Workshop 1: Toronto
Feb 4-5, 2023
University of Toronto Mississauga
Taking place over a winter weekend, this two-day, hybrid workshop (in person for our Toronto scholars and invited graduate students; virtual for our international partners and graduate students) facilitated an inaugural dialogue among scholars across our four collaborating institutions, including the University of Toronto, the American University in Cairo, the Institut français de Pondychéry, and the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.
Workshop Rationale
by Aqsa Ijaz, Co-Project Manager, GPRI
The framing of the term global is hardly ever questioned in much of what passes as global history, global literatures, and global humanities. More often than not, the term is understood as a concept that’s by and large padded by the Anglo-Saxon academic discourse of the 90s. Within this framing of the global – connections, voices from the margins, and autonomous histories are emphasized with a hope that some kind of renewed understanding of global experience can be extracted from these diverse perspectives.
However, the problem with this kind of multipolar perspective is that it assumes that conflicting histories can be presented side by side without ever questioning the legitimacy of their larger discursive legacies. Such liberal-pluralist approaches to the global flatten the differences and reduce political projects to mere commodities while making their own politics of framing the discourse invisible. Too often, the structures of so-called global knowledge contribute more to our ignorance of non-western societies, Indigenous, and premodern pasts than to a meaningful understanding of their differences.
One can see such a framing of the global in almost any handbook of global history, global literature (etcetera) wherein these structures of thought and language that are expressed remain largely Eurocentric. Historians continue to frame the experience of time in the temporal markers of European historiography, and literary scholars are rarely able to provide a glimpse into literary imagination of a non-western past without referring to the genres that have come to be theorized from within the western literary tradition. Essentially translating the differences into a more familiar vocabulary of imperial discourse, most of modern humanities and social sciences continue to be outside of the philological density that informs the thick forest of non-western pasts.
With our first workshop in Toronto, we would like to work towards promoting a radical shift in how we conceptualize the global, how perspectives are hierarchized, and the language through which we come to engage the global pasts. We propose to think together and discover opportunities for re-theorization. Only through a diversely collaborative thinking project like the GPRI can we hope not just to provincialize Europe, but to think outside of its given epistemologies.
Program of Events
