Dear Colleagues,
[Announcement excerpt]
"The geopolitical significance of South Asia has been a well-known fact
in policy and security studies for the last several decades. In academic
circles too, the logic of South Asia has become a naturalized reality:
its appearance in the area studies departments of many US/western
institutions signals acquiescence if not participation in an agenda
informed by pursuit of global hegemony. The naturalisation of South Asia
as a discourse recalls European precedents of producing knowledge about
the ‘other’ in order to foster a morally and epistemologically superior
European identity – as witnessed in the historical invention of Africa,
Asia, and the Middle East. [...] Questioning South Asia as a discourse that at present burdens the
scholarly imagination, and overdetermines conference agendas and
research funding, might reconfigure the strategies we employ to
understand the region.
Some of the questions we seek to investigate are: What are the obstacles
to developing comparative research perspectives for scholars
constrained by ‘South Asia’? How can we shift away from the dominant
framework of South Asia as an already-determined category, and devise
new research agendas? And what demands for change, transformation, or
recalibration might this place on us as subjects undertaking research?"
Kindly regarding,
Walter Slaje
-----------------------------
Prof. Dr. Walter Slaje
Hermann-Löns-Str. 1
D-99425 Weimar
Deutschland
Ego ex animi mei sententia spondeo ac
polliceor
studia humanitatis impigro labore culturum
et provecturum
non sordidi lucri causa nec ad vanam
captandam gloriam,
sed quo magis veritas propagetur et lux
eius, qua salus
humani generis continetur, clarius effulgeat.
Vindobonae, die XXI. mensis Novembris
MCMLXXXIII.