Adela Pineda Guest Speaker for “The Rest does the West: Global Uses and Experiences of Western Civilization”
Over the centuries, the notion of Western Civilization (or its equivalents) has been used, both within and outside of what is commonly considered the West, as a powerful signifier. This signifier has served vastly different purposes by different agents. It has served to legitimate the state repression that was carried out in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s in the name of saving Western Christian Civilization from “godless communism”. But it has also served to justify the creation of stable and prosperous democracies in Asia and elsewhere. It has provided a legitimating narrative for colonial enterprises and/or exploitative economic arrangements throughout Latin America, Africa and Asia. However, the same notion(s) of Western Civilization has also served as a powerful narrative to oppose said colonial arrangements, to oppose religious fundamentalism in the Middle East or even to give credence to the fight for women’s rights (witnessed by the contemporary appropriation of the #metoo movement in the global arena, or how the idea of “not being left behind” vis-à-vis the West has recently shaped the debate on the legalization of abortion in Argentina and elsewhere).
Western Civilization is also a lived experience upon which identities are constructed: it is an object of desire (or rejection) and it is a source of pleasure or anxiety. The doubt about who “really” belongs to the west (and, conversely, how to “perform the West” by those who want to belong to the West) are drivers of behaviors trivial and momentous, from dietary options to voting patterns.
Of course, the desires and anxieties surrounding Western Civilization aren’t exclusive to the so called periphery. We can see that in the United States as well. The right (and the far right in particular) considers the Western project under assault due to recent demographic and immigration patterns, cultural trends, and government policies. Interestingly enough, the left also feels that it is under assault, but by different forces: the emergence of authoritarian leaders throughout the world and the increasing success of ethnonationalist parties in the West’s core. These are clearly vastly different explanations of the root causes on the perceived crisis of Western Civilization. Yet they underscore the degree to which both groups’ conception of the West diverge in important ways.
It is precisely this diversity of conceptions and experiences that we would like to discuss in the colloquium that we are organizing. We envision a colloquium that would bring together scholars from CU who work on geocultural areas outside the “core” of the West (such as Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Eastern Asia and Africa) in order to share with their colleagues and the public at large their perspectives on how the notion of the West (and its synonyms and modifiers) is currently or has been used and “lived” in said geocultural areas.
This will be a hybrid event, organized around conversation panels: there will be brief participant presentations (5 minutes) followed by discussion between the participants themselves and the public. The participants’ contribution does not have to be directly related to his or her current research, since we conceive of this colloquium as a scholarly-informed, yet informal event. Each participant can present on a specific case, or comment on the general topic, as it applies to his or her area of expertise.