Dear List members:Please see information below about an upcoming conference
in Fall 2019, and please direct any questions to
nalini.mohabir@concordia.caPost/Colonial
Ports : Place and Nonplace in the Ecotone
*Ecotones #6 *Deadline for submitting proposals: April 5, 2019
October 24 - 26, 2019
Concordia University
Language: English
*In partnership with EMMA (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3),
MIGRINTER (CNRS-Université de Poitiers) and La Maison Française d’Oxford*
After conferences in Montpellier, Poitiers and La Réunion (France, 2015,
2016 and 2018), as well as Kolkata (India, 2018) and Purchase (NY, USA,
2019), this is the 6th opus of this conference cycle in Montreal, Concordia
University. An “ecotone” initially designates a transitional area between
two ecosystems, for example between land and sea. The “Ecotones” program
(2015-2020) is a cycle of conferences which aims to borrow this term
traditionally used in geography and ecology and to broaden the concept by
applying it to other disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities.
An “ecotone” can thus also be understood as a cultural space of encounters,
conflicts, and renewal between several communities. This interdisciplinary
conference will more specifically focus on colonial and postcolonial port
cities as ecotonic dialectics between places and non-places.
Commonly understood, a port is the site where ships’ passengers enter or
exit, and cargo is loaded or unloaded. Thus, it represents the flow of
people and exchange of goods, in the age of sail, as well as in the
contemporary globalized world. The unbounded space of the port offers
opportunities to explore “discontinuous histories” of port cities, and “its
interfaces with the wider world” (Gilroy 1993), as a site that decentres
the nation through its slippery flows. In addition, port cities anchor
urban development around shipping routes and international trade. Ports of
call offer the hope of safe harbours for migrants, a refuge in a storm, or
alternatively a vulnerable site for colonial concessions or gateways that
must be regulated or controlled. Ports are also passages of communications.
In computer networking, a port is a nodal point of communication through
which data flows, a portal to information. Lastly port cities occupy that
liminal space between land and water, an in-between ecotonic zone of
transition.
Ports are often referred to as nonplaces – gateways subject to global
forces that historically shaped trans-oceanic connections, expansion into
hinterlands, and crossroads of historical and contemporary encounters.
Nonplaces within cities are commonly perceived as liminal locations reduced
to their function of transportation or commercial nodes, or as locations
that crush the sense of individual empowerment. But artists, writers,
critics and researchers have depicted them as multiple, paradoxical spaces,
where new possibilities arise and new cultures emerge. Nonplaces may
produce social flows and networks that are not only a defining feature of
our “super-modernity”, but also, in the longue durée of urban and
semi-urban dynamics, a matrix for identity formation, cultural transitions
and environmental adaptation.
Port cities, however, are also placed. Cities such as Georgetown in Guyana,
Shanghai, Dar es Salaam, Liverpool, Calcutta, Nantes, or Montreal among
many others, may be viewed through longstanding geographic imaginaries,
linguistic collectivities and/or colonial and postcolonial histories,
suggesting an ongoing struggle over who ‘claims’ the city (in Montreal’s
case, unceded territory), and gestures towards political, social, or
economic insecurities apparent in the spatial configurations of urban life,
with implications that potentially destabilize national narratives. For
example, as an island in the Saint Lawrence River, the city of Montreal is
not only connected to multiple elsewheres through migration, but also
through trade. The Saint Lawrence opens on to the Atlantic ocean through
which flowed a long-standing trade in bauxite from towns in the Caribbean
to Quebec (following circuits laid by imperialism). Thus, ports shape
material channels of profit and power, as well as modes of resistance that
occur around these networks of control.
We seek papers that engage with these multiple formations of ecotone spaces
within port cities, past and present. We encourage abstracts on topics such
as (but not limited to):
- Circulations and hubs of ideas, migration, or commerce that linked
cities across empire(s)
- Interactions and networks of mobile labour in port cities, the
spatiality of encounters
- Cultural transitions or environmental adaptions in (post)colonial port
cities at different historical junctures or across geographic locations
- Urban colonial heritage, and attendant linkages to global urbanism
- Memorializing of port city histories and the shaping of identities
(including sexuality, race, gender, language, religious, m
