LECTURE: Globally Networked media and Postcolonial Theory

You are invited to a free public lecture by

Professor Mark Poster, University of California, Irvine and IAS Professor-at-Large, UWA

As the Keynote address for Network Media: Code, Culture and Convention

A cross-disciplinary symposium at the University of Western Australia September 9 – 11, 2004

Globally Networked media and Postcolonial Theory

Date and Time: Thursday 9 September at 7.00pm

Venue: Alexander Lecture Theatre, Arts Building, UWA (Enter off Hackett Drive though Hackett Entrance 1 Parking available in Car Park P3 near Reid Library, Law Building and Arts Building)

Abstract:

The impact of converging information media needs to be studied in relation to social and cultural practices, particularly as these media cross cultural and political boundaries. The question of postcoloniality is at stake as media and their associated contents reach across the planet. We might then ask: Is the epoch of postcolonial or transnational studies over? Is the present era still one best characterized in terms of resistance to Western hegemony by states that formerly were administered by the imperial branches of European and American governments? Or are we now in a post-postcolonial epoch? Put differently, I offer the hypothesis that as globalizing, networked media continue to disseminate and to multiply, postcoloniality appears more and more as a moment in a declining phase, continuing and shifting to be sure, of the larger phenomenon of globalization. For the purposes of this talk, I will explore the hypothesis that the postcoloniality is now folding into globalizing movements and trends, especially through the dissemination of planetary networked media.

Biography:

Professor Mark Poster teaches at the University of California, Irvine in the History Department, the Film Studies Program and the Critical Theory Emphasis. He is also associated with the Department of Information and Computer Science. Some of his publications are: The Second Media Age (Blackwell, 1995) which is version 2.0 of The Mode of Information (Chicago Press, 1990). One chapter of this book is available here as "Postmodern Virtualities." Cultural History and Postmodernity appeared with Columbia University Press in 1997, on the relation of poststructuralist theory to the discipline of History. A collection of pieces old and new with a critical introduction by Stanley Aronowitz is published as The Information Subject with G & B Arts International (2001). He continues his study of the social and cultural theory of electronically mediated information with What's the Matter with the Internet?, published by The University of Minnesota Press (2001). This includes an essay, "CyberDemocracy," also available on the website: http://www.humanities.uci.edu/mposter/

More details on the symposium are available online at: http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/activities_and_programs/other_activities_and_events

ALL WELCOME. NO RESERVATION IS REQUIRED

For more information please contact The Institute of Advanced Studies, UWA on Tel (08) 6488 1340; Email [email protected]; www.ias.uwa.edu.au