Postcolonial Europe

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Until recently, most work done in the field of comparative postcolonial studies focused on Europe's ex-colonial peripheries. Increasing emphasis is now being placed, however, on the after-effects of colonialism on European metropolitan cultural practice, and on those power relations within Europe that can be analysed as direct or indirect forms of colonial power. By bringing together both established and younger scholars from three different European locations working in the interdisciplinary field of postcolonial studies, the network would aim to establish the parameters of postcolonial Europe, bringing the field back to its European intellectual origins but also showing how these origins have been creatively transformed.The network would be organised in the first instance around the topic of 'Occidentalism', those negative attitudes and representational mechanisms, in evidence within as well as outside Europe, by which suspicion and resentment of European values (and Western values in general) are systematically mobilised and deployed. An in-depth analysis of Occidentalism requires a further understanding of the contemporary post-secular climate both within and beyond Europe's borders, so a first workshop on the Western dimensions of Europe, and the 'anti-Westernism' to which Europe has arguably been subjected, would be followed by a second, arranged more specifically to look at the relationship between Occidentalism, Orientalism and the contemporary post-secular world. These workshops aim to go well beyond the reactionary notion of a threatened Europe, a notion on which some, unduly inflexible concepts of Occidentalism (e.g. as a 'war on the West') depend. In moving beyond the ossified concepts of Occident and the Orient, the network aims to clear a space to look at postcolonial Europe in terms of a non-binary understanding of European social, cultural and political forms.The benefits of the network would be to strengthen the work of individual scholars in the field working at three different European locations; to provide a European format for debate about current research in the field; and to establish a network of younger, as well as more established scholars who might collaborate, support and help develop each other's work. The network would provide an initial platform from which to develop further research on postcolonial Europe as a more nuanced, but still critical, alternative to binary understandings of the Occident and the Orient, the West and the non-West.