Workshop Series: Gender and Empire
Cairo, May 13-14 2007 (Oriental Hall)
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The affinities between the colonial and the post-colonial imperial have been subject to much recent scholarly debate. One particular concern has been to go beyond affinities and develop a better understanding of ways in which contemporary categories of empire operate differently. Gender has been one important site through which these geographical, cultural and political debates have been engaged over the past two centuries. Concomitantly, with modernist narratives in tatters, epistemological questions as to the cost and limits of a rights based imagination of modern gender politics is increasingly coming under critical scrutiny. By asking what critical purchase gender studies can have in the age of empire , this conference invites an examination of the politics and possibilities of gender studies scholarship in the historical present. Panels and papers will address a wide range of issues engaging contemporary gender research and politics -- and their modern genealogies -- with a particular focus on the MENA, Africa and South Asia.