Colleagues,
See below for a lecture by Mimi Sheller next week.
Best wishes,
Gad
>Dear Colleagues,
>
>Would you be so kind as to circulate to interested parties the
>notice of Mimi Sheller's lecture (see below) next week in Oxford?
>
>It would very good to see you there, if you can make it.
>
>Best wishes,
>
>Richard Scholar
>--
>Richard Scholar
>Fellow and Tutor in French
>Oriel College, Oxford
>
>---
>
>Professor Mimi Sheller (Drexel University)
>
>'The Virtual Reality of the Early Modern Caribbean'
>
>Friday 4 May at 2.15pm
>MacGregor Room, Oriel College, University of Oxford
>
>In her 2003 study, Consuming the Caribbean, Mimi Sheller followed
>the lead set by Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury and Jackie Stacey in
>their Global Nature, Global Culture (2000) in thinking of the
>Caribbean as an effect, a fantasy, a set of practices, and a
>context. This was not to suggest that the Caribbean is 'illusory,
>immaterial, or a matter of ideas and imagination alone' (Franklin et
>al. 2000), but rather to begin to grasp how nature is both enlisted
>to do certain kinds of work of imagination (denaturalized), and then
>made to seem originary and untouched (renaturalized). In this paper,
>Sheller re-examines this argument in light of recent understandings
>of 'virtuality', and thereby reconsiders early modern globalization
>as a kind of paradoxical production of a 'virtual reality'. Insofar
>as the Caribbean is both denaturalized and renaturalized, it is a
>perfect example of a paradox that Homay King has identified, in
>which virtuality simultaneously 'invokes existence and
>non-existence, reality and unreality'. In what ways was the early
>modern encounter with the Caribbean both real and unreal? How was
>the existence of the indigenous Caribbean simultaneous with its
>non-existence? This paper examines the potentialities incarnate in
>the chimerical indigenous Caribbean as global avatar.
>
>All welcome
>
>The Oxford Early Modern French Research Seminar in association with
>the Caribbean Globalizations Network
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