Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In a study on the performative encounters between France and the Maghreb, Mireille Rosello claimed that colonial memory is ‘trapped behind the barbed wires of history.’ I argue that this traumatic memory emerges in innovative and productive ways in Franco

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper seeks to bring various postcolonial critical theoretical perspectives into fruitful dialogue with one another vis-à-vis the question of the hegemony of the English language in the Indian and global contexts. It aims as well to assess the contribution such an endeavor might be said to make in terms of providing a deeper understanding of the complex relations of power that collectively, continually, and dynamically (re)constitute the human social world. I begin with an historical overview of the position of English within the Indian context. Next, I attempt to theorize the hegemonic position of English within India through the lens of postcolonial critical theoretical perspectives. I then move to address the dual question of: What might the case of English in India tell us about the global hegemony of English?, and, more specifically, What insight(s) might postcolonial critical theoretical perspectives provide vis-à-vis the latter phenomenon? I conclude by proposing a number of different potential studies examining the multiple dimensions of the global hegemony of English. All these studies, I believe, would benefit substantially from the analytical power of postcolonial critical theoretical approaches whose profound ability to identify and capture paradox provides important insight into human social phenomena which other approaches would either deny and/or miss.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Over the past decade, representation of racial and cultural Others in tourism media texts has become an important scholarly concern. Researchers working in this area view tourism processes as part of a broad discursive framework, which is inscribed with relationships of power and dominance. These relationships are manifested in and maintained through tourism texts, which are characterized by established representations of destinations that reflect broader social ideologies about race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc., privileging dominant groups at the expense of others. Thus far, however, analyses of tourism media representations have focused predominantly on mass tourism promotional materials produced either by for-profit agencies or by government organizations charged with encouraging local economic development through increased tourism revenues. Lacking has been an assessment of promotional materials produced by non-profit tourism brokers, as exemplified by the phenomenon of university study abroad tourism. This study interrogates the promotional literature of a popular American study abroad program, Semester at Sea (SAS), in order to determine whether its depictions of destinations and people differ from those found in mainstream mass tourism media texts. Grounded in post-colonial theory, and employing a three-pronged method of content, semiotic, and discourse analysis, it argues that while SAS embraces a mission of promoting cross-cultural understanding and global citizenship, the program nevertheless continues to (re)produce hegemonic depictions of “non-westerners,” asserting a western superiority ideology by polarizing the West and the Rest into binaries of modern/traditional, technologically advanced/backward, and master/servant, and decomplexifying the globalization process by presenting the non-West as exotic, culturally pristine, and filled with happy natives.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Michel de Certeau’s astute conceptualisation of ordinary peoples’ practices of everyday life, non-elite cultural (re)production, and his focus on democratic research ethics provides an empiric-conceptual bridge between three, nominally separate domains for broaching issues around democracy - as a political ideal, set of norms, interventions and contestations in a so-called global information age. Namely: postcolonial critiques of western (mainstream/critical) political paradigms; constructivist approaches to theorising technology; post-Marxist projects for “Radical Democracy” as proposed by Laclau & Mouffe (1985) and then furthered by Hardt & Negri (2000, 2003). Significant revisions of overlapping “essentialist apriorisms” such as these, in their bids to decentre the western/male/privileged gaze in democratic politics and knowledge-production, tend to under-theorise and under-research Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Even whilst affirming their formative role in key socio-political mutations and other-globalization contestations, these projects are still carried along by an undertow of technological determinism. The eloquent, complex - and antagonistic - ways in which non-western, non-elite Internet practitioners (re)articulate democratic practice on and through the Internet in particular are then overlooked.

The paper develops these theoretical claims, substantiating them with material taken from participant-observer research into Internet discussion forums for Pacific Island communities; their diasporic populations particularly. In these cyberspaces people debate the very meaning and application of democratic practices for small island developing states faced with “global” imperatives. The topic at hand is ongoing political dissent in the Kingdom of Tonga; as a specific case but also with respect to postcolonial politics in the Pacific region at large. A closer look at what "democratic principles" are at stake, and for whom in these discussions’ thematic content and how these mesh with the formal, participatory features of these everyday (cyber)spatial practices puts some conceptual flesh and empirical muscle-tone on postcolonialist and post-Marxist politics for (un)democratic cybertimes.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: For the last two decades, the issue of academic responsibility has been a common concern of both mainstream and critical scholars of international relations (IR). Most of the discussions have framed the problematic in terms of the relationship between theory and practice, and as such, have focused more on the content of the knowledge produced in IR than on the process of knowledge production. Missing from the debate, specifically, is a systematic examination of the social relations of knowledge production.Starting from the claim that IR scholarship has historically been, and continues to be complicit in producing and sustaining imperialist/colonial power relations, this paper argues for the need to critically reflect on the conditions of (im)possibility for the theorization and practice of global politics created through the obscuring of the socio-political relations of knowledge production. Informed by a feminist project of (de)colonizing knowledge production in IR, this paper challenges the colonial compartmentalization of being and knowing by re-locating IR pedagogical practices in the socio-political process of knowledge production. By drawing connections between the ?intimate? site of identity production within the IR classroom and the broader political power dynamics of imperialism, this paper shows how IR pedagogical practices participate in the creation and naturalization of gendered, racialized, classed, and sexualized categories and subjects. Informed by an understanding of Empire-building as involving the production and deployment of not only militaries and capital, but also of subjectivities, the paper concludes by suggesting that those of us who are committed to a project of resistance and opposition to imperializing/colonializing discourses and practices need to reflect on the (im)possibilities created by our pedagogical practices.