>Subject: Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora and Indigeneity in Canada
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>Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:32:26 -0700
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>
>Call for Papers:
>
>Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora and Indigeneity in Canada
>
>Edited by Melina Baum Singer, Christine Kim, and Sophie McCall
>
>Over the past couple of decades, the terms of critical debate that
>have animated Canadian cultural and literary studies—such as race,
>nation, difference, culture—have shifted in significant ways. The
>death of the nation, so often prophesied, with varying degrees of
>optimism, fear and ambivalence, continues to shape the language of
>Canadian cultural and literary studies. In this collection we propose
>to analyse the larger conceptual shifts that have occurred in
>response to national and post-national arguments. Discourses of
>postcoloniality have been supplemented, and in many cases, even
>largely replaced by the paradigms of diaspora, indigeneity,
>globalization, and transnationalism, perhaps suggesting that the
>broader project of decolonization requires multiple kinds of tools
>and strategies. At the same time, each of these theoretical
>frameworks has also undergone a series of transformations that bear
>investigating. Diaspora studies, for example, has moved away from its
>initial affiliation with Jews and Jewish experiences and has largely
>become synonymous with critical race theory. First Nations studies
>has long had a troubled relationship with postcolonial studies, since
>many practices and policies of colonization are ongoing. Diasporic
>and indigenous scholarship is often critical of Canadian national
>discourses and the practices of the state, yet both critical streams
>maintain certain investments in the language of nations. For
>instance, the discourses of sovereignty and nation-to-nation
>relations have become key words for Aboriginal writing, while
>critical race politics in the 1980s was deeply invested in creating a
>place for minorities within the nation. Meanwhile, hybridity as a
>critical approach, mobilized to address an increasingly broad set of
>questions relating to cultural race politics, is often associated
>with transnationalism and the emergence of globalization studies. The
>goal of this collection is to take stock of ongoing conversations
>about the cultural politics of contemporary Canadian literature and
>to consider the cultural grammar for speaking about race and
>ethnicity in the current moment.
>We are particularly interested in submissions that explore the
>following questions:
>
>How do we understand the ongoing production of diasporas in the
>current moment given the displacing work of social, economic, and
>political forces that often take the form of social policies,
>poverty, and responses to natural disaster? At the same time that
>racialized groups seem particularly vulnerable to uprooting forces in
>the current moment, this is also a period in which the creative and
>critical work of diasporas appears to be flourishing. How do we
>understand the relationship between these aspects of diaspora? Are
>they as contradictory as they initially appear?
>
>How do First Nations issues such as land claims and redress for
>residential schools speak to diasporic ethics and politics? How might
>we think about indigenous and/or diasporic relations to issues of
>displacement? To what extent does the turn to sovereignty, which
>continues to play an important role in developing a language of
>decolonization in First Nations studies, risk eliding urban, mixed-
>blood, deterritorialized indigenous subjectivities? What other
>conversations between First Nations and diasporas are ongoing or have
>been held in the past?
>
>What might the future of a critical multiculturalism hold, especially
>given pressing questions of sovereignty, state, and nation? What are
>the implications for discourses of multiculturalism in the face of a
>recent proliferation of media commentary that taps into fears of
>‘home-grown terrorists’ on the one hand, and celebrates hybridity on
>the other? What does the turn to cultural hybridity enable and what
>does it obscure? How do discourses of hybridity articulate with
>discourses of nation, transnationalism and globalization? And more
>broadly, how do we understand this tension between the legal and
>cultural discourses of identity?
>
>Often, ‘postcolonial’ writing is reduced to matters of content and
>‘issues’ and questions of form and style overlooked. Yet this shift
>from postcolonial to newer or different paradigms underscores the
>significance of ‘how’ these conversations unfold. How might we then
>foreground questions of the aesthetics of ‘minority’ writing in Canada?
>
>The editors have a formal offer to publish this collection as part of
>the TransCanada series through Wilfrid Laurier University Press. We
>welcome submissions about 4000-6000 words in length to be submitted
>by August 30, 2008. Requests for information can be sent to Melina
>Baum Singer at [log in to unmask], Christine Kim at [log in to unmask]
>or Sophie McCall at [log in to unmask]
>
>We require an electronic version of your paper as well as 3 hard
>copies. Please email submissions to any of the editors and mail hard
>copies to either Christine Kim or Sophie McCall at:
>
>Department of English
>
>Simon Fraser University
>
>Burnaby, British Columbia
>
>V5A 1S6
>
>
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