A Conference Sponsored by the Department of Asian Studies and the Institute for Comparative Modernities, Cornell University, Ithaca

Friday, September 22 | Saturday, September 23, 2023

DAY 1 –– Friday, September 22, 2023 | Goldwin Smith Hall 64, Kaufmann Auditorium

3:00 – 3:15 p.m. Welcome Introduction – Brett de Bary and Naoki Sakai

3:30 – 5:30 p.m. PANEL ONE – Colonialism and the Invention of the National Language

Moderator: Esra Akcan (Cornell University, Ithaca)

Panelists:
Cécile Canut (Université Paris Cité and Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris): L’ordre-de-la-langue: The Myth of French as a Universal Language
Chul Kim (Yonsei University, Seoul): Construction of Colonial Internationality: Centered on the Production of National Language in Korea
Mukoma wa Ngugi (Cornell University, Ithaca): African Literary Criticism in Crisis: Politics of Language, Periodization, and Citizenship

Discussant: Peter Osborne (Kingston University, London)

Saturday, September 23 conference schedule (PSB 401 10:00-17:00)

The conference proposes that what is taken for granted today as national or ethnic language, in the sense of “la langue,” came into existence in the world in modernity, that is, the world as it was gradually organized according to the basic schema of internationality instituted in Europe from the 16th to 19th centuries. Initially this understanding of an “international world” was limited to a special region called Europe, but as the territorial states in Europe moved into non-European regions and conquered their lands, the Eurocentric structure of the international world gained global dominance. Gradually, all the land surface of the earth came to be organized by the bipolarity of Europe (also called “the West” since the end of the 19th century) and the Rest. Thanks to the pioneering work of Cécile Canut (Provincialiser la langue, Edition Amsterdam, 2021), Jon Solomon (Spectral Translation), and Naoki Sakai (Voices of the Past) we now understand that the notion of la langue is closely associated with the colonial internationality of the modern world. Our attempts to seek national languages everywhere as the sign of indigenous cultural and political autonomy is, in fact, a continuation of the colonial imposition of the Eurocentric norm on colonial populations. Hence, Canut’s appeal for ‘provincializing Europe’ challenges the established modality of knowledge production about the Rest, particularly in area studies.

The conference will therefore consider the formation of national language to be closely affiliated with knowledge production in the modern human and social sciences, on the one hand, and with the creation of the new “imagined community” called “the nation,” on the other. We seek to discuss how broader problems of knowledge production are implicated in the international structure of Eurocentric modernity with a particular emphasis on the intimate connections between the formation of the area and the constitution of la langue.

Participants:

Brett de Bary (Cornell University)
Naoki Sakai (Cornell University)
Jon Solomon (Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3, Lyon)
Cécile Canut (Université Paris Cité and Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris)
Peter Osborne (Kingston University, London)
Hideto Tsuboi (Waseda University, Tokyo)
Chul Kim (Yonsei University, Seoul)
Peter Button (Independent Scholar, New York)
Setsu Shigematsu (University of California, Riverside)
Lisa Yoneyama (University of Toronto)
Takashi Fujitani (University of Toronto)
Natalie Melas (Cornell University)
Arnika Fuhrmann (Cornell University)
Naminata Diabate (Cornell University)
Gavin Walker (Cornell University)
Mukoma wa Ngugi (Cornell University)
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò (Cornell University)
Grant Farred (Cornell University)