[Discussion] CFP: Renaissance Humanism: Decolonizing Extra-Western Europe (Netherlands) (9/1/04; 7/5/05-7/8/05)

[sule tarakcioglu]

PANEL PROPOSAL FOR CULTURAL CHANGE CONFERENCE:  University of Groningen,
The Netherlands, 5-8 July 2005

RENAISSANCE HUMANISM: DECOLONIZING EXTRA-WESTERN EUROPE

Scholars have recently begun to recognize that Renaissance humanism,
long considered a hallmark of Western social and intellectual
development, must be reevaluated in terms of its complicity with Western
European colonization not only of physical spaces but cultural and
linguistic domains.  Among humanism's contributions still very much with
us is the definition of what constitutes the center of Europe and what
is considered its margins.  The consequences of this definition include
our perception of a Europe split on an East/West axis, and the fact that
what we now call "Eastern Europe" has almost completely dropped out of
our recognition of Europe and European humanism during the Renaissance.
  As a result, we seldom hear much regarding humanism in places outside
of Western Europe: Eastern Europe--where Cracow and Prague, for example,
were important centers of humanist learning-- or the Islamic world, or
Asia, Russia, and Africa. Yet, we know that scholarly and commercial
interchange spread many of the central ideas of humanism beyond its
Western European origins. What were those pathways of exchange? What
influence did humanism have beyond the borders of Western Europe, and
how may it have been affected, as a movement and a philosophy, by its
contacts beyond the center? This panel seeks to consider Renaissance
humanism within a context of decolonization, as we examine its
developments and effects outside its Western European home turf.

Please send e-mail proposals/abstracts by September 1, 2004, n the body
of e-mail messages to:
Nina Chordas, Ph.D.,
nina.chordas@uas.alaska.edu


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