OSL Seminar: ‘Forms of Postcolonial and Postsocialist Time: Eternal Presents and Resurfacing Futures’

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When and where: 18 November (Amsterdam), 25 November (Amsterdam), 2 December (Groningen), 9 December (Amsterdam) and 16 December 2024 (Groningen), 13:00-16:00. The exact venues will be shared with course participants.
Participation: This course is open to PhD Candidates and RMA students; OSL members will get priority access.
Credits: 5 EC. NB: Credits can only be awarded to humanities ReMA and PhD students from Dutch universities.
Organizers: Dr Ksenia Robbe (University of Groningen), Dr Hanneke Stuit and Dr Sanjukta Sunderason (University of Amsterdam)

Registration will open on 2 September 2024 VIA THIS LINK

THE SEMINAR IS FULLY BOOKED, please send an e-mail with your with your name, affiliation, status (ReMA, PhD, other) and research school membership to osl@rug.nl. We will put you on our waiting list.

This course addresses the ways in which literature and art, in their generic capacity for multi-perspective representation, reimagine place and agency within the eternal present inaugurated by the end of the Cold War at the turn of the 1990s. This global discourse of contemporaneity was meant to deconstruct the linear progressive time of modernity that dominated the 20th century. However, arrested within such perceptions of new spatio-temporal fluidities of “the contemporary” were the heterogeneous temporalities of decolonization and democratization in societies that had been negotiating the impacts and afterlives of empire and ideological conflicts of the Cold War across the long 20th century.

Today, we observe a certain “return of history” in calls for decolonization that have come to define militant imperialisms and nationalisms across the globe, as well as activist resistance to nation-statist hegemonies. The war in Ukraine, and continuing conflicts over postcolonial sovereignty across former colonial sites like Hong Kong, Kashmir, or Palestine reveal such circularities of eternal presents and resurfacing futures. These temporalities, while appealing to new calls for liberation, are nonetheless often dominated by nation-state driven essentialist past-orientedness and the wish to preserve the existing hegemony.