You are cordially invited a special seminar by Prof. Vicente L. Rafael.
The details are as follows.

Date and Time: June 30th (Thurs.) 16:00 – 18:00, 2016
Place: Meeting room (E107) on the first floor of East building, CSEAS, Kyoto University

Speaker: Prof. Vicente L. Rafael, Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Washington

Title: Mutant Tongues: Englishes, Vernaculars, and the Postcolonial Humanities in Singapore, the Philippines and the United States

Abstract:
Is there a post-colonial humanities? How does a comparative
understanding of the histories of Singapore, the Philippines, and the
United States help us track the formation of the humanities in the
current moment, often characterized as one of “neo-liberal
globalization”? How does education in the humanities at once continue
and displace the work of what was once called “national development”?
How does the nation-state recruit languages–specifically English and
the mother tongues―into the work of translating the inhuman conditions
of global capital into the humanizing ideology of development? In the
case especially of Singapore, how does the work of English translation
create new–one could even say, mutant–formations of expression that
exceed, if not defy, the nation-state’s mandates for an educated
citizenry? What are the consequences of such linguistic defiance for
revising regnant ideas about the prospects for pursuing a post-colonial
humanities?

Bionote:
Vicente L. Rafael is Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies at
the University of Washington in Seattle. He is the author of several
works on the Philippines, including Contracting Colonialism, White Love
and Other Events in Filipino History, The Promise of the Foreign, and
most recently, Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language Amid Wars
of Translation, all published by Duke University Press.

Moderator: Hau Caroline, CSEAS, Kyoto University