Amsterdam | 1 October 2021, 14:00-18:00 CET
Multiple narratives contribute to the shaping of individual and communal beliefs and practices — even more so today. However, what makes some of these narratives more pervasive than others? In the processes of sense- and decision-making, hegemonic narratives are positioned in the centre, namely the place from which institutions exert their influence. These ‘central’ narratives tend to naturalize the unequal production and distribution of meaning, thereby marginalizing, invisibilizing and excluding many peripheral voices. Latin America is a prime example of how central narratives can generate social injustice, but also of emerging counter-hegemonic narratives.

Groningen | 28-29 October 2021
The end of the Cold War at the turn of the 1990s initiated a global discourse of contemporaneity that was meant to deconstruct the linear progressive time of modernity as well as its dialectics that dominated the 20th century. In literature and artistic imagination, this postmodern sensibility was meant to institute a new “politics of time” (Osborne) marked by globalization – both open and seamless, as well as generative of a new expansive, fluid episteme. The heavily Eurocentric myopia of this view found starkest expressions in the idea of the “end of history” (Fukuyama) that declared the end of politics itself. Yet arrested within such perceptions of new spatio-temporal fluidities of “the contemporary” were the heterogeneous temporalities of decolonization and democratic change in societies that had been negotiating the impacts and afterlives of empire and ideological conflicts of the Cold War itself across the long 20th century. 

Online | 1-2 November 2021
Responding to the recent ‘transnational turn’ in Modernist Studies, as well as the growing field signalled by the establishment of the Feminist Modernist Studies journal in 2018, this workshop will explore the relationship between gender and transnational modernism. Bringing together scholars of a variety of national and regional modernisms (North America, Europe, Latin America, and beyond), we seek to assess where women fit into the redrawing of the geographical borderlines of Modernist Studies and how to account for not only the geographic but also symbolic marginalisation of these figures. Spread over two days, the workshop will combine presentations, discussion groups and collaborative writing sessions.

Amsterdam | 19-20-21 January 2022 
Against the rapidly accelerating ravages of neoliberalism across the globe, the term “liberal” has, more than ever, come to be contested in public debate. Yet the idea of the novel as a “liberal” genre – dating to the heyday of nineteenth-century realism – persists, even as it may (at times) struggle to break free of its Western heritage. In the effort to imagine alternative forms of social organization and political community beyond an individualist ontology, and to come to terms with new modes of reading and critique beyond the neoliberal imprint, fiction writers are developing modes of expression that innovatively negotiate continuities with older forms and literary traditions – precisely as they seek to respond to what is new. In tracking and mapping the new forms of literary expression and practices of critique that are emerging in and for (late, neo,- or post-)liberal times, this winter school aims to hold the different meanings of “liberal” – indeed, the full spectrum – in play: from political and economic (neo-)liberalism, on the one hand, to literary or aesthetic liberalism (especially in the context of old and new realisms in the novel) on the other, while also making room for decolonial and critical race approaches.