NYU-CNRS 2009-2010 Research Seminar Series

NYU Transitions: A Center for International Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences
2009-2010 Research Seminar Series

Rethinking Transnational Processes and Multiple Modernities in the Atlantic World

Among the key issues today among academics, policy-makers, and publics at large, and salient on both global and local scales, are debates about the articulation of religion and modernity, the relationship between secularism and religion, and the memorialization of cultural and historical change over time. If we have never been "modern," as some scholars have argued, then it is the ideologies and practices, which define modernity that require interrogation. In this seminar we will take up the question of modernity and its key interlocutors in the Atlantic World, religion, diaspora, memory, creolization, and secularism, exploring how such conceptual categories become constructed and meaningful in different moments of transnational processes. Our emphasis will be hemispheric, focusing on the demographic, cultural, and religious flows among Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe, from which the notion of modernity has emerged, being shaped particularly within western epistemology. The seminar will build on recent research suggesting how the Atlantic World has generated multiple modernities rather than single-trajectory transitions to "being modern."

Fridays, 2 - 4 pm, 4 Washington Square North, Conference room, 2nd floor


October 23, 2009
Roger Sansi (Goldsmiths College, University of London)
Encountering Images in Candomblé: events, representations, and iconoclasm

November 13, 2009
Francio Guadeloupe (Radboud Universiteit, Nijmegen, Netherlands)
Saint Martin & Sint Maarten featuring the world

January 29, 2010
Jill Casid (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Woulds that Matter: Conditionals of Possibility and the Magic of Contact

February 26, 2010
Vincent Brown (Harvard University)
Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness: A Screening and Discussion

March 5, 2010
Gil Anidjar (Columbia University)
The Rhetoric of Blood

Contacts:
Stefania Capone, scl350@nyu.edu
Aisha Khan, ak105@nuy.edu