IAFOR update on partnership with the University of Barcelona’s Tricontinental Lecture Series

The International Academic Forum (IAFOR) is excited to report the ongoing success of the Tricontinental Lecture Series at the University of Barcelona, an IAFOR Institutional Partner. The University of Barcelona’s Centre for Australian and Transnational Studies (CEATS) is hosting the ongoing series in partnership with IAFOR.

An initiative of the teachers of Postcolonial Studies in the English Department at the University of Barcelona, the Tricontinental Lecture Series was created in 2011 to incorporate speakers of diverse academic and cultural backgrounds intervening in the Postcolonial Studies courses offered at the Department of English and German Studies. The first Tricontinental Lecture was read by Sudanese-British writer Jamal Mahjoub in 2011, in an auspicious event co-organised with Casa Africa.

The series title responds to the conviction that the interdisciplinary field of Postcolonial Studies has a social and political responsibility, and pays homage to twentieth-century anti-colonial struggle. It was inspired by Robert Young’s precise reclamation of the key tenets of postcolonialism:

In many ways, “tricontinental” is a more appropriate term to use than postcolonial. ... As terms, both "tricontinental" and "third world" retain their power because they suggest an alternative culture, an alternative “'epistemology”'... Postcolonialism begins from its own knowledges, many of them more recently elaborated during the course of the anti-colonial movements, and starts from the premise that those in the west, both within and outside the academy, should take such other knowledges, other perspectives, as seriously as those of the west. Postcolonialism, or tricontinentalism, is a general name for these insurgent knowledges that come from the subaltern, the dispossessed, and seek to change the terms and values under which we all live.

Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: O.U.P., 2003.

Recent speakers have included Australian poet Peter Bakowski, Gibraltarian writer M. G. Sanchez, Professor Philip Hayward of Southern Cross University, and London-based writer Sunny Singh.