Cfp: "The 'Post'-Marked World: Theory and Practice in the 21st Century," Department of British and Commonwealth Studies, University of Łódź, November 22-23, 2010.

Debates on the theoretical have dominated the discourse on humanities for a few decades now. The surge of anti-humanism from the 60s of the last century had already given way to the hermeneutics of the ‘post’ in the 80s, and the cult of the postmodern has launched us into the era of absolute deterritorialization of theory itself. As Baudrillard wrote in Symbolic Exchange, “…any theory can from now on be exchanged against any other according to variable exchange rates but without any longer being invested anywhere…”

In the wake of such theoretical aporia, the conference is an attempt to (re)think the implications of the term ‘post’ in current theoretical parlance. Is there a politics always/already embedded in the ‘post’? Do we need the ‘post’ any more? Did we, in the first place, need it at all? Is it possible to counter essentialism with the ‘post’ prefix? These are some of the questions the conference intends to raise and explore by examining the ‘post’-marked terms in the theoretical market. The purpose is to look at the ‘post’-marked terms, such as poststructuralism, postcolonialism, postcommunism, postfeminism, post-Marxism, postmodernism, post-Holocaust and (m)any other possible ‘post’, both theoretically and textually vis-à-vis the arts, cinema, literature, history, geography, anthropology, culture and area-studies, etcetera.

Visit the conference website here: http://www.britishstudies.uni.lodz.pl/post2010/.