EMMA (Etudes Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone,Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France)
in partnership with Coastal Carolina University (SC, USA) and MIGRINTER (UMR CNRS-Poitiers, France) is setting up a five year program
Ecotones: Encounters, Crossings, and Communities
2015-2022
An « ecotone » is a transitional area between two or more distinct ecological communities, for instance the zone between field and forest, mountain and ocean, or between sea and land. The two ecosystems may be separated by a sharp boundary line or may merge gradually. An « ecotone » may also indicate a place where two communities meet, at times creolizing or germinating into a new community.
We will be borrowing this term traditionally used in environmental studies and geography, and apply it to postcolonial studies in disciplines such as literature, history, the arts, translation studies, the social and political sciences, ethnic studies, ecocriticism, etc.
In the continuity of the program « Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, ‘Race’ » that was implemented by EMMA (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier, France) in partnership with several universities between 2011 and 2013, « Ecotones » seeks to continue exploring the « complex chemistry » of creolizing worlds (Robin Cohen), the « contact zones » between cultures (Mary Louise Pratt) in contexts such as migration, diaspora, refugee movements and other postcolonial displacements and environmental evacuations, among other major historical events.
Conjointly with the social sciences, pride of place will also be given to the literary and artistic representations of these micro and macro transformations, to the ways aesthetic forms not only represent but also contribute to shaping and modifying a process.
The ecotones, as points of contact or points of friction, between the Indian Ocean, the South and East China Seas, the African continent, the Caribbean and the North American continent will provide the main frame of approach. The use of concepts like « diaspora space » (Avtar Brah) and « Afrasia » (Gaurav Desai) will be beneficial.
The emphasis will be put on communities in their relation to place, neighborhood, and environment, including the precise circumstances these communities are modified over periods of time, the factors of change, and the many ways these elements are represented and mediated in literature and the arts. How do the languages, the cultural practices, the scientific knowledge, and environmental concerns meet and transform in these newly constructed ecotones? How does the merging of different ecologies and communities produce creolization and new identities? What postcolonial approaches to global ecologies (Elizabeth DeLoughrey) can be set up in the context of « transcolonial » relations (Shu-mei Shih and Françoise Lionnet)? Can we identify an emerging cosmopolitics in these contact zones (Michel Agier) ?
The modalities of such processes of (re-)invention will have to be examined from different angles, taking in the conflicts and the productive exchanges and frictions between the other and the self. Literary and political movements and the history of ideas necessarily cross paths and pollinate, following different routes and creating a multiple and diverse universe, in which a single and fixed origin can only be questioned.
Specific lesser-known communities will be focused on to understand how new relations to specific places are being formed as we speak, and constitute new forms of belonging, bonding, and citizenship. The aim is to understand how everyday practices, languages, customs, beliefs, rituals and ideas evolve, maintain themselves or transform, when two communities merge with, or confront each other. What are the realities when one community takes precedence over, or absorbs, the other one, when religions, cultures and languages are implanted in postcolonial locales across the globe. How do the descendents of two indentured or migrant communities, for instance, negotiate the space and interact with each other ? Keeping in mind the multiple interpretation of the term, micro-spaces will be examined to understand how they are negotiated and represented.
A series of interdisciplinary events will be co-organized by EMMA (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France), Coastal Carolina University (SC, USA) and MIGRINTER (UMR CNRS-Poitiers, France) in collaboration with partner universities.
Specific calls for papers will be circulated to create networks, announce conferences and workshops, and set up events. Publications will be planned in the different venues and at other partner universities.
The 3-G Network on the three Guyanas (Guyana, French Guyane and Suriname) will bring into focus one of the best possible examples of Ecotones in the literal and metaphoric interpretations of the word.
2015 being the 40th anniversary of the independence of Suriname and 2016 the 50th anniversary of the independence of Guyana, will provide excellent opportunities to bring that part of the world into the limelight, in relation to 70 years of départementalisation in the French Guyane.
Events will be hosted in Amsterdam (October 2015, University of Amsterdam, University of Antwerpen, Université de Liège, the Université Catholique de Louvain and Werkgroep Caraïbische Letteren), Montpellier (June 2016, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3) and London (October 2016, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Studies, University of London).
The modalities will be defined in separate forthcoming announcements.
Feel free to send an email if you wish to be kept informed of developments and events.
Co-convenors of the Program « Ecotones » and Coordinators of the 3-G Network:
– Dr Thomas Lacroix (MIGRINTER, UMR CNRS–Poitiers, France) thomas.lacroix@univ-poitiers.fr
– Dr Judith Misrahi-Barak (EMMA, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France) judith.misrahi-barak@univ-montp3.fr
– Prof Maggi Morehouse (Coastal Carolina University, SC, USA) morehouse@coastal.edu
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Ecotones #8 : Utopia and Ecotone: Contemporary Stakes
Ghent University, Belgium
29 September – 1 October 2022
https://jfeyerei.wixsite.com/utopiaandecotone
In partnership with
EMMA (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3), DIRE (Université de La Réunion) et Maison Française d’Oxford
https://emma.www.univ-montp3.fr/fr/valorisation-partenariats/programmes-européens-et-internationaux/ecotones
Conference venue: Ghent University, Belgium
Dates: 29 September – 1 October 2022
Languages: English, French
Deadline for abstracts: May 15 2022
Notification of acceptance: 31 May 2022
utopia_and_ecotone_programme.pdf
abstracts_utopia_and_ecotone_ghent.pdf
cfp_ecotones8_ghent_29sept_1oct2022.pdf
After a series of conferences held at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, Université de Poitiers and Université de La Réunion (France, 2015, 2016, 2018), at the Centre for the Study of Social Sciences in Calcutta (CSSSC, India, 2018), Manhattanville College (USA, 2019), Concordia Universitý (Canada, 2019) and University of Cape Town (South Africa, 2021), this international conference at Ghent University will be the 8th opus of the “Ecotones : encounters, crossings, communities” (2015-2022) conference cycle. This interdisciplinary programme aims to open up the term “ecotone”, a concept hitherto used in geography and ecology, to the humanities, political and social sciences. The “Utopia and Ecotone” Conference will focus specifically on utopias that emerge from or relate to ecotones.
An “ecotone” initially designates an ecological transitional area between two (or more) distinct ecosystems, the passage between two habitat types (forest/grassland) or the flow between two natural environments (freshwater/sea water). In explaining how this transition zone can be studied from a sociological as well as a biological perspective, Misrahi-Barak and Lacroix (2019; see also Arnold et al. 2020) have broadened the definition: an ecotone can thus also refer to a cultural space where communities meet, at times creolizing or germinating into a new community. As a place (oikos) of identity tensions (tonos) at work, the ecotone represents a shared alternative space, enabling connection, transformation, and potentially reinvention. This 8th conference intends to continue the discussions led in previous editions on the “complex chemistry” of creolizing worlds (Cohen 2009), the “contact zones” between cultures (Pratt 1992) in contexts such as migrations, diasporas, refugee movements, postcolonial displacements, human movements linked to climate change and other major historical events of the contemporary period (1980 to the present) through the prism of “utopia”.
The definition of the ecotone, as given above, echoes that of utopia in the contemporary era: through the power of the imagination, utopia would be the revealing place of a knot of tensions (Benjamin 1997) that must be observed, questioned and reinvented. The hypothesis of this conference is the following: an ecotone is a fertile space for the reawakening of utopia, a hypothesis that will be specifically posed in the face of contemporary issues. For the past twenty years, utopian proposals have been emerging, not in the traditional, largely pejorative sense, evoking a future so bright that it seems unreal, which led to political practices oscillating between impotence and dictatorship; but in the sense that they would go against the current of dominant social relations in a resolutely active approach (Balibar 2020). Utopia would therefore not be the anticipation of the future, but, in the present, the exercise of a concrete thought, which invents counter-narratives and experiments with alternative modes of relation. This pragmatic aspect of utopia reactivates Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope (1976), according to which true utopia would not be an “image of consolation”, a fictional recourse in the face of “disenchantment”, or even a chimerical abstraction, but rather an overcoming, a figure of the imaginary to be inscribed in the materialitý of the world (Wright 2010). As an anticipatory consciousness, experimental thinking, far from the totalitarian temptation, utopia would rather be an open floor to possibilities, to feasible projects of transformation, here and now. For example, the idea of “Refugia” coined by Robin Cohen (2015), which the sociologist and expert in migration studies, is exploring in greater depth alongside Nicholas Van Hear (2020): Refugia is the proposal to create a deterritorialised, transnational entity between different sites developed and self-governed built on initiatives essentially led by people in a migratory situation. This pragmatic utopianism draws on both the ecotone as a socially shared space and the archipelago as a space for relation (Glissant 1997) to challenge the model of the nation-state in terms of its ability to offer hospitality to displaced people. In the current context of the asylum crisis – otherwise known as the “migration crisis” – utopia could be more than a principle of hope, it could also be an attempt at resistance that summons a principle of responsibility (Delmas-Marty 2011).
“See how we graft Utopia onto all these plants of the Creole vegetation", said the poet, writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant in his novel Tout-monde (1993). In the same heuristic impulse, the objective of this conference is to push back the epistemological limits of utopia by observing it from the ecotone. In what way is an ecotone a circulation zone where utopias emerge, whether for economic, social, industrial and financial, or artistic and creative purposes? How does utopia help us question the ecotone, for example, concerning its borders, its margins or its flows, and vice versa? How does utopian thinking integrate the diversities generated by the ecotone? Is there an ideal, inclusive and egalitarian model of the ecotone, whether real or imagined? What new modes of relationship does the ecotone allow for in postcolonial contexts? Metaphorical or concrete, how does the ecotone renew modes of representation? How does utopia apprehend the evolution of transitional zones, especially those generated by ecological changes? And what about the mesh that is being woven between human beings and the whole of the living world? What role can utopia play in the future and in contemporary social, economic, urban and ecological achievements in the face of the migratory challenge in a globalised world when climate change occurs? What about model cities, or città ideale? How is utopianism, often perceived as an essentially Western construction, renewed by the countries in the Global South and their diasporas?
The “Utopia and Ecotone” Conference will convene, revise and extend through the lens of utopia the notions of “place” (oïkos) and “non-place” (outopos) (Agier 2013), of “heterotopia” (Foucault 1994), of “deterritorialisation” and “lines of flight” (Deleuze and Guattari 1980), of maroonage (Bona 2016) and “the inextricable entanglement of lianas” (Bona 2021). The transnational dimension of the ecotone will also be examined using concepts such as “cosmopolitanism” (Beck 2006, Vertovec 2002), “afropolitanism” (Mbembe 2005, 2019; Diop 2016; Gehrmann 2016; Balakrishnan 2018) or “afropeanism” (Miano 2020). The circulation of worlds allows for the emergence of new conceptualisations, both pragmatic and programmatic, of “emancipatory utopias” (Vergès 2017), such as “afrotopias” (Sarr 2016), which we invite to observe, both in the Anglophone and Francophone worlds. As an analogy from environmental thinking, the ecotone highlights the notion of “interconnectedness” (Morton 2008), whereby components are intrinsically linked to the whole of life, but are also continually and repeatedly reconfigured and reconnected. In conjunction with the political and social sciences, special attention will be given to literary and artistic representations of these multiple contemporary formations of utopias dealing with issues of flow and mobility in ecotonal spaces.
Information
The “Utopia and Ecotone” conference will take place on 29 September – 1 October in Ghent (Belgium). The languages of work will be English and French. Each presentation will last 20 minutes (followed by a discussion). A peer-reviewed publication of the proceedings is envisaged.
The conference will be an in-person event. Travel and accommodation costs will have to be covered by the participants. Registration fees will be requested.
How to submit
Paper proposals, in English or French, in .doc or .docx format, should include a title, a 300-word abstract that clearly specifies the corpus studied, a short critical bibliography, and a 5-line bio-bibliographic note (including name, institutional affiliation and email address).
Proposals must be sent by email to Justine Feyereisen: justine.feyereisen@ugent.be by 30 April 2022. The scientific committee’s decision will be delivered by 31 May.
References
Agier M.: 2013, La Condition cosmopolite. L’Anthropologie à l’épreuve du piège identitaire, La Découverte.
Arnold M., Duboin C., Misrahi-Barak J. eds.: 2020, Borders and Ecotones in the Indian Ocean, Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée.
Balakrishnan S.: 2018, “The Afropolitan Idea: New Perspectives on Cosmopolitanism in African Studies”, Delanty G. (ed.), Routledge International Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies (2nd ed.), Routledge, 575-585.
Balibar É.: 2020, Histoire interminable, La Découverte.
Beck U.: 2006, Qu’est-ce que le cosmopolitisme ?, Aubier.
Bloch E.: 1976, Le Principe Espérance I [1954-1959], Gallimard.
Bona D.T. : 2016, Fugitif, où cours-tu ?, Presses universitaires de France
___: 2021, La Sagesse des lianes. Cosmopoétique du refuge, Post-éditions.
Cohen R.: 2009, The Creolization Reader. Studies in Mixed Identities and Cultures, Routledge.
___: 2015, « Refugia: the limits and possibilities of Buzi’s Refugee Nation”, https://nandosigona.
wordpress.com/2015/07/30/refugia-the-limits-and-possibilities-of-buzis-refugee-nation.
___, Van Hear N.: 2020, Refugia. Radical Solutions to Mass Displacement, Routledge.
Deleuze G., Guattari F.: 1980, Mille plateaux. Capitalisme et schizophrénie, Minuit.
Delmas-Marty M.: 2011, Les Forces imaginantes du droit IV. Vers une communauté de valeurs, Seuil.
Diop P.S.: 2016, « Des mots et concepts nouveaux en circulation dans l’espace francophone : l’“Afropolitanisme” en question », Nouvelles études francophones, 31.2, 14-28.
Duverger T.: 2021, Utopies locales, les solutions écologiques et solidaires de demain, Les Petits Matins.
Fassin D (dir).: 2021, La Société qui vient, Seuil.
Foucault M.: 1994, Dits et écrits, Gallimard.
Gehrmann S.: 2016, “Cosmopolitanism with African roots. Afropolitan’s ambivalent mobilities”, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 28.1: 61-72.
Glissant E.: 1993, Tout-monde, Gallimard; 2020, Treatise on the Whole-World, translated by Celia Britton, Liverpool University Press.
___, 1997, Traité du Tout-monde, Gallimard.
Mangeon A.: 2022, L’Afrique au futur. Le renversement des mondes. Herman.
Mbembe A.: 2005 (25 December), « Afropolitanisme », Africultures, http://africultures.com/afropolitanisme-4248.
___, Sarr F. (dir.): 2019, Politique des temps. Imaginer les devenirs africains, P. Rey & Jimsaan.
Miano L.: 2020, Afropea. Utopie post-occidentale et post-raciste, Grasset.
Misrahi-Barak J., Lacroix T.: 2019, “Ecotones: Encounters, crossings, and communities, 2015-2020”, Programme outlines, https://emma.www.univ-montp3.fr/fr/valorisation-partenariats/programmes-...éens-et-internationaux/ecotones.
Morton T.: 2008, The Ecological Thought, Harvard University Press.
Pratt M. L.: 1992, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Routledge.
Sarr F.: 2016, Afrotopia, P. Rey.
Vergès F.: 2017, « Utopies émancipatrices », Mbembe A., Sarr F. (eds.), Écrire l’Afrique-Monde, P. Rey & Jimsaan, 243-260.
Vertovec S., Cohen R.: 2002, Conceiving Cosmopolitanism, Oxford University Press.
Wright E.O.: 2010, Envisioning Real Utopias, Verso.
Organising Committee
Justine Feyereisen, Universiteit Gent
Pierre Schoentjes, Universiteit Gent
Scientific Committee
Corinne Duboin, Université de La Réunion
Justine Feyereisen, Universiteit Gent
Thomas Lacroix, CNRS, Sciences Po- CERI, Maison Française d’Oxford
Judith Misrahi-Barak, EMMA, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3
Pierre Schoentjes, Universiteit Gent
Ecotone Programme Coordinators
Thomas Lacroix, CNRS, Sciences Po- CERI, Maison Française d’Oxford
Judith Misrahi-Barak, EMMA, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3
Maggi Morehouse, Coastal Carolina University
Ecotones #7 : Reconfiguring, Repurposing the City: Urban Ecotones in the Global South
University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa
28-30 October, 2021
in partnership with
EMMA (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3), Praxiling (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 and CNRS), DIRE (Université de La Réunion), and La Maison Française d’Oxford
https://ecotones7.wordpress.com/
Venue: University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa
Dates: October 28-30, 2021
Languages: English, French
Deadline for submitting proposals: 15 January 2021
Notification of acceptance: 1 March 2021
ecotones_2021_programme_final.pdf
cfp_ecotone7_cape_town_final.docx
After conferences at Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, Université de Poitiers and Université de La Réunion (France, 2015, 2016 and 2018), at the Centre for the Study of Social Sciences of Calcutta (Kolkata, India, 2018), Manhattanville College (NY, USA, 2019) and Concordia University (Montreal, Canada, 2019), this international scientific event at UCT will be the 7th opus of this conference cycle.
An “ecotone” initially designates a transitional area between two ecosystems, for example between land and sea. The “Ecotones” programme (2015-2020) is a cycle of conferences which aims to borrow this term traditionally used in geography and ecology and to broaden the concept by applying it to other disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. An “ecotone” can thus also be understood as a cultural space of encounters, conflicts, and renewal between several communities. This interdisciplinary conference will focus more specifically on colonial and postcolonial cities as “ecotonal” dialectics between places and nonplaces (Augé).
Cities can be imagined as estuaries made of the sedimentation of drifting populations over a long period of time. They are powerful matrices of aggregation and segregation transforming and transformed by people coming from various horizons. As permanently renewed moving sites of uniting differences (Lefebvre), cities are lived experience and constantly defined by their margins. Perhaps more than other spaces, they empower people’s identities and generate shared social references, yet in different and unequal ways. Cities of the South often include affluent populations living in distant suburbs and gated communities while subalterns may remain captive in city centres. Conversely, cities of the North tend to expel lower and middle class at their margins while estate price in their core can only be afforded by wealthier populations. In that regard, cities are “situated”, endowed with thick historical and environmental forces shaping the populations living in their confines. But cities are also hubs connected with long-distance elsewheres. They are privileged sites of disjunctive flows in the global cultural economy (Appadurai), crossroads of a strikingly new interactive system of real and imagined topographies. And while growing postcolonial cities are privileged loci for the emergence and negotiation of new identities, increasing transnational mobility and migratory movements turn even smaller urban geographies into complex “contact zones” (Pratt): sites of both fruitful entanglements and novel forms of segregation.
Whether “global” or “glocal”, cities are thus part and parcel of wider archipelagos, including archipelagos of memory and the imagination. In that regard, cities can also be “nonplaces” in which people come and go anonymously, suspended in a permanent state of transit. The front windows of “exotic” groceries, shops, and restaurants contribute to the transformation of multicultural city spaces; they open onto hybrid public locations and visually indicate the presence of diaspora businesses supported by international networks. Yet, although transitory and often anonymous, nonplaces “accept the inevitability of protracted sojourns of strangers”, on condition however that these passing or temporary people are conceded a mere physical presence and have their “idiosyncratic subjectivities” erased (Bauman); for indeed, no symbolic expression of history and identity, no significant social relations emerge from nonplaces. In today’s urban configurations, they are nevertheless not entirely devoid of meaning, in opposition to “empty spaces” (Kociatkiewicz & Kostera), the waste-products of architectural projects and the forgotten fringes of urbanist vision, which are not prohibited, but “inaccessible because of their invisibility”. Besides, in the context of global centre-periphery relationships, urban identities are increasingly shaped by phenomena of creolization, with multiple forms of cultural continuums and their inherent dynamic ambiguities (Hannerz). Beyond the old colonial and now postcolonial Western “metropoles”, South American megalopolises and Asian global cities, where one can locate forms of “alternative cosmopolitanism” (Mayaram), many African cities epitomize the urban revolution in the Global South over the last two decades. Examples comprise Cairo, Lagos, Dakar, and notably Johannesburg, the polycentric “elusive metropolis” (Nuttall & Mbembe), but also Cape Town whose complex multi-ethnic and multi-cultural configurations harbour many ecotonal mechanisms which contribute to the emergence and negotiation of original modes of (global) citizenship.
These circulations do not, however, prevent cities from falling (back) into – or reproducing and consolidating – new “identity traps” (Agier), in the sense of socially and racially based negation of certain subjectivities. With rising security concerns in many cities, this can be seen with the replacement of frontiers by walls, which are indeed the “negation of the frontier” (Agier) in that they deny the reciprocal recognition of self and other, and which contribute to new forms of precariousness (Butler) in urban settings. Therefore, in spite of – and because of – globalization and increasing mixing, people (re)create pockets of homogeneity and new forms of urban “heterotopias” (Foucault), “spaces of the other” that have “the power to juxtapose in one real place many spaces and locations which are by themselves incompatible”.
Importantly, urban imaginaries and the world’s major cities, notably port cities, are now heavily affected by the climate crisis and its consequences. In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), Amitav Ghosh explores how coastal cities from Mumbai and Kolkata to New York and New Orleans represent concentrations of great risk and vulnerability in a future of climactic instability, increased storm activity and sea level rise. Tracing how the establishment of major ports on the coastlines of the world was often a consequence of 18th-century imperialism and trade networks, he speculates about the “managed retreat from vulnerable locations” that many major urban centres will need to undergo in the coming century. More broadly, what will the climate crisis mean for the 21st-century city? And how might ecological and environmental change unravel the technocratic confidence and carbon-based economy that informed the urban imaginary of 20th-century, modernist city planning?
Eventually, cities not only produce culture, but culture re-produces cities. Literature, film and other forms of artistic representation possess myriad ways of conveying and negotiating a “cartographic imaginary” (Westphal) where urban identities, their challenges and predicaments, become major signifiers, locations for debating our current living-together and imagining the future. Particularly, in the wake of the larger spatial turn and other disciplinary reconfigurations (e.g. the ethical turn, the social turn), literary representations and the arts are not only informed by or reflections of our urban ecotones, but contribute to inform and shape their contours.
***
Following up on Ecotones #6 at Concordia University in October 2019 focused on “Post/Colonial Ports: Place and Nonplace”, Ecotones #7 will review, revise and revisit such notions as place and “nonplace”. Other concepts such as “espace lisse” and “espace strié” (smooth space vs striated space, Deleuze and Guattari), or “heterotopia” (Foucault) may also be useful in the context of the urban ecotone, reflecting upon the urban space as shaped by movement and events, imaginaries and affects more than by fixed bearings and measurable objects, as more intensive than extensive. We will be particularly interested in examining the multiple ways spaces are de/formed, reconfigured and repurposed, be it for economic, social, industrial and financial aims, or artistic and creative ones, homogeneously or heterogeneously.
We seek papers from a broad range of disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences that engage with these multiple formations of ecotone spaces within colonial and postcolonial cities, past and present. We encourage proposals on topics such as (but not limited to):
- Cities as assemblages of environmental, historical and political forces shaping populations and social relations;
- Cities as areas where districts, zones, and neighbourhoods are reconfigured and repurposed; where abandoned spaces are taken over and readapted for different uses (with what impact, cost, meaning etc.);
- Cities as sites of mobilizations, confrontation and solidarity between local and migrant populations;
- Urban spaces as sites of hyper-invisibility or hyper-visibility;
- Cities as spaces where the non-urban and the rural encroaches on the urban, the non-human on the human, etc.;
- Cities as sites of cultural confluence and continuum in the context of global centre-periphery relationships;
- Cities as nodal points in wider networks (regional, national, global);
- Cities as a confluence of heterotopias;
- Urban geographies as shaped by – and shaping – imagination, language, the arts and literature;
- The urban ecotone as a new “geocritical” topos within fictional and non-fictional forms of representation;
- Cities as nodal points of the tension between processes of creolization and (re)homogenization, of integrative and differentialist topographies;
- Fringes, informal spaces and in-between locations that (co)fashion the urban ecotone;
- Cities as generators of ideological formations, identity projects and conceptual tools (“Cosmopolis”, “Zéropolis”, “Afropolis”, etc.);
- Cities as “discursive matrices” for sociolinguistic dynamics and creativities, and/or sites of polyglossic encounters between native and non-native speakers;
- Cities and environmental crisis: ecological degradation, climate change and the urban as site of waste, air pollution, toxicity and “slow violence” (Nixon).
References:
Agier, Michel, La condition cosmopolite: L’anthropologie à l’épreuve du piège identitaire. Paris: La Découverte, 2013.
Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Augé, Marc. Non-Lieux : Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité. Paris: Seuil, 1992.
Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 2000.
Bégout, Bruce. Zéropolis. L'expérience de Las Vegas, Paris: Allia, 2002.
Butler, Judith. Precarious life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004.
Deleuze, Michel & Félix Guattari. Mille plateaux : capitalisme et schizophrénie. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980; A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
Foucault, Michel. ‘Des espaces autres’ [1967], in Dits et écrits II, 1976–1988. Paris: Gallimard, 2001: 1571-81.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Hannerz, Ulf. Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London & New York: Routledge, 1996.
Kociatkiewicz, Jerzy & Monika Kostera, “The anthropology of empty space.” Qualitative Sociology 1, 1999: 37-50.
Lefebvre, Henri. La révolution urbaine. Paris: Gallimard, 1970.
Mayaram, Shail (ed.). The Other Global City. London & New York: Routledge, 2009.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Nuttall Sarah & Achille Mbembe (ed.). Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2008.
Oldfield, Sophie & Susan Parnell (ed.). The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South. London & New York: Routledge, 2014.
Pieterse, Edgar. City Futures. Confronting the Crisis of Urban Development. London & New York: Zed Books, 2008.
“Postcolonial Cities: Africa”. Moving Worlds. A journal of transcultural writings 5.1, 2005.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London & New York: Routledge, 1992.
Roy, Ananya. “Slumdog cities: Rethinking subaltern urbanism.” International journal of urban and regional research 35.2, 2011: 223-238.
Westphal, Bertrand. La géocritique. Réel, fiction, espace. Paris: Minuit, 2007.
***
We invite contributors to upload their proposals (a 250-word abstract, title, author’s name, a 150-word bio, and contact information) to the conference website:
https://ecotones.submittable.com/submit/150853/ecotones-7-university-of-cape-town
Each presentation will be 20 minutes (followed by discussion time). A selection of papers will be considered for publication at the conclusion of the series of Ecotones events.
- Deadline for abstracts: 15 Jan. 2020
Notification of acceptance: 1 March. 2020
Organizing Committee:
A/Prof Markus Arnold, University of Cape Town
Dr Hedley Twidle, University of Cape Town
Scientific Committee:
A/Prof Markus Arnold, University of Cape Town
Dr Shari Daya, University of Cape Town
Prof Corinne Duboin, Université de La Réunion
Dr Divine Fuh, University of Cape Town
Dr Nomusa Makhubu, University of Cape Town
A/Prof Arnaud Richard, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3
Dr Anna Selmeczi, University of Cape Town
Dr Hedley Twidle, University of Cape Town
A/Prof Sandra Young, University of Cape Town
Ecotones programme coordinators:
A/Prof Judith Misrahi-Barak, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3
Prof Thomas Lacroix, La Maison Française d’Oxford
Prof Maggi Morehouse, Coastal Carolina University
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Ecotones #6 : Post/Colonial Ports : Place and Nonplace in the Ecotone
Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
October 24-26, 2019
in partnership with
EMMA (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3), MIGRINTER (CNRS-Université de Poitiers) and La Maison Française d’Oxford
Venue: Concordia University, Montréal, Canada
Dates: October 24-26, 2019
Language: English
Deadline for submitting proposals: April 5, 2019
postcolonial_ports_conference_programme.pdf
---------------------------------------
cfp_ecotone6_final_260219.docx
After conferences in Montpellier, Poitiers and La Réunion (France, 2015, 2016 and 2018), as well as Kolkata (India, 2018) and Purchase (NY, USA, 2019), this is the 6th opus of this conference cycle in Montreal, Concordia University. An “ecotone” initially designates a transitional area between two ecosystems, for example between land and sea. The “Ecotones” program (2015-2020) is a cycle of conferences which aims to borrow this term traditionally used in geography and ecology and to broaden the concept by applying it to other disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. An “ecotone” can thus also be understood as a cultural space of encounters, conflicts, and renewal between several communities. This interdisciplinary conference will more specifically focus on colonial and postcolonial port cities as ecotonic dialectics between places and non-places.
Commonly understood, a port is the site where ships’ passengers enter or exit, and cargo is loaded or unloaded. Thus, it represents the flow of people and exchange of goods, in the age of sail, as well as in the contemporary globalized world. The unbounded space of the port offers opportunities to explore “discontinuous histories” of port cities, and “its interfaces with the wider world” (Gilroy 1993), as a site that decentres the nation through its slippery flows. In addition, port cities anchor urban development around shipping routes and international trade. Ports of call offer the hope of safe harbours for migrants, a refuge in a storm, or alternatively a vulnerable site for colonial concessions or gateways that must be regulated or controlled. Ports are also passages of communications. In computer networking, a port is a nodal point of communication through which data flows, a portal to information. Lastly port cities occupy that liminal space between land and water, an in-between ecotonic zone of transition.
Ports are often referred to as nonplaces – gateways subject to global forces that historically shaped trans-oceanic connections, expansion into hinterlands, and crossroads of historical and contemporary encounters. Nonplaces within cities are commonly perceived as liminal locations reduced to their function of transportation or commercial nodes, or as locations that crush the sense of individual empowerment. But artists, writers, critics and researchers have depicted them as multiple, paradoxical spaces, where new possibilities arise and new cultures emerge. Nonplaces may produce social flows and networks that are not only a defining feature of our “super-modernity”, but also, in the longue durée of urban and semi-urban dynamics, a matrix for identity formation, cultural transitions and environmental adaptation.
Port cities, however, are also placed. Cities such as Georgetown in Guyana, Shanghai, Liverpool, Calcutta, Dar es Salaam, Nantes, or Montreal among many others, may be viewed through longstanding geographic imaginaries, linguistic collectivities and/or colonial and postcolonial histories, suggesting an ongoing struggle over who ‘claims’ the city (in Montreal’s case, unceded territory), and gestures towards political, social, or economic insecurities apparent in the spatial configurations of urban life, with implications that potentially destabilize national narratives. For example, as an island in the Saint Lawrence River, the city of Montreal is not only connected to multiple elsewheres through migration, but also through trade. The Saint Lawrence opens on to the Atlantic ocean through which flowed a long-standing trade in bauxite from towns in the Caribbean to Quebec (following circuits laid by imperialism). Thus, ports shape material channels of profit and power, as well as modes of resistance that occur around these networks of control.
We seek papers that engage with these multiple formations of ecotone spaces within port cities, past and present. We encourage abstracts on topics such as (but not limited to):
- Circulations and hubs of ideas, migration, or commerce that linked cities across empire(s)
- Interactions and networks of mobile labour in port cities, the spatiality of encounters
- Cultural transitions or environmental adaptions in (post)colonial port cities at different historical junctures or across geographic locations
- Urban colonial heritage, and attendant linkages to global urbanism
- Memorializing of port city histories and the shaping of identities (including sexuality, race, gender, language, religious, migrant)
- Literary representations and/or Visualities of colonial or postcolonial urban flows
- Port cities as globalized past and/or migrancy of the present
- Regulation, control, and spatial division within (post)colonial port cities
We invite contributors to upload their proposals (a 250-word abstract, title, author’s name, a 150- word bio, and contact) to the conference website:
https://ecotones.submittable.com/submit/135822/ecotones-6-montreal
--------
Each presentation will be 20 minutes (followed by discussion time). A selection of papers will be considered for publication at the conclusion of the series of Ecotones events.
Ecotones 6 Organizing Committee
Jill Didur (English, Concordia University) jill.didur@concordia.ca
Nalini Mohabir (Geography, Concordia University) nalini.mohabir@concordia.ca
Ecotones Program Coordinators
Thomas Lacroix (Maison Française, Oxford-CNRS) thomas.lacroix@cnrs.fr
Judith Misrahi-Barak (EMMA, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3)
judith.misrahi-barak@univ-montp3.fr
Maggi Morehouse (Coastal Carolina University) morehouse@coastal.edu
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Ecotones #5 : The Caribbean: Vulnerability and Resilience at Manhattanville College June 21-22, 2019
in partnership with EMMA (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3) and MIGRINTER (CNRS-Université de Poitiers)
ecotones_program_ny_june_2019.pdf
ecotones5_abstracts_and_bios_june_2019.docx
CALL FOR PAPERS
An “ecotone” initially designates a transitional area between two ecosystems, for example between land and sea. The “Ecotones” program (2015-2019) is a cycle of conferences which aims to borrow this term traditionally used in geography and ecology and to broaden the concept by applying it to other disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. An “ecotone” can thus also be understood as a cultural space of encounters, conflicts, and renewal between several communities (Florence Krall).
The Ecotones 5 conference will include an interdisciplinary study of the wider Caribbean as a space of cultural, historical, geographic, and linguistic diversity, a meeting place of peoples from different corners of the world. Central to this study is the idea that the Caribbean is a dynamic and heterogeneous space that has clearly been shaped by the persistence of colonialism. Colonialism created an exploitative and extractive economy based on forced labor which in turn led to multiple forms of resistance beyond rebellions and revolutions that were endemic throughout the region. Recently, the region's response to several natural disasters has also demonstrated multiple forms of resilience.
These forms of resistance and resilience can be seen in the wide array of literary/historical/ social/nationalist movements that came after the end of colonization. Postcolonialism gave rise to movements such as Antillanité and Créolité that stress the multiplicity of the Caribbean experience. More recently, the idea of littérature-monde “echoes antillanité and créolité in that it calls both for an end to French ethnocentrism while advocating for a ‘return to the world’” (Moudileno). This multiplicity is evident in Fernando Ortiz’s use of the term “transculturation” which stressed the merging and converging of cultures. This hybrid nationalism that Ortiz espoused and Albizu Campos epitomized, saw the Caribbean as an area that embodied hybrid postcolonial identities. Ortiz’s “transculturation” is echoed by Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” which is a singular discrete work that uses the “Atlantic” as a geopolitical unit that carves out a cultural-political space for the discussion/creation of a hybrid Caribbean. Both concepts challenge the centrality of Europe through the use of indigenous languages and cross-cultural imagination.
We invite proposals on a wide range of topics related to Caribbean as listed below, but encourage those that relate to the Caribbean as a space of vulnerability and resilience in light of natural disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes, including the repercussions of the massive earthquake that hit Haiti in 2010 and the aftermath of more recent hurricanes, Irma and Maria in 2017, that devastated Puerto Rico, Dominica, and Barbuda, among other Caribbean islands. Proposals related to networks and support systems of all kinds among various communities of the Caribbean diaspora in the New York metropolitan area would be of particular interest.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
In History and the Social Sciences
Economics and politics of the Caribbean
The colonial and postcolonial Caribbean
The Regional and Diasporic Caribbean
Gender and Sexualities
Nationalisms
Slavery and Slave revolts
Plantation Culture
Racial and Ethnic Relations
Commemorations
Transculturation
In the Arts, Literature, and the Humanities:
The Literatures of the Caribbean
The Visual Arts
Créolité, Antillanité, Littérature-monde
Center and Periphery
Limbo Gateway
Tropological Revisions
Afropolitanism
Film and Digital Media
Musical Traditions in the Caribbean and the Black Atlantic
In the Sciences
Natural Disasters and the Caribbean
Ecology and the Caribbean
Global warming and the Caribbean
We invite contributors to upload their proposals (a 250-word abstract, title, author’s name, a 150- word bio, and contact) to the conference website:
https://ecotones.submittable.com/submit/124664/ecotones-5-the-caribbean-vulnerability-and-resilience-at-manhanttanville-colleg
Each presentation will be 20 minutes (followed by discussion time). A selection of papers will be considered for publication at the conclusion of the series of Ecotones events.
Venue: Manhattanville College, Purchase, NY, USA.
Dates: June 21-22, 2019
Language: English
Deadline for submitting proposals: December 15, 2018
Notification of acceptance: February 1, 2019
Ecotones 5 Organizing Committee
Nada Halloway, Associate Professor of English, Manhattanville College Nada.Halloway@mville.edu
Binita Mehta, Professor of French, Manhattanville College Binita.Mehta@mville.edu
Gregory Swedberg, Professor of History, Manhattanville College Gregory.Swedberg@mville.edu
Wil Tyrrell, Director, Sister Mary T. Clark, RSCJ Center for Religion and Social Justice, Manhattanville College Wil.Tyrrell@mville.edu
Ecotones Program Coordinators
Thomas Lacroix (MIGRINTER, CNRS-Poitiers) thomas.lacroix@univ-poitiers.fr
Judith Misrahi-Barak (EMMA, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3) judith.misrahi-barak@univ-montp3.fr
Maggi Morehouse (Coastal Carolina University) morehouse@coastal.edu
cfp_engl_ecotones_mville_2019.docx
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Ecotones #4 : Partitions and Borders at Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta December 13-15, 2018
in partnership with Concordia University (Montreal, Canada), EMMA (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3) & MIGRINTER (CNRS-Université de Poitiers)
Confirmed keynote speakers :
Dr Annu Jalais (National University of Singapore), and Prof Srilata Ravi (University of Alberta)
abstracts_bios_ecotones4_dec6.docx
programme_ecotones_kolkata_decembre_2018.pdf
An ‘ecotone’ is a transitional area between two or more distinct ecological communities, for instance the zone between field and forest, mountain and ocean, or between sea and land. The two ecosystems may be separated by a sharp boundary line or may merge gradually. An ‘ecotone’ may also indicate a place where two communities meet, at times creolizing or germinating into a new community.
After the first three conferences held in Montpellier, Poitiers and Reunion island, ‘Ecotones 4’ will focus on one area that has served as an ecotone for centuries. This is the area of Bengal in East India, an ecotone area between Europe, the Indian subcontinent and the Far East. With its unique position, the region has been criss-crossed for centuries, by travellers, traders, colonists, refugees, pirates and missionaries of diverse racial, religious, linguistic, regional and national affiliations from all over the globe.
In this conference we will explore how a region functions through history as a transitional space between two ecologies. Do these ecotone spaces echo the distinct notes of its two borders, or do these spaces create a unique melody of their own and constitute a third space? How do these ecotone spaces reflect the dynamic flow of people into and out of its precincts? Do they have essential attributes that impact the people who call the ecotone their home? The studies on the culture and the geography of these areas will also enquire into the vulnerability of the ecosystems and of the populations in these areas, the former experiencing a persistent burden from the latter who source their livelihoods from their habitat, while the latter have to bear the brunt of myriad forms of assault.
During its centuries-old history, the region of Bengal has been a space that, like the people who inhabit it, came to be dynamic in nature. This has been a space that has, through history, granted refuge to many — a history that was made possible because of its unique geographical terrain, making it, paradoxically, both easy to access and difficult to monitor. This aspect has been accentuated by the political position of this ecotone area, situated between two nations, and on the Bay that opens into South-east Asia.
Bengal is a transitional zone where the urban and urbane space of North India dissolve into the marshy, rural world of the Gangetic delta; it is a transcultural zone where the racial and cultural ‘purity’ of Brahminical and Mughal India gave way to a syncretic mixture of languages, cultures and ethnicities; it is a transcolonial zone where French, British and other European interests intersected and creolized. This plurality can be seen reflected in the cultural and religious practices, in popular and classical art cultures, in public institutions and architecture, as well as in the folklores and customs of the place.
In order to explore the ecotonal nature of the territory from an interdisciplinary perspective, the conference will identify geographical areas, environmental concerns, historical periods and cultural fields which have been ecotone areas of conflict, confluence and transition.
The proposed areas of interest of this conference will be around the following issues:
- Migration into and out of the ecotone area,
- Socio-cultural and economic aspects of such im/migrations,
- Trans-regional ties as a consequence of these im/migrations,
- Fluidity and porosity of borders,
- Heterogeneity and confluence of identities
- political definition and redefinition of borders and identities
- changes in the geographical map of the region and its impact upon the nature of the ecotone
- natural calamities and forced migrations
The conference will work at three distinct levels:
a) academic — with scholarly papers that analyse the historical, political, socio-cultural and anthropological aspects of the area;
b) cultural — through story-telling via folklore, textile cultures, songs and pats (pictures);
c) performative / auto-ethnographic — first-person accounts of people who have either arrived or transited through the area driven by a diversity of reasons ranging from those of livelihood, to that of natural and man-made calamities.
We trust the strong regional focus will give a specificity to the conference, which may then be useful in comprehending the patterns of human behaviour and history to arrive at theoretical or thematic understanding of ecotone areas, in Bengal and elsewhere.
We invite contributors to upload their proposals (a 250-word abstract, title, author’s name, a 150-word bio, and contact) to the conference website: Ecotones 4 Kolkata
Each presentation will be 20 minutes (followed by discussion time). All methodological and theoretical approaches are welcomed. We also invite creative interventions suggesting fresh topics. A selection of papers will be considered for publication at the conclusion of the series of ‘Ecotones’ events.
Venue: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta
Dates: 13-15 December, 2018
Language: English
Deadline to send a proposal: March 15, 2018
Notification of acceptance: April 15, 2018
Scientific committee
Dr Thomas Lacroix, MIGRINTER, CNRS, Université de Poitiers, France thomas.lacroix@univ-poitiers.fr
Dr Judith Misrahi-Barak, EMMA, Université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier 3, France judith.misrahi-barak@univ-montp3.fr
Dr Nalini Mohabir, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada nalini.mohabir@concordia.ca
Prof Maggi Morehouse, Coastal Carolina University, SC, USA morehouse@coastal.edu
Organising committee
Prof Rosinka Chaudhuri (Centre for the Study of Social Sciences Calcutta)
Dr Judith Misrahi-Barak (EMMA, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France)
Dr Nalini Mohabir, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
‘Ecotones’ Program Coordinators
Dr Thomas Lacroix (MIGRINTER, CNRS, Université de Poitiers)
Dr Judith Misrahi-Barak (EMMA, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France)
Prof Maggi Morehouse (Coastal Carolina University, SC, USA)
cfp_engl_ecotones_kolkata_30082018.docx
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Ecotones #3 : Indian Ocean: Ecotones, Contact Zones, and Third Spaces Observatory of Indian Ocean Societies, University of Reunion Island June 14-15, 2018
in partnership with EMMA (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3) and MIGRINTER (CNRS-Université de Poitiers)
cfp_ecotones_3_u._reunion_juin_2018.docx
programme_colloque_ecotones_la_reunion.pdf
___________________________________________________________________________________________
Ecotones #2 : Experiences of Migration and Transformations in the Ecotones University of Poitiers (MIGRINTER) 22-24 June, 2017
https://ecotones2.sciencesconf.org
programme_ecotones_poitiers.pdf
____________________________________________________________________________________________
