[Bilimsel Haber] CFP: 9/11 and the Futures of Critical Thought (6/2/06; 10/21/06)

[Nazan Haydari]

"Beyond Ground Zero": 9/11 and the Futures of Critical
Thought

Saturday, October 21, 2006

McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada 

    In the wake of the September 11 attacks on the
Pentagon and World
Trade Center in 2001, and amid sweeping patriotic
declarations that the
suicide hijackers had waged a war on America as well
as democracy, the
energetic response by public intellectuals, academics,
philosophers,
and theorists has been to ask: what "America?? what
"democracy?? what
"war?" "for" and "against whom?" Today, in view of the
unfolding
catastrophe in Iraq, the growing presence of the
Canadian military in
Afghanistan, and the heightened anxieties over "state
security," what
does it mean?what could it mean?to conjure the
specter(s) of "9/11?" In
what ways does this event haunt the present day, not
only as a moment
of traumatic violence, but also as an occasion to
change the very
nature of how we think about events? As Jacques
Derrida has argued,
9/11 means calling ?into question, at their most
fundamental level, the
most deep-seated conceptual presuppositions in
philosophical discourse?
(Derrida 100). 

     What quickens this one-day conference is a need
not only to
(re)visit and unsettle current discourses on "9/11,"
but also to engage
the ethical, cultural, (geo)political, and pedagogical
repercussions of
the attacks in their immediate and long-term
aftermaths. How has 9/11
complicated the relationship between (media) spectacle
and terror? What
are the new challenges and pedagogical implications of
9/11 and its
myriad representations in the collective work of
mourning and public
remembrance? How are theories of alterity at once
problematized and
made even more vital by the racialized divides that
the attacks
(re)inforced or (re)configured? How are the concepts
of "democracy,"
"justice," "freedom," "multiculturalism," "tolerance,"
and "diversity"
put in the service of "empire" post-9/11? In what ways
does the willful
forgetfulness of past cultural traumas enable the
public mourning of
only those who died in the attacks? How is 9/11
reshaping our shared
concept of "humanity" and of what constitutes the
"human?" The
conference will be animated by the conviction that
critical thought and
informed debate?far from being the morally equivocal
"weak link"?are,
today, never more urgently needed modes of
intervention in the current
and ongoing "War on Terror." 

    To reflect the breadth and vitality of current
critical work in the
discourses on 9/11, we invite submissions and
participants from a wide
range of disciplinary perspectives, including critical
theory, cultural
studies, postcolonial and critical race theory,
literary studies,
multimedia, peace studies, philosophy, critical
pedagogy, queer theory,
and gender studies. Possible subjects of conference
submissions may
include, but are not limited to, the following topics:
 
-(re)configuring the post-9/11 "human" 
-specters of "empire" and the spectacle of terrorism 
-teaching (after) 9/11: the Humanities and critical
pedagogy 
-spectacle, memory, and the work of (selective)
mourning 
-ethics, rights, and doing justice to/after 9/11 
-race, gender, and the "alterities" of terror 
-trauma, temporality, event: representation and the
conceptual limits
of "9/11" 
-9/11 aesthetics/the aestheticization of 9/11 
-the politics of (bio)power after 9/11 

Plenary Speakers:

     Dr. Marc Redfield is Professor of English and the
John D. and
Lillian Maguire Distinguished Chair in the Humanities
at Claremont
Graduate University. His fields of specialization
include Romanticism,
the nineteenth-century novel, aesthetics, literary
theory, and
comparative literature.  His celebrated recent work
focuses on the
genealogy of the concept of ?terror,? and on the ways
in which ?terror?
has a complex history in political and philosophical
discourse that
inflects its use and abuse in the present day.

     Dr. Roger I. Simon is a Professor at the Ontario
Institute for
Studies in Education cross appointed to the Department
of Sociology and
Equity Studies and the Department of Curriculum,
Teaching and Learning.
Simon is the Faculty Director of the Centre for Media
and Culture in
Education and Director of the Testimony and Historical
Memory Project
at OISE/UT.  His most recent research has addressed
questions of the
pedagogical and ethical dimensions of practices of
cultural memory in
the context of our age of spectacle.

Sponsored by McMaster University's Department of
English & Cultural
Studies and made possible by the generous donations of
the John Douglas
Taylor family.

Please submit 500-word abstracts via e-mail to Karen
Espiritu or Don
Moore at: tayconf at mcmaster.ca by Friday, June 2, 2006.
 For more
information, please visit our website:
http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~taylor.

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