Preliminary Programme

Wed 11 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 12 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.00 - 18.30

Fri 13 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 14 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

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Wednesday 11 April 2012 14.00 - 16.00
A-3 CUL05 Cultures of Modernity 3: Theorising Modernity
Boyd Orr: Lecture Theatre A
Networks: Culture , Religion Chair: Joris van Eijnatten
Organizers: Ed Jonker, Joes Segal, Joris van Eijnatten Discussant: Ed Jonker
Jukka Kortti : Media, Elite and Modernity. Defining Modern among Finnish Cultural Intelligentsia in the 20th Century
The presentation discusses how the Finnish intelligentsia has defined modern in the 20th century. It focuses on the role of media in the making of modern – both as an abstract concept and as a concrete programme to build a new society. Finland has witnessed an extremely rapid modernisation process ... (Show more)
The presentation discusses how the Finnish intelligentsia has defined modern in the 20th century. It focuses on the role of media in the making of modern – both as an abstract concept and as a concrete programme to build a new society. Finland has witnessed an extremely rapid modernisation process especially after the Second World War - even in the whole post war European context. Cultural intelligentsia has had an important role in the process since the intellectuals in Finland have never really become an alienated stratum with an independent tradition visa-á-vis the state. Hence rather than in the marginal avant-garde, they have been at the centre of society. The main sources for the presentation come from the Finnish cultural journals and broadcasting; they are approached as an institution and through their contents. The objects of the study include the whole 20th century, but the main periods dealt in the presentation are the cultural modernism of the 1950s, the societal modernism of the 1960s and the cultural post modernism of the 1980s. These were the times when the defining of modern reached the discussions even in the level of national Finnish public sphere. (Show less)

Alanna Lockward : “We are all black”. Modernity, Global Citizenship and the Limits of Humanity from the Enlightenment of the Haitian Revolution
This paper will show how the idea of global citizenship is linked to the racial configurations of the modern world and hence with the limits of humanity. It discusses how the racial hierarchy of human existence, originating in the Renaissance and prescribed legally during the Enlightenment, established current (white-male-Christian-Western) ... (Show more)
This paper will show how the idea of global citizenship is linked to the racial configurations of the modern world and hence with the limits of humanity. It discusses how the racial hierarchy of human existence, originating in the Renaissance and prescribed legally during the Enlightenment, established current (white-male-Christian-Western) European notions of who is Human and who is lower in that hierarchy, thereby designating citizenship, one of the most important legacies of modernity. I analyze key literature and its critique, in order to map discursively the role played by the Haitian Revolution in how modernity established racialized global definitions of citizenship from the perspective of the (trans) Atlantic World(s) (Gilroy 1993). For this purpose, I compare some narratives from each axis of the slave trade’s triangle which will be represented respectively by two nation-states: Africa (Ghana and Namibia)/the Caribbean (Haiti and the Dominican Republic)/Europe (France and Germany).
The central thesis of decolonial thought is that coloniality is not a state of affairs opposed to modernity and preceding it, but an integral part of the processes of modernization themselves. The experience of European expansion and colonization is crucial to understand the emergence of the main institutions of modernity between the 16th and 19th centuries. In the same way, all the processes of modernization of the peripheries have been mediated by the “cultural logic” of colonial heritage.
In post-colonial studies neither the ideology of modernity nor the black pits that hide its rhetoric are ever questioned. Decolonial thinkers counteract the evolutionist narratives of the social sciences that have hidden the mutual dependency between modernity and coloniality, presenting the latter as an unwanted subproduct of the first. In this sense, decolonial thinkers make a clear difference between colonialism and coloniality. Walter Mignolo establishes that what he calls “the rhetoric of modernity” (progress) is always accompanied by the “logic of coloniality” (exploitation). Decolonial thinkers analyze asymmetries in global definitions of citizenship in relation to coloniality. The decolonial approach establishes an epistemic turn by means of expanding the scope of investigation into the world, instead of keeping it within “the discipline”.
Decolonial thinking differs from post-colonial theory or post-colonial studies in that these are circumscribed within the legacy of French post-structuralism. Post-coloniality is a product of (post) modernity. De-colonial thinking, on the contrary, finds its roots in Afro and Indigenous histories of maroon and independence movements and communities.
The paper discusses the connection between racism and the figure of the citizen not only from the perspective of the theories, rules, laws and social structures that created them, but also from the perspective of the resistance to them, and the Haitian Revolution is only the tip of many icebergs in this regard. According to Laurent Dubois (2005) we are all descendants of the Haitian Revolution and therefore accountable to its ancestry, my aim is to analyze this predicament as a citizen of the Dominican Republic; as a racialized non-citizen of a European nation: Germany and as a member of the Diaspora of the African continent. (Show less)

Joes Segal : In Search of Socialist Modernism: How East Bloc Culture fell Victim to Western Teleology
Recently the concept of ‘modernity’ has been used with regard to socialist cultures and societies. The Victoria & Albert Museum organized the Cold War Modern: Design 1945-1970 exhibition (London, 2008) in which design from the West was provocatively combined with design from the Eastern Bloc under the common denominator of ... (Show more)
Recently the concept of ‘modernity’ has been used with regard to socialist cultures and societies. The Victoria & Albert Museum organized the Cold War Modern: Design 1945-1970 exhibition (London, 2008) in which design from the West was provocatively combined with design from the Eastern Bloc under the common denominator of ‘modernism’. Katherine Pence and Paul Betts edited a volume about everyday culture and politics in the GDR under the title Socialist Modern (2008), and former socialist countries reinterpret their past in terms of an ‘alternative’ modernity (e.g. conference Modernization, Vilnius, December 2010). The use of the concept of ‘modernity’ in a socialist context seems counter-intuitive, as it contradicts the widespread association of ‘modernity’ with free-market capitalism and liberal democracy. In the field of the visual arts, ‘modernism’ has been defined in terms of artistic individualism and creative freedom, qualities that have been claimed as Western values par excellence. However, this Western narrative that started to dominate in the wake of the Cold War has serious methodological and empirical flaws: on the one hand it confuses empirical data with a normative interpretation of the world, on the other, on account of its teleological structure it obscures a more balanced and open-minded interpretation of non-Western cultures and societies. In my paper, I will use the example of Cold War era East European art and its interpretation to unravel the teleological assumptions in our use of the concept of ‘modernity’. (Show less)

Michael Spiller : Past the Post: Modernism and Modernity
Modernism (and increasingly as time passes, Postmodernism) are movements destined to be located in a past that they defined themselves by repudiating. This paper will ask whether modernity - which is a condition, not a movement - can still be usefully defined through the ,odernist oppositions that have ... (Show more)
Modernism (and increasingly as time passes, Postmodernism) are movements destined to be located in a past that they defined themselves by repudiating. This paper will ask whether modernity - which is a condition, not a movement - can still be usefully defined through the ,odernist oppositions that have shaped our modes and understanding of the world. Modernity, knowingly or not, seeks to replace eternity with time, and thus finds itself opposoing religious order; to replace the past with the future, encountering theobstacle that the future only exists by not becoming the present; to replace truth with viewpoint (democracy is unassailably modern); to replace writer with text, as self is increasingly located as a manifestation in electronic fields; to replace the tribe with the globe, and reality with image, as images can be replaced, as the future requires, much more quickly than realities. It will be suggested that these oppositions, none of which is politically or ethically neutral, are a useful inheritance from modernism through post-modern analysis, and that for the very reason that modernity is not a movement with a manifesto, but a condition of mind with aspirations, the articulation of these oppositions, and cultural-historical analysis of the vistories of one over another, are essential if what Giovanni Vattimo called "the tendency for Progress to dissolve itself" is to be understood and controlled. (Show less)



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