My Planned Talk at University of Lahore

In a couple of days I will travel to the historic town of Lahore to give a culminating Keynote address at a conference being organized by the English department of University of Lahore.

Entailed Geographies of Resistance: Literature, Language, Culture, this conference has the following general theme:

Since the middle of the twentieth century, resistance in literature, language and culture has been closely associated with the anti-colonial and national liberation movements in the Global South. The neoliberal globalization wih its attendant economic and socio-political ideologies, however, transforms registance to a more global form. Geopgraphics of Resistance:Literature,Language and Culture seeks to explore how resistance is reconfigured in contemporary aesthetics, linguistics, and cultural practices of contemporary forms of globalization. The conference aims to explore not only the various forms of resistance but also investigates the interrelation of all aspects that make up culture including class, race, gender, media, language and power. Discussions may focus on how these elements traverse the spaces of resistance that tend to counter late modern globalization, which is largely responsible for national and trasnational conflicts, socio-economic inequalities, and ecological disasters. In addition to sites of resistance, the conference hopes to highlight discourse on the coercive and repressive policies of neoliberal practices in the Global South.

I consider it a great honor to be invited to give a talk and I hope that my words and thoughts would be of some use to the audience.

I will be speaking about the role of humanistic education in shaping our individual and collective subjectivities in contemporary times.

I have always maintained that a truly humanistic education, when delivered through an informed pedagogy, can help us educate our students to be more compassionate, generous, and caring. Of course, these are not my ideas: many a philosopher and theorist have argued for this kind of regard for our local and global others.

Similarly, many scholars in my own field have argued that humanities can perform this function of “training the imagination” (Spivak) of our students.

So, in this talk I will mostly focus on critical pedagogy, for without an informed pedagogy humanities are not likely to deliver on any of their transformative possibilities.

This is just a brief note to share the news about this exciting conference. I will post a detailed account of the event after my visit.