‘Ethics and Postcolonialism’
10-11 April 2006, Newcastle University
Contacts| Call for Papers | Programme | Registration | Getting here
*All events will take place in the Percy Building, University of Newcastle.
CONFIRMED SPEAKERS:
• Dr Leela Gandhi, La Trobe University, Melbourne (Australia)
• Professor Gauri Viswanathan, Columbia University, NY
(U.S.A.)
• Dr Heather Widdows, Lecturer in Global Ethics, Centre
for Global Ethics, University of Birmingham
• Dr Bhikhu Parekh, Centennial Professor, London School
of Economics and Political Science
• Prof. Peter Jones, University of Newcastle
This conference, organized in conjunction with Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, attempts to explore and articulate some of the visible intersections between ethics and postcolonialism. In this field, ethics can be described as a “hidden term” underlying discussions around the supposed “ruins” of a universal code of human rights and the unmasking of processes of economic exploitation in the world today.
Conceptual models of postcolonial engagement that center around Leela Gandhi’s hospitality or “xenophilia”, Edward Said’s secular criticism, and Jacques Derrida’s reconciliation, all can be said to stem in one way or another from an implicit reliance on ethical premises. The aim of this conference is to excavate such principles and to make them more readily available for discussion and critique. Is it possible to envisage an ethics that can make sense of differing value systems in the different cultures touched by the process of globalization? On the one hand, there is an increasingly widespread scepticism towards the universal applicability of ethical concepts, which is counterbalanced by the powerful emphasis of postcolonial theory on the ethics of engagement and the necessity of intervention. Given these premises, it appears particularly urgent to envisage a more contextualized form of ethics that can nevertheless lay claim to a strategic validity in terms of moral and political accountability. Numerous and urgent questions make a discussion of the ethical approach in dealing with postcolonial issues necessary: for example, is there an ethical aspect to violence in contemporary postcolonial societies, indeed could violence be seen as an ethical necessity in some cases? Or in terms of historical reparations and reconciliations, can ethics always be seen as restorative or are there significant failures in this vision?
Such questions demand a sustained scrutiny of the concepts of ethics, human rights, and intervention, and will involve discussions of conscientious activism in the inter-disciplinary overlaps between politics, literature, cultural theory, sociology and development. For this reason, we plan to invite speakers across a range of academic disciplines.
The extended length of time accorded to each speaker, we hope, will enable a full exploration of their research and how it engages with ethics and postcolonialism.
The conference programme, including abstracts has now been finalized and is available here.