the stable
identity kept current in official discourse is the contestatory force of an
interpretative method whose material is the disparate, but intertwined and
interdependent, and above all overlapping streams of historical evidence.'





Both in method and content Said's books contributed to a new approach to
post-colonial theory and practice. A year after his death we would like to
address some of the issues he developed in his work. We, therefore, welcome
papers (15 to 20 minutes reading) on the following subjects:



1.      Histories of Empires and Colonies

2.      Women and Empires

3.      Old Empires and Indirect Colonialism

4.      Post-colonial Theories in the 21st century

5.      Said's works and their importance in post-colonial cultural
criticism



Please send 150-word abstracts by 15 July 2004 to the following addresses:

Adelaide Meira Serras: aserras@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Luísa Leal de Faria: lealfaria@xxxxxxxxx

Teresa Malafaia: tvmalafaia@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx