“In the last analysis, we must produce truth as we must produce wealth, indeed we must produce truth in order to produce wealth in the first place.”
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 1976.


In light of the natural disasters and political and economic upheavals marking the new millennium, it seems more than timely that EACLALS should use its 15th triennial conference to retrace its conceptual roots in the Commonwealth and reconsider the notions of wealth and commonality.

Postcolonial discourse has preferred to utilise poverty, subalternity and disadvantage as theoretical categories and rarely examined what Foucault calls the “abuses and arrogance of wealth” or refined wealth as a measure of advantage and disadvantage. Yet the production of wealth has been both a motivation behind colonial expansion and a justification for it. Although interventionist acts and overseas investments have consistently been masked in a liberal rhetoric of benevolent “common good,” all too often their purpose and effect have been the enrichment of a few, the accumulation of wealths not commonly shared.

While scholarly interest in the resultant social, political and cultural asymmetries has lent greater visibility to the exploited and marginalised, it has also eclipsed the excesses of today’s rich and super-rich. These demand our attention though, especially as the discrepancies between the wealthy and the poor are being reinforced by the global financial crisis and as protest movements against corruption and economic injustice are drawing hitherto unimagined constituencies. The Arab Spring and the Occupation of Wall Street are cases in point, demonstrating the urgent need for both a critical reassessment of such concepts as “general interest” and “public welfare” and a careful appraisal of resources that still give currency to the idea of a commonly shared wealth. Such resources include also more uncommon wealths: riches not necessarily perceived as such, if only because of their inherent resistance to commodification.

Commonwealth literatures and languages, the core of our discipline, embody such riches and at the same time re-present other cultural wealths threatened by monetisation, consumerism and affluenza. How can such a heritage, which counteracts exclusive ownership and values shared experience, sharpen our awareness of different types of wealth and poverty? How can the ‘truth-telling’ of literature undermine strategic efforts to conceal and distort economic and political realities? How does it improve our understanding of the material conditions under which we live and the metaphoric riches at our disposal? What alternative scenarios of well-being, what new visions of prosperity, what innovative approaches to affluence can writing, especially from the Commonwealth, offer to a world believing itself held hostage by market demands and the neoliberal imperative to produce capital growth? What warnings does it spell out against the fragility of certain wealths and the devastating costs of others? What future does Commonwealth literature envisage for concepts like “commonwealth” and the “common weal”?


SUB-THEMES:


1. Agents of Enrichment – Enablers and Gatekeepers:
Bankers, Gamblers, Investors
Haves and Have-Nots
Creditors and Debtors
Winners and Losers
Benefactors and Beneficiaries

2. Trajectories: Processes/Narratives of Enrichment:
The Quest for Wealth
Wealth and Dispossession
Change through Growth and Accumulation
Exhaustion of Wealth and Resources

3. The Power of Wealth – Power and Wealth – Politics of Wealth:
Interest and Interests, Debts and Dependencies, Shares and Sharing
Corruption and Control
Transformations through Prosperity
Forms of Sharing: Shareholding and Withholding

4. The Rhetoric of Wealth and the Wealthy:
Signs of Wealth – Symbols of Status
(In)Visibility of Wealth: Conspicuous Consumption and Hidden Affluence
Justifications of Wealth

5. The Ethics of Wealth:
The Legitimacy of Gain
Fair Trade – Fair Distribution
Philanthropy and Generosity at Large
The Price of Wealth: Who Pays?

6. Aesthetics of Wealth:
The Splendour of Riches – the Ugliness of Excess
Profanity of Pomp
The Value of the Original

7. The Other Side of the Coin: Poverty as Cause and Consequence of Wealth:
Realities: How Much Poverty Can the Rich Take?
Forms of Poverty
Hunger Feeding Affluence – The Affluent Feeding the Hungry

8. Geographies and Histories of Wealth:
Old and New Mappings
Treasuring and Measuring Wealth: Accounting, Protecting, Storing
Redistribution of Wealth
Centres of Wealth
Heydays of Prosperity

9. A Wealth of Wealths:
Material Wealth
Knowledge as Wealth
Natural Wealth and Wellbeing: Resourcing the Planet
Cultural Treasures – Heritage as Wealth and Woe
Spiritual/Otherworldly Wealths

10. Communicating Wealth:
Wealth and Education: Access and Exclusion
The Wealth of Memory
The Wealth of Words: Global Language and Language Death
Resourcing the (Un)Common Wealth: New Technologies and Social Media

11. Literary Wealth and Value – the Canonical and the Popular:
Performing Arts: (Un)Common Wealth?
A Wealth of Books: Colonial and Postcolonial Archives
Literary Criticism: Privilege, Luxury, Responsibility?