Apologies for cross posting.

David Lambert

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A Conference at the Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies
University of Leeds 

Thursday 24 - Friday 25 September, 2009
Leeds Humanities Research Institute 

'THE POSTCOLONIAL HUMAN' 


Keynote Speakers

Peter Hallward, Professor of Philosophy at Middlesex and author of
Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment
(2007), Badiou: A Subject to Truth (2003) and Absolutely Postcolonial
(2001)

Alan Lester, Professor of Historical Geography at Sussex and author of
Colonial Lives Across the British Empire (2006) and Imperial Networks:
Creating Identities in Nineteenth Century South Africa and Britain
(2001)


Whether it is being challenged in disability and ecocritical studies as
a normative descriptor, or applauded as a strategic universal in recent
calls for a 'new' Saidian humanism, the human has always been a topic of
concern for Postcolonial studies. Is it a useful category?

The human is the material basis for Agamben's 'bare life' as it marks
the symbolic erosion of humanity. It is the often unspoken referent of
'suffering', and the most basic level of victimage in Hardt and Negri's
characterisation of 'Empire' or Bauman's idea of 'liquid modernity'. It
is also the basis for a dream of its utopian extension in the posthuman,
and yet simultaneously an ontology and affect strategically withheld
from persons and peoples in the imagining of the contemporary (Gilroy's
'infrahuman'). The human is more than a bone of contention; it is a
category with material significance. The displacement of the migrant and
the sans-papiers begins epistemically in their definition against
normative understandings of the human; the global development of
humanitarianism has increasingly involved the use of the human as an
abstract intermediary between aid and the people who need it.

This conference seeks to further these discussions by interrogating
several linked strands of debate regarding the human. It asks whether
this concept retains usefulness with respect to a field that emphasises
cultural plurality, and even questions the benefits and ethics of such a
conceptual abstraction: to what end do we discuss representations of the
'human' while in the global South millions lead materially subhuman
existences? Does the use of 'human' in calls for 'human rights' or
against 'human suffering' not occlude the application of late colonial
or neo-liberal ideas of the human to potentially incommensurable
situations? More generally, how have humanist discourses responded to
the accelerating advance of globalisation and uneven development? Topics
for discussion will include but are not limited to:

- humans and humanism; postcolonial calls for a 'new humanism'
- humans and humanitarianism; invocations of the human in times of
crisis, e.g. as a means of rationalising humanitarian intervention
- humans, animals and machines; different modalities of the cyborg and
the posthuman and their implications for postcolonial thought
- the colonial and postcolonial human; the human as created by the
legacies of colonialism, including slavery and indentured labour
- perspectives on the human as universalising category and/or normative
descriptor
- utopian or dystopian formations of the human, posthuman and
'infrahuman'
- human existence between 'biopolitics' and 'necropolitics'
- the ethics and material consequences of the human as conceptual
abstraction
      
Papers from postgraduate researchers are especially welcome. Papers will
be considered for publication in Ex Plus Ultra. Please send 250 word
proposals for 20-minute papers to Alan Ramon Ward
[log in to unmask] by
20 July 2009 www.leeds.ac.uk/icps/

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Dr David Lambert
Reader in Historical Geography

Department of Geography
Royal Holloway, University of London
Egham, Surrey, TW20 0EX

Tel : +44 (0)1784 443640 Fax : +44 (0)1784 472836
http://www.gg.rhul.ac.uk/lambert/ 

Colonial lives across the British Empire (Cambridge University Press,
2006), edited with Alan Lester

White creole culture, politics and identity during the age of abolition
(Cambridge University Press, 2005)