Lucy S. McNeece  (The University of Connecticut)
Re-Orientations: Travelers from Antique Lands

Academic institutions are reputed to be places of debate and exploration, but university administrative structures are notoriously slow to transform, in part because their objectives are primarily economic, and therefore conservative. While claiming to provide the structures for intellectual inquiry, the Academy nonetheless exerts often arbitrary constraints upon what kinds of knowledge can be produced. Francophone Studies, like Commonwealth Studies, developed as a result of geopolitical changes that occurred with the end of European empire. Although postcolonial studies necessarily opened such programs to the study of history and politics, they remained within the existing structures of the national languages and literatures.

If Francophone Studies hopes to play a significant role in the future of the Humanities, if it is to become the vehicle of knowledge of a rapidly changing world, it must re-integrate forgotten traditions that have influenced the modernity and post-modernity of all the national literatures. These 'forgotten ancestors' include the cultures of Africa, of course, but more remote traditions of the Orient and Asia as well.

This paper will discuss the impact of certain Eastern traditions whose esthetics and epistemology have left indelible traces upon the contemporary literature and art of what we term 'post-colonial post-modernity.'