Locating Postcolonial Narrative Genres

International Conference, Stuttgart University, July 16-19, 2009

The prominence of questions of cultural identity in postcolonial studies has prevented due attention to concerns of literary form and aesthetics. Genres like the novel have often been condemned as ultimately complicit with dominant Western enlightenment agendas and local forms of articulation have frequently deconstructed them or redefined their properties. While considering the politics of cultural production and the tensions involved, our main aim is to explore the faultlines of generic transformations and of the emergence of new genres. In which way have marginalized cultures been concerned with traditional forms like the epic or the novel, how has e.g. the postcolonial epic re-conceptualized the burden of traditional nation-founding myths or the postcolonial novel deconstructed implications of the history of (auto)biographical models and of enlightened individualism? Such questions have special urgency in the context of cultures with strong oral traditions. The conference will focus on the evolution of specific narrative techniques as part of an emerging postcolonial aesthetics.

Moving Images - Mobile Viewers: 20th Century Visuality

Vision and movement seem to have shifted centre stage in modes of experience in the last century: as a result of their joint effect slow contemplative gazes at static images seem to be increasingly displaced by distracted, ‘vernacular’ ways of seeing. Looking out of the window of a speeding car, receiving photographs of planet earth from outer space, watching the flickering images of the TV screen, scrolling through a text, zooming in on a location in Google Maps, or sending images via mobile phones or webcams - all these are unique visual experiences that were impossible before various inventions in the 20th century originated completely new kinds of movement. The double meaning of “moving images” is meant to signal the specificality of motion to these imagi(ni)ngs and at the same time to express the emotional power of those visual images which are able to transcend the constant stream of images in contemporary perception.

Conference Website
Call for Papers (pdf)

Semiotic Encounters: Text, Image and Trans-Nation

We would like to invite you to our international conference 'Semiotic Encounters: Text, Image and Trans-Nation' that will take place on July 17th-20th 2008 in Freudenstadt-Lauterbad, at the Black Forest. The conference invites a cross- and interdisciplinary approach to the circulation of signifying practices and the interplay between various semiotic systems, e.g. film, fiction and photography in 20th-century Anglophone contexts.

Conference Website

17. - 20.07.2008

Prof. Dr. Walter Göbel
Noha Hamdi
Sarah Säckel