(NAME-MCE) FW: Rethinking Multiculturalism

[Francisco Alfonso Rios]

Hi: Thought this might be of interest to the NAME community.

Francisco

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: CLACLS <las at econs.umass.edu>
Date: Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 12:10 PM
Subject: Fwd: Rethinking Multiculturalism

CFP: Rethinking Multiculturalism: Brazil, Canada, and the United States

Chair in Multiculturalism, Department of Equity, York University, in collaboration with the Center for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC), and the Michael Baptista Lecture. Toronto, Ontario, January 28-30, 2010.

The idea of multiculturalism, a key term for the liberal state and a product of late twentieth-century global movements of capital and people, has historical roots in colonial slavery, indentureship, and other labour migrations. By considering migration in its local, transnational, and hemispheric contexts, this conference seeks to understand the relationship among hegemonic and resistant configurations of multiculturalism and social justice, economic equity, and access to power. What is the relationship between celebrations of multiculturalism and issues of human rights, environmental, and social justice, and economic equity? Just what is the relationship between discourses of multiculturalism, whether hegemonic or resistant, and the indigenous peoples of Brazil, Canada, and the United States? We endeavor to take seriously the "cultural" in multiculturalism, as an agricultural metaphor, meaning to cultivate, and its relationship to the nature/culture dualism, which continues to position indigenous peoples and their homelands as raw nature in need of cultivation, as well as in the anthropological sense of culture as a whole way of life, and popular or lay senses of the word "culture" as cultural production. We welcome proposals that move beyond white/other binaries to consider how the multiplicity of racialized subjects, ethnic groups, im/migrants, and indigenous groups relate to one another. For example, since the racialized category of blacks in Brazil, Canada and the United States is inclusive of people who were transported to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade, as well as recent immigrants from the Caribbean, Central and South America, and Africa, how does reading difference in terms of race alone obscure the multicultural, or ethnic differences, within racialized categories?

Papers are invited in English, French, Spanish, or Portuguese that explore and theorize multiculturalism in Brazil, Canada and the United States. We welcome investigations of Brazilian im/migrants and their cultural production in Canada and the United States.

Topics might include, but are not limited to:
    Human rights and discourses of multiculturalism
    Diaspora Native (aboriginal, First Nations, Amerindian) relations
    Constructions of race/ethnicity in diaspora
    Re-considerations of gender and sexual rights
    Religious difference, ideologies of nation, and immigration policies
    The relationship between immigration and trans/national economic/trade policies
    Cultural production (e.g. literature, music, dance, film, television) and the multicultural and/or diasporic imagination
    Public policy and cultural production
    The relationship of the Brazilian diaspora to the construction of the Latino/a subject in North America
    Relationship between elite immigrant classes and refugees, guest workers, and stateless peoples

    Comparative, hemispheric, and interdisciplinary approaches are especially welcome.
    Submit abstracts to Vermonja Alston at valston at yorku.ca or confbraz at yorku.ca by October 1, 2009.

    The Chair in Multiculturalism has been created through a national and international agreement among the Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil), Universidade Federal de São Carlos (Brazil), University of Pittsburgh (United States), and York University (Canada). The Chair supports the exchange of researchers and students among the four universities, with special emphasis on multiculturalism, human rights, social and environmental justice, and cultural production in Brazil, Canada, and the United States. The new Department of Equity Studies at York University was created to foster greater research and teaching in the areas of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity, human rights, migration and refugee studies. York University is a large research university in Toronto, Ontario, the most multicultural city in Canada. The University has the most diverse student body of any
university in Canada.