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CALL FOR PAPER & PANEL PROPOSALS
CFPs: "Race-Making and the State: Between Postracial Neoliberalism
and Racialized Terrorism"
The 10th Annual Critical Race and Anti-Colonial Studies Conference 8-10
October 2010 University of Alberta Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: 30 March 2010
CONFIRMED SPEAKERS include:
* Angela P. Harris, University of California-Berkeley Law School,
co-author, Race and Races: Cases and Resources in a Diverse America
* Lily M. Ling, The New School, author, Postcolonial International
Relations: Conquest and Desire between Asia and the West;
* Achille Mbembe, WISER, University of Witwatersrand, author, On The
Postcolony;
* Sherene Razack, OISE/University of Toronto, author, Casting Out: The
Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics;
* Sunera Thobani, University of British Columbia, author, Exalted
Subjects: The Making of Race and Nation in Canada.
* Robert A Williams, Jr., E. Thomas Sullivan Professor of Law and
Indigenous Studies, University of Arizona, author, The American Indian
in Western Legal Thought (pending).
CONFERENCE DESCRIPTION: Despite the 'wilful forgetting' evident
in much Canadian and international studies scholarship, racial
thinking, race-making and racial imaginaries long have served the
imperial and
colonial designs of empires and states alike. German philosopher
Eric Voegelin was among the first to think through the relationship between
race-making and the state. In Race and State, he insisted that the
racial idea was a fundamental element of the modern state. For
Voeglin, it was irrelevant whether race was a biological or genetic
fiction; this did not belie its power or its real life political,
material or social salience. Hannah Arendt in turn persuasively
argued that race thinking has been wide-spread across the west since
at least the eighteenth century, and functioned as a political device
to differentiate the 'primitive', 'savage' and 'barbarian' from the
'civilized'. Racism was a powerful ideological weapon in imperialist
policies including the 'scramble for Africa' and in the dispossession
of Indigenous lands. In Society Must Be Defended, the French social
theorist Michel Foucault advanced the notion of 'state racism' as one
expression of the biopower of the modern state, which unleashed
governing technologies to 'make live' some groups and 'let die'
others. Other important works on the 'racial state', prominent among
them, Omni and Winant (1994), Anthony Marx (1998), David Theo Goldberg
(2002), Sherene Razack (2008) and Sunera Thobani (2007), have linked
imperial and colonial racisms to the conceits of modern liberal
states, which purport to be race neutral, colour-blind and even
postracial, while masking, reproducing and even reinforcing historical
inequities.
The nature of race thinking and race-making are differently configured
in two dominant logics of the twenty-first century: neoliberalism's
racial imaginaries of an individualized, atomized person who can leave
behind her or his racial, ethnic and gendered self and the racial
imaginaries of 9/11 and the 'war on terror', which make clear that
'outsider groups' are always already shaped by racial and gendered
markers. Arguably neoliberalism has depoliticized race and racism,
indeed, all structural inequalities. It has reduced racism to a
psychological shortcoming that can be mediated through the promotion
of cross-cultural understanding. In this context, we are confronted
with the paradoxical claim that while there may be racism, apparently
there are no racists and no systemic conditions of racial inequality.
This paradox disdains historical memory of institutional and
structural racism and 'forgets' that racial thinking and race-making
have shifted over time, space, and regimes with sometimes devastating
effect. What is racism and who if anyone can be called a racist?
Race-making and the 'racial state' too often are imagined as cases of
exceptions, such as Nazi Germany or apartheid South Africa. This too
elides the everyday and normalized practices of race-making and racism
and obscures meaningful anti-racist practices. In such contexts, what
do anti-racism and decolonization mean? How do they manifest in
theories, practices and policies?
ABOUT THE NETWORK: The Researchers and Academics of Colour for
Equality (R.A.C.E.) Network is in its tenth year. Annually it hosts
the largest conference gathering of critical race and anti-colonial
studies scholars and activists in Canada.
CALL FOR PAPERS: The primary purpose of this conference is to explore
race-making, anti-racism, decolonization and the state. We encourage
papers and panels that take an interlocking analysis with class,
gender, sexuality and disabilities. Topics may include but are not
limited to: the role of the state in producing racial classifications,
hierarchies and imaginaries; racial projects including colonialism,
indigenous dispossession, slavery and internments; 9/11, violence and
the war on terrorism; state inventions of 'black sites' of rendition
and torture as well as routinized practices such as photographing,
fingerprinting, and surveillance of racial others; race in immigration
and refugee policies, detention centres and
similar securitized initiatives; the political economy of race in a
neoliberal era; science, genetics and race; skin, body and identity;
race, fantasy and desire; comedy, satire and race; the evasion and
even erasure of race from many disciplinary efforts to understand the
constitution of advanced liberal states and markets; colonial
encounters and racism that informed dominant relations between
indigenous peoples and white settler societies; and that think through
anti-racisms, anti-colonialism, decolonization and social justice in
theory, policy and practice.
HOW TO SUBMIT A PROPOSAL: The R.A.C.E. 2010 conference organizer is
Dr. Malinda S. Smith, Political Science Department, University of
Alberta. Please send a 300 words abstract in Word or RTF with title,
keywords, institutional affiliation and contact to
(race.edmonton /at/ gmail.com) and include a 150 words Bio locating your work
in critical race /anti-colonial scholarship by 30 March 2010 to:
Dr. Malinda S Smith
2010 R.A.C.E. Conference Organizer
University of Alberta
Telephone: 780.492.5380 / Fax: 780.492.2580
Email: (RACE.Edmonton /at/ gmail.com)
Web site: http://www.criticalraceconference.arts.ualberta.ca/
