CALL FOR PAPERS
Local Modernities: Islamic Cultural Practices as Sites
of Agency, Mediation, and Resistance
Graduate Student Symposium
Department of the History of Art and Architecture,
Harvard University
History, Theory, Criticism Section of the Department of
Architecture, MIT
Cambridge, MA
October 5, 2002
Recent scholarship has challenged the definition of
modernity as an invention of the West that spreads with
the rise of industrialism, capitalism, the
nation-state, and colonialism. Taking the disruption of
this deterministic model as a starting point, the
symposium seeks to ask how the conceptual orientation
of modernity shifts once we begin to critically
consider a more complex range of locales. Specifically,
the examination of Islamic cultural practices during
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will allow us to
explore alternative ways of shaping and defining what
exactly constitutes the experience of modernity.
Our focus on traditionally marginalized positions is
intended to activate the discourse on modernity and the
multi-directional flows of people, goods, ideas, and
cultural practices.
The conference will serve as an
opportunity to go beyond the essentializing definition
of Islamic culture as a practice firmly rooted in the
past, religious subject matter, and a geographical
heartland and will also bring into dialogue the
relations between diverse modernities, including those
of the West.
We welcome abstracts dealing with case
studies within and outside of the Islamic world and
methodological critiques concerning problems and
possibilities of peripheries.
Abstracts should be no
more than 250 words and be received by May 15, 2002.
Please submit abstracts via mail or email to:
Kristina Van Dyke
Department of the History of Art and Architecture
Harvard University
485 Broadway
Sackler Museum
Cambridge, MA 02138
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Prita Meier, Ph.D. candidate and
Kristina Van Dyke, Ph.D. candidate
Department of the History of Art and Architecture,
Harvard University
Sarah Rogers, Ph.D. candidate
Department of Architecture,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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