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Call for Papers
Theme: Synchronizing the World
Subtitle: Historic Times, Globalized Times, Anthropogenic Times
Type: International Conference
Institution: Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages
(IKOS), University of Oslo
Location: Oslo (Norway)
Date: 12.–14.6.2017
Deadline: 25.2.2017
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For its three day international conference, the SAMKUL (RCN) project
Synchronizing the World invites papers that investigate the problem
of multiple temporalities and their synchronization in the
Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment world. We define synchronization
as the process by which the Enlightenment notion of progress, a
temporal concept, was made global through the processes of
colonialism and globalization.
During the Enlightenment, new genre technologies for synchronizing
natural, geological, cultural and historical times emerge in this
period, including the iconic encyclopedias, novels, universal
histories. These genres also spread outwards to the colonies
especially in Asia and Africa in the second colonial wave, giving
rise to the new discursive vocabularies of “Oriental Renaissances”,
reformations or reconstructions across colonial contact zones.
However, the process of synchronization was also continually
questioned, challenged, and fragmented in this new globalization. For
instance, moral progress regulated by missionary activity was as much
a part of the exploitative nature of colonialism as in conflict with
it and other religious belief systems, which seemed to operate with
their own temporalities. In the late 20th century, the rhetoric of
breakdown in the process of synchronization seems to be undergirded
by geopolitical conflicts in a neo-colonial world. Conflicts that
unravel the violence inherent in the process of universalizing
progress often have their origins in what Paul Virilio has termed
“globalitarianism,” a form of exploitative colonial
techno-totalitarianism built on the export of capitalism through
globalization.
A special focus area for the current discussions of synchronization
and its effects is in the area of geological temporalities, where
synchronized crises as the result of anthropogenic climate change and
other human activity continually produce an apocalyptic vision of the
future. This new kind of synchronization channels the dystopian
mirror of Enlightenment notions of progress, and may even be
described as a means to counter nonsynchronicity by recasting it as
the “synchronized crises of unsynchronized effects”: where effects
that are planetary in scope are felt only locally in terms of impact.
Abstracts for 20 minute papers are invited on these topics
1. Comparative studies of the Enlightenment notion of progress and
progress in the colonial contact zones
2. Studies of the 19 th century progress phenomenons such as the Arab
Nahda, the Ottoman Tanzimat, the Meiji Ishin, and the Bengal
Renaissance
3. Investigations into the genres of synchronization: universal
histories, encyclopedias and the novel and others, and how these
categories developed the notion of progress
4. Studies of entangled temporalities such as geological times, clock
times, and cultural times
5. The instrumentalization of temporalities
6. The failure of synchronization as a process and the role of
residual or dominant discourses in nonsynchronicities
7. The effect of nonsynchronicities on the technologies of progress
and globalization
8. The effect of nonsynchronicity in investigating the development of
genre
9. The role of synchronization processes in the definition of crises
10. Investigating the problem of multiple temporalities in terms of
distributed environmental and geopolitical effects of
anthropogenic activity
500 WORD Abstracts may be sent by 25 February 2017:
[email protected]
Successful applicants will be notified on or before March 5, 2017.
Conference website:
http://www.hf.uio.no/ikos/english/research/projects/synchronizing-the-world-globalization-and-multipl/events/conferences/2017/synchro-conf.html
Contact:
Synchronizing the World Project
Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages (IKOS)
University of Oslo
P.A. Munchs hus, Niels Henrik Abels vei 36
N-0371 Oslo
Norway
Email: [email protected]
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