Postcolonial Spatialities
While postcolonial theory is necessarily invested in questions of space, it has not produced the multi-layered theories of space, spatiality, and space-making that the late 1980s and early 1990s seemed to promise. This conference on Postcolonial Spatialities will thus wrestle with spatial theories as they are currently constituted but with a view to reviewing them with postcolonial perspectives at the level of example and of theory.
THURSDAY APRIL 26
9:00-9:30—Welcome Address
+ Ato Quayson, NYU - The Challenge of Postcolonial Spatialities
10:00-11:30 Session 1—The State of Space or the Space of State?
+ Jeanne-Marie Jackson, John’s Hopkins University - Spatiality Beyond Disorder: Southern African Restorations of the ‘Metonymic Ideal.’
+ Neil ten Kortenaar, University of Toronto - Imagining Alternative States in Africa
+ Jini Kim Watson, NYU - “Spaces of the Global Cold War: Alignment, Regionalism and PEN Asian Writers Conferences”
+ Chair/Discussant: Rajgopal Saikumar, NYU
11:45-1:15 Session 2—The Arc from Space to Memory
+ Dylan Miner (Wiisaakodewinini), University of Michigan - Nimbezikaa // I Move Slowly: Lowriding with Ancestors and the Land
+ Celina Hung, NYU Shanghai - Fishermen and Slaves in Twenty-First Century International Waters: Writing Labor Outcries in Taiwan's Ocean Literature
+ Sandra Ponzanesi, Utrecht University/Columbia University- Digital Diaspora Beyond the Buzzword
+ Chair/Discussant: Toral Gajarawala, NYU
2:30-4:15pm Session 3—Techno-Logics of Space
+ Grace Afsari-Mamagani, NYU - From Welikia to Digital Harlem: Reading Layered Renderings of Upper Manhattan through Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers
+ Heba Jahama, NYU - The Nile River: Hydropolitics, History, Literature
+ Sandeep Mertia, NYU - Of Fragments and Bits - Towards an Ethnography of Smart Cities in India
+ Chair/Discussant: Zach Humphrey, NYU
4:15-5:45 Session 4—Typologies of Colonial Space-Making
+ Isabel Hofmeyr, University of the Witswatersrand/NYU -A Port City, a Custom House and a Verandah: Transcolonial Spatialities
+ Ola Uduku, University of Edinburgh - Spaces of Leisure and Spaces of Pleasure: A Post Colonial Gaze
+ Ananya Kabir, King’s College, London - Elmina as Postcolonial Space: Transoceanic Creolisation in the ‘Postmétis’ Present
+ Chair/Discussant: Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, NYU
FRIDAY APRIL 27
9:30-11:00 Session 5—Space, Planning, Study
+ Asher Ghertner, Rutgers New Brunswick- Airpocalypse: Distributions of Life Amidst Delhi’s Polluted Airs
+ Saronik Bosu, NYU - Spatial thinking and the Planning Imperative
+ Joanna Phua CUNY Graduate Center - Techno-Power and Hyper-development in the Global South
+ Chair/Discussant: Nate Preus, NYU
11:15-12:45 Session 6—Syncing Space and Politics
+ Haytham Bahoora, University of Toronto - Mapping Empire in an Early Arabic Novel: Imagining Anti-Colonial Solidarity in Jalal Khalid
+ Peter Hitchcock, CUNY Graduate Center/CUNY Baruch College - Beyond States and Statelessness? New Forms of Postcolonial Polity
+ Mark Sanders, NYU - The Space of the University: Time, and Time Again
+ Chair/Discussant: Saronik Bosu, NYU
2:00-3:30 Session 7—Roundtable Discussion
+ Jini Kim Watson, NYU
+ Neil ten Kortenaar, University of Toronto
+ Ananya Kabir, King’s College London
+ Isabel Hofmeyr, University of the Witswatersrand/NYU
+ Ato Quayson, NYU
