Upcoming Events
CCFI / CFIS Cosmo/Politics Noted Scholar Lecture
Dr. Pheng Cheah
Dr. Pheng Cheah is Professor in the Department of Rhetoric, University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (Columbia University Press, 2003) and Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Harvard University Press, 2006). He is also the co-editor of Cosmopolitics:- Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (University of Minnesota Press, 1998), Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson (Routledge, 2003), and Derrida and the Time of the Political (Duke University Press, 2009). He is currently working on a book on world literature in the age of global financialization and a book on the concept of instrumentality.
Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights
March 11, 2010, 12 – 1.30 pm | Coach House – Green College
The problematic of cosmopolitanism and the world-wide solidarity it entails has primarily been posed in terms of the deficiencies of vision, perception and the imagination. While we can imagine the bounded community of the nation, it is more difficult to imagine common humanity. Proponents of new cosmopolitanisms tend to distinguish between cosmopolitanism as a normative idea and a set of experiences and real practices, cosmopolitanism as an ideal project and actually existing cosmopolitanism. This paper suggests that we must locate the physico-material bases of cosmopolitanism at an even more fundamental level: in the biopolitical making of concrete human beings with all their capacities and needs who can subsequently recognize that they thereby have human rights.
This lecture is co-sponsored by Access & Diversity, Department of Antropology, Asian Studies, Centre for Women's and Gender Studies, Department of Educational Studies and Centre for the Study of the Internationalization of Curriculum Studies.
Of Other Worlds to Come
March 12, 2010, 2.00 – 5.00 pm | Choi Building #120
The major current in the critical rethinking of modernity today emanates from perspectives outside the North Atlantic, from various sites that have either been excluded and marginalized by the relentless universal historical march of Euro-American modernity or incorporated through the subordinating sign of belatedness or backwardness. This rethinking takes the form of the argument that we have to see the world as consisting of multiple temporalities that overlap and cannot and should not be hierarchized by means of a teleological progression from ‘earlier’ and ‘outmoded’ to ‘later’ and ‘new’, from the ‘not yet there’ to a universal end that is actualized in the present. This paper offers a critical examination of two exemplary accounts of alternative modernities: the idea of multitemporality or heterotemporality elaborated in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, and Nestor Garcia Canclini’s Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity.
