Changing Images of India and Africa
A colloquium organized by SARI and CICC at the Salle des conférences,
Université Cergy-Pontoise on the 3d and 4th June 2010.
Call for Papers
The very mention of the word image brings back memories of colonial clichés. Any picture of Africa with no mention of poverty, wars or starvation seems nowhere to be found. As regards India, it is still the land of miserable slums and neglected widows. But the purpose of this SARI/CICC colloquium is to move beyond the colonial rhetoric and decidedly look at contemporary India and Africa in order to create, first of all, a South-South dynamics of interaction. The idea of movement is conveyed by the continuous form of the verb in the title.
Researchers familiar with the difference between looking and seeing and the politics of the gaze can now think about other ways of theorizing representations of India and Africa by Indians or Africans living in India or vice versa, by diasporic Indians and Africans or by Western cosmopolitans. Language being what Derrida calls the invincible body of the other, it would be interesting to go beyond Anglophone or Europhone languages and explore how self-representation s of India or Africa are being made in other/mother tongues in order to set up a different enmeshment of currents of thought.
Paper proposals might
1. Contrast earlier images of India/Africa with current images
2. Study the influences that brought about the change
3. Discuss the new politics of representation
4. Examine the role of the location and position of the observer in the process of change
5. Explore the theme not only in literature but also in painting, cinema, music and generally the media (press, videoclips, advertisements)
6. Identify the core set of images that resist change and explain the
reasons for their persistence
Please send your title, an abstract of 200 words and your email and snail mail addresses to both the coordinators: Geetha Ganapathy-Doré and Michel Olinga from the Université de Paris 13
Contact: geethagd@hotmail.com, geetha.dore@ univ-paris13.fr,
michael.commonwealth@yahoo.co.uk
NOTE: Last date for submission of proposals is 15th February 2010. The proposals could be in English or French. However, for the publication of the proceedings, you would be required to contribute your text in French.