Beyond East and West.

Decolonizing Modernization

The year 2015 started with a series of violent incidents such as the attack on Charlie
Hebdo in Paris, the bombing of Sanaa, Yemen's capital, and the massacres committed in Nigeria
by the Boko Haram group, which brought back into public debate the Huntington's theory about
the clash of civilizations and brought about a lot of discussions about modernization and its
paths. But, as in other cases, any attempt to contribute to the understanding and clarification of
such situations and challenges requires not only a thorough analysis of the context, but also a
trip back in time in the search for the explanations needed for understanding the contemporary
world or some aspects of it. In the last five centuries, European colonialism and the ideology of
modernization and its initiatives marked the world system in a complex manner:
Modernization and colonialism are two major and wide concepts, linked in multiple and
complex ways, generating much controversy among scholars. The famous book Orientalism
penned by Edward Said determined a process of rethinking the way the Western world has
interacted with other cultures and caused a major shift in the perspective by highlighting the
manner in which certain cultural representations are constructed and influence the political,
cultural and social relations. This book was followed by other major works such as Dipesh
Chakabarty's Provincilizing Europe, Valentin Y. Mudimbe's The Invention of Africa, Walter
Mignolo's Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border
Thinking, Larry Wolff's Inventing Eastern Europe, or Maria Todorova's Imagining the Balkans,
that revealed other symbolic geographies and cultural constructs, and the close link between
knowledge and power that structures them which contributes significantly to their
naturalization. The Orient, the Balkans, Eastern Europe, Central Europe, Southern America and
Australia, all these symbolic lands hide real geographies, which interacted with the
interpretative framework of the modern and the modernizing Occident, and were politically,
economically and socially profoundly marked by this interaction. The West's colonial
expansion was accompanied by the emergence of a meta-narrative of civilization and
modernization about exporting Western European civilization, presented as being universal and
an embodiment of progress, about taming and civilizing the barbarians and their societies
which were described as being backward, steeped in superstition and irrationality.
This year, Telciu Summer Conferences addresses the issue of modernization from the
perspective of decolonization. The title chosen: Beyond East and West. Decolonizing
Modernization targets an approach to modernization by overcoming the Eurocentric paradigm
and, thus, integrating various perspectives on this complex phenomenon. As with the previous
editions of the Telciu Summer Conferences, interdisciplinarity is a basic premise, pursuing
the convergence of scholars that cultivate interdisciplinarity in their activity, as well as the
dialog between specialists and enthusiasts from different domains. Below we outline a range of
possible themes and questions which might be addressed by those wishing to give a paper to
the conference:
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Modernity, Modernization, Postcolonialism, Decoloniality.

East and West, South and North. Designing peripheries and inferiority.

The Balkan Peninsula - The Iberic Peninsula or The European Orient

Faces of colonialism.
Modernization and Westernization.
Colonialism and the construction of the inequalities.
Islam and the challenges of modernity.

To apply for the conference, please send a title and an abstract of your paper (max
300 words) in English to telciusummerconferences@yahoo.com until 30th of April 2015.
We will inform you about our decision by 15th of May 2015. All contributions accepted
and presented during the conference will be published in a volume. Accommodation for the
speakers will be offered by the organizing committee. Unfortunately we cannot cover the
costs for transport.
Organizing Committee:
Valer Simion Cosma, Babe-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca (Romania)
Manuela Boatc, Freie University, Berlin (Germany)
Ali Abdelhafiz Moursi, Assiut University, New Valley (Egypt)