Dear all,
We extended the deadline for the decolonial, decentralising Summer
Conference in Romania of the Center for the Study of Modernity and the
Rural World:
http://centrulpentrustudiereamodernitatiisialumiirurale.ro/en/home/
About the conference: https://telciusummerconferences.wordpress.com/
<https://telciusummerconferences.wordpress.com/2019/02/12/8th-edition-2019-race-sovereignties-and-south-eastern-thought/>
8th Telciu Summer Conference
Race, Sovereignties, and South-Eastern Thought
8-11 August 2019, Telciu, Romania
<https://telciusummerconferences.wordpress.com/2019/02/12/8th-edition-2019-race-sovereignties-and-south-eastern-thought/>
Call
for Papers deadline extended: 1 June 2019
For a long time, mainstream historiography and social science viewed the
rise of nation-states as the gradual overcoming of multinational political
organizations and multi-ethnic empires throughout the world. The resulting
conceptualization of empires and nation-states as mutually exclusive and
chronologically discrete political formations and of the nation-state as
the modern norm generated its own anomalies. The Habsburg, the Ottoman, and
the Tsarist Empires, powerful global actors until well into the
twentieth-century, were explained away as anachronistic survivals of the
old order in the face of mounting national challenges. In spite of ample
evidence for the coexistence of imperial and national state structures in
the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth, the dominant view is that
they no longer coexist in the twenty-first. Dozens of state formations
which are still colonized in the twenty-first century, such as Europe’s and
the United States’ outermost regions and overseas territories, continue to
be viewed as exceptions from the above trajectory from empire to nation and
as anomalies in a modern world of sovereign nation-states, while their
inhabitants retain colonial citizenships and unequal rights with respect to
their counterparts in the metropole.
At the same time, as outright authoritarianism plays havoc with the facades
of parliamentary liberalism in places as different as Brazil, India, and
Hungary, the term “sovereignty” has become a compulsory signifier of the
far-right chorus. Once associated with emancipatory calls for radical
democracy, the “sovereignty” churned out by these authoritarians is little
more than a signaling device for ethnocentric politics, oligarchic
capitalism, and a revival of racist, xenophobic, and anti-gender tactics.
This year’s Telciu Summer Conference engages with the entanglements of race
and sovereignty from both the Global South and the European East, in an
effort to explore the potential of a common decolonial, politically radical
South-Eastern thought. It traces the origin of both processes of
racialization and (sovereign) state formation to a colonial imaginary that
still shapes racial state politics today. Since all the states emerged with
the European colonial expansion in the Americas were new creations, so were
all the major ethnic categories, in turn linked to the position of
sovereign states within the interstate system and of social groups within
states. Thus, while the crude sociocultural hierarchy between Europeans and
non-Europeans mirrored the economic and political power differential
between colonizer and colonized countries, the various ethnic categories
within each state reflected and at the same time justified the division of
labour created in the wake of the colonial occupation of the Americas:
slavery for Black Africans, various forms of serfdom for Native Americans,
and indentured labor for the White European working class. At the same
time, ethnicization produced a worldwide racist discourse, in that the
devalued segments of the work force appeared as on the whole racially
inferior to the dominant ones, regardless of the particular ethnic
hierarchy that the process of ethnicization generated in individual
locations. While the upper end of the hierarchy mostly included a White
privileged segment and its lower end a Black underprivileged one, it was
the constant (re)creation of reified racial and ethnic entities that
characterized capitalism as a racist system.
Against this background, can sovereignty be recovered into a field of
emancipatory politics at a time when transnational issues like climate
catastrophe and mass migration are the defining condition of our times?
Does the inclusive definition of popular sovereignty resonate less with
mass publics than its exclusionary recovery by the “take our country back”
reactionaries because of ingrained racial logic? Why was it so easy for
authoritarians to convert popular sovereignty into a veneer for racism and
homophobia? Do we still need sovereignty as a basis of emancipatory
politics or are “postcolonial sovereignty games” (Adler-Nissen/Gad 2013)
increasingly the rule and “non-sovereign futures” (Yarimar Bonilla 2014)?
*Keynote speaker*: Marius Turda, Oxford Brookes University
[image: AfisExpoBuc]
The language of the conference is *English*.
There are no fees for conference participants. The organizers will cover
meals for the speakers and will book (but not cover) the accommodation
(single: 80RON/night; double: 120 RON/night). In case you cannot cover the
accommodation please let us know as we are able to cover it for up to 5
speakers based on need and by request. Independent researchers or junior
researchers will be given priority with accommodation.
The conference proper will take place on the 9th and 10th of August with a
welcome dinner on the 8th and community activities on the 11th.
If you would like to participate, please send us your title, a *300
words* abstract
and your affiliation in English by the *18th of May* to
*[log in to unmask]* <[log in to unmask]>. If you are a
speaker of Romanian, please send us your abstract both in English and
Romanian, so as to ease the work of our translators (we like to print our
materials in both languages in order to showcase our work for the
non-English speaking public).
Please note that the *Telciu Summer Conference* is followed by the *Telciu
Summer School *(11-18 August), in English and Romanian, this year with the
same topic. The Summer School is designed around longer seminars and other
cultural and artistic activities and has a more open structure as the
Summer Conference. If you would like to participate, the Summer School has
a separate registration process that will be open from March. However,
please let us know if you would like to stay for the Summer School as well.
For more information, please visit http://telciusummerschool.ro/.
Organized by the *Center for the Study of Modernity and the Rural World*
<http://centrulpentrustudiereamodernitatiisialumiirurale.ro/en/home/>* (CSMLR,
Telciu, Romania)* and the *County Museum of History and Art, Zalău*
<http://muzeuzalau.ro/>.
--
Ágota Ábrán, PhD
Center for the Study of Modernity and the Rural World
<http://centrulpentrustudiereamodernitatiisialumiirurale.ro/en/home/>,
Romania
History and Art Muzeum of Zalău <http://muzeuzalau.ro/>, Romania
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