Symposium

Alternative Modernities

Luke Gibbons
University of Notre Dame

Thongchai Winichakul
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Susan Stanford Friedman
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Friday, March 2, 2001
2:00-6:00 p.m.
6191 Helen C. White Hall

2:00 Film Screening: The Hard Road to Klondike (Dir. Desmond Bell, 1999)
An Irish laborer migrates to the U.S. after the Irish famine in the mid-nineteenth century and makes connections with native cultures.

3:00 Luke Gibbons : "Ghosts of the Nation: Human Rights, Irish Culture, and the Gothic Memory"

4:15 Break

4:30 Rethinking "Modernity"
Thongchai Winichakul : "The Quest for 'Siwilai': A Geographical Discourse of Civilizational Thinking
in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Siam"
Susan Stanford Friedman : "Breaking the Mold of Eurocentric Definition"

5:30 Summary Discussion

Luke Gibbons: Professor of English and concurrent Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame, has lectured widely in Great Britain, Europe, North America, and Australia. His academic interests include a wide variety of scholarly issues, ranging from film and literature to the visual arts, questions of aesthetics, politics and cultural history, and contemporary debates on post-colonialism. He is the author of Transformations in Irish Culture (University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), co-author of the pioneering book, Cinema in Ireland (Routledge, 1988), and a contributing editor of the landmark Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing , edited by Seamus Deane (Norton/Field Day, 1991). He is also the author of numerous articles that have appeared in Irish and international journals such as The South Atlantic Quarterly , Artforum , Cultural Studies , The Oxford Literary Review , Eire-Ireland , The Irish Literary Supplement , and History Ireland . He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the International James Joyce Foundation, and is a consultant editor to the new Routledge review of post-colonial studies, Interventions . His most recent book, The Colonial Sublime: Edmund Burke, Aesthetics and Ireland 1750-1850 will be published by Cambridge University Press, and he is currently preparing two other books for publication, Alternative Enlightenments: Romanticism, Republicanism and Irish Culture , and The Idiomatic Eye: Ireland and National Cinema .

Symposium Issues: Two recent issues of Daedalus crystallize major questions in Modernity Studies that the Symposium explores. "Early Modernities" (Summer 1998) and "Multiple Modernities" (Winter 2000) challenge prevailing assumptions about modernity that define it as an invention of the West that spreads to the Rest beginning with the Renaissance; gathering its defining momentum with the rise of industrialism, capitalism, the nation-state, colonialism, and Enlightenment science and universalism; and evolving into postmodernity in the current age of transnationalism and globalization. How might our understanding of Western modernity change if we understand it to be one among many different modernities? If we substitute the diffusionist model with an interactive, symbiotic, intercultural, and transcultural one? If we recognize distinctive modernities in other historical periods and other parts of the globe? If we explore the impact of migration and flows of people, goods, ideas, and cultural practices in the formation of hybridic and indigenized modernities? If we examine the divisions within the West or within any other part of the world that produce profoundly different experiences of modernity depending on different relations to the structures of power?
Luke Gibbons will focus on the aftermath of the Great Famine in Ireland with discussion of a recent film about an Irish laborer who leaves Ireland for the U.S. and makes connections with native cultures in the Klondike. Thongchai Winichakul will discuss how the Siamese elite adapted aspects of Western modernity to further their project of establishing their own superiority within Siam and Southeast Asia. Susan Friedman will raise general questions about the challenge to Eurocentric models for modernity, with brief reference to her recent work on Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness and Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North .