Reminder from David Midgley
Call for papers
Legacies of Conquest:
Transnational perspectives on the conquest and colonisation of Latin
America
A symposium to be held at CRASSH, University of Cambridge,
11-12 April 2017
Organisers: Jenny Mander, David Midgley and Maya Feile Tomes
The discovery of the ‘New World’ is one of the standard reference points
for defining ‘modernity’ from a European perspective. It is also a
historical event that has had manifest repercussions for the interaction
of human cultures around the globe. This symposium will provide the
opportunity for a comparative inquiry into the ways in which key aspects
of the conquest and colonisation of Latin America by Europeans have been
represented and transmitted in writing, in visual culture, and in
performance culture down the centuries and across a range of national
cultures.
Two keynote speakers will provide the symposium with perspectives that
run beyond the European. Dr Stefanie Gänger (Assistant Professor at
Cologne University) is the author of Relics of the Past. The Collecting
and Studying of Pre-Columbian Antiquities in Peru and Chile, 1837–1911
(2014), and she will be speaking on the historical constraints on
understanding the native cultures of Latin America through archaeology
and ethnography. Professor João Cezar de Castro Rocha (Rio de Janeiro)
is President of the Brazilian Association of Comparative Literature. His
latest book is Shakespearean Cultures. The Challenge of Mimesis
(forthcoming 2017), and he will speak on the role that reflections of
European traditions have played within the development of Latin American
cultures.
The aim of the conference is to discover, by comparing a selection of
particular cases, where there is common ground among the national
cultures of Europe and Latin America in the treatment of key issues,
where there are significant differences, and what the nature of those
differences is. Proposals from scholars at any career stage and with
expertise in any relevant area, including areas of research that are
currently in the process of development, will be welcome. We
particularly invite contributions on cases that have presented
themselves, within the cultures in which they have arisen, as
innovative, provocative or controversial with regard to the long-term
significance of the conquest and colonisation of Latin America, and the
following list is a guide to the broad areas that particularly interest
us:
1. Representations that relate to the perception of a utopian potential
in the settlement of South America.
2. Representations of the slave trade with Africa, particularly those
that relate to the unsuccessful attempts to extend the principles of the
French Revolution to the West Indies.
3. Representations of the landscape of South America, its wild life and
its indigenous human populations that relate to the accounts of European
explorers from the 16th to the 20th century.
4. Representations from within the cultures of Latin America, including
the native cultures, that challenge or complement European treatments of
the issues.
5. Commemorative practices relating to historical events associated
with the conquest, and the critical or revisionary approaches to
established historiography that may be reflected in such practices.
This conference is being funded by CRASSH, the Modern Humanities
Research Association, and the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages
at Cambridge University. It is anticipated that a publication in a
peer-reviewed series will arise from the symposium.
Proposals, with an abstract no longer than 200 words please, should be
sent to [log in to unmask] by 30 November 2016.
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David Midgley
Professor of German Literature and Intellectual History
St John's College
Cambridge CB2 1TP
Tel. 1223 338779
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