Confy @ Bankura University

Re-imagining the Nation:

Space and Boundary in Scotland and India

25-26 February, 2017

Bankura University, West Bengal, India

Eric Gidal and Michael Gavin, while developing the theme of spatial humanities and its relation to Scottish literary studies, comments:“…both writers and scholars of Scottish literature have long been centrally concerned with questions of place: the texture of Scotland as a nation is inextricable from the topology of its landscapes, the history of its transformations, and the struggles over its representations”. Space and boundary therefore address complicated issues related to a modern nation state which constitutes unitary significations despite multivalent presences. Space is interrelated to multiple forms of transformation and representation, thereby critiquing significant questions of history, geography, politics, literature and topology as specific spatial forces.

As Henri Lefebvre points out that all space is political or as Foucault has envisioned the ensuing centuries as centuries of geography, study of space and boundary increasingly becomes a complex site of intellectual investment. But space, conjoined with questions of ‘boundary’ as a prevailing normative point of view, further addresses emerging critical issues. How is space produced and how does it posit new problematics of cultural mapping through negotiations of ‘boundary’? How do space and boundary become compatible with the growing insistence on transnationalism and transculturalism? Diasporic presence, influx of immigrants, variables of ethnicities, experiments with new cultural forms inflect on complex re-imagining of the stability of nation states with its so-called celebrated ideologies of “unum pluribus”.

Both Scotland and India may share their distinctive views  on space and boundary within the stable mapping of a nation state. It is worthwhile to see how discussions on social, political, literary and even economic questions related to space and boundary can bring these two space – Scotland and India—together with their existing and emerging forms of boundary.

This conference will address, though not limited to, the following issues

Nation and Transnation

Space and Boundary: Negotiating the Politics of Identity

Text, Production and Interculturalism

History, Cartography and Topology

Across Continents: Scottish Orientalists in India

Place, Space and Cultural Geography

Diaspora, Ethnicities and Multivalences

Please send your abstracts as soon as possible to debnarayan@gmail.com

Registration: Rs 1500

Student Registration: Rs 1000