Paul Treanor is a frequent critical voice on this forum. Rather suprisingly for
someone who is so critical of English language imperialism, his contributions
are invariably in English. Surely, this is reinforcing the very thing he is so
critical of. If Paul wants to broaden the forum into other languages he is very
welcome to do so, as is anyone else. There is no rule that specifies that email
has to be in English!
Paul seems to be critical of many things. If he feels so strongly why does he
not set up a parallel to the Oxford Cultural Turns conference with some other
working languages. It seems strange that he should criticise a conference setup
in Britain, by British academics (if I dare use such essentialist terminology)
for using English as the working language.
Most internal conferences in France, Germany or the Netherlands will use French,German or Dutch as their language of choice, although I accept international
conferences in these countries are commonly bi-lingual with English as one of
the languages.
As for Rhodes house venue, does this really make the conference Imperialist? I
remember some years ago attending a conference in Amsterdam at the department
of sociology was then located, if I remember correctly, in the old Dutch East
India Company building. We enjoyed the conference and the venue. We did not, as
far as I remember, accuse the organisers of residual imperialism for daring to
hold the conference in such a venue. Most western countries have a history of
imperialism - the British, the Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Portugese etc.
Paul seems to think that the British have a unique monopoly on imperialism.
Chris Hamnett
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