Conférencier invité : Nezar Alsayyad

Dans le cadre du colloque international Innovations sociales en tourisme, en patrimoine et dans les musées : Savoirs canadiens, espagnols et d’ailleurs, l’IPAC est fière d’annoncer la tenue d’une conférence de M. Nezar Alsayyad, professeur de l’Université de Berkeley, Californie.

Sa conférence, qui aura lieu le 11 mai dès 9h15 à la salle 2123 du Pavillon Alphonse-Desjardins (Université Laval), portera sur « Tourism, Fundamentalism and the Build Environment : on National Identity and the Heritage Discourse ».

Résumé de la conférence (en anglais) 

Tradition and heritage have typically been interpreted in relation to the built environment as constructs of authenticity.  As such, they long played a role in the definition of identities internationally.  They were also central to the rise of tourism as a global cultural practice.  As a regime of universal value, however, such ideas are a legacy of the colonial era and the resultant spread of the ideas derived from the European Enlightenment.  They were thus implicit in the establishment of a cultural hierarchy separating Western modernism from the traditional « other. »  Since the latter decades of the twentieth century, however, the rise of alternative, postcolonial modernities and the emergence of neoliberal flows of imagery and cultural reference have undermined the physical place-based frame according to which tradition and heritage were once consumed.  This process has now been accentuated by two other global developments.  One has been the rise of fundamentalist ideologies, which have contested the legitimacy of the nation-state and advocated a new medieval system of cultural territories.  The other is the emergence of an « after-global » era, marked by the failure of economic globalization to establish the parallel supremacy of liberal democracy.  As a result, the content and value of heritage and tradition must be constantly and situationally negotiated in an informationally interconnected world of derivative cultural signification.

Bienvenue à tous !