Identités, Images, Représentations.

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Technical and scientific advances sparked off fundamental changes in the Western world between the end of the 18^th and the middle of the 20^th centuries, enabling Europeans to roam the world in search of wealth, to wrest control from indigenous peoples, to exploit the Other. This exploitation was ‘justified’ by colonial discourse. It was also at this time that a new form of political organisation – the nation-state – was born in Europe.

The West came to believe in linear ‘progress’ and ‘evolution’, in the ‘natural right’ of the ‘superior white race’ to reign over ‘inferior races’, who were expected either to assimilate or to die out as a consequence of ‘natural selection’. At the same time, the coloniser exploited exotic images of colonised peoples, sometimes acting to prevent the evolution of indigenous cultures, forcing them to become a kind of living museum. Such images supplied a counter-image, a kind of photographic negative, which helped to define a positive Western identity. Although the colonised were excluded from positions of authority, some subalterns were given administrative positions as middle-men between the coloniser and the colonised. Back in the Centre, the new national identities were consolidated on a basis of racial ‘purity’ and a binary opposition between inclusion and exclusion; national histories were written with a view to fostering social cohesion between the chosen citizens of the nation.

But modernity suffered its own identity crisis: eugenics lead to the Holocaust and technical progress to Hiroshima. European colonisation crumbled world-wide, ex-colonies attained independence and sought to reconstruct their own identity. Globalisation then began to eat away at the foundations of the national identities that had been so laboriously put together by the European nation-states. New forms of national identity began to emerge in an attempt to acknowledge the ethnic heterogeneity of national populations.

As the certainties of modernity came crashing down, the world entered an era where identity crises – personal, group, community, national – may be considered the norm rather than an exception. The authority of ‘official History’ has been challenged and its content deconstructed by postcolonial authors who underline its gaps and silences and its use of stereotypes. Official History has also been deconstructed (e.g. by life-stories) in literary, filmic and other forms.

We will focus on representations of the other. By juxtaposing and comparing differing disciplinary approaches, we hope to uncover shared strategies of resistance to stereotyping. We are particularly interested in examining the role of hybridity/métissage and ‘interculturality’ in this process.

We encourage diverse theoretical approaches:

-          identity construction,

-          postcolonialism,

-          trauma theory,

-          whiteness studies,

-          etc.

borrowed from diverse fields of study

-          literature,

-          civilisation,

-          history,

-          film studies,

-          semiology,

-          anthropology,

-          linguistics,

-          etc.

We are particularly interested in contributions encompassing regional studies from

-          the Asia-Pacific (including Australia and New Zealand), and

-          the Americas.

But we will also consider contributions relating to other areas.

Representations of the West from the perspective of other cultures are also of special interest.

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