Critical Ethnic Studies and the Future of Genocide: Settler Colonialism/Heteropatriarchy/White Supremacy
A Major Conference
March 10-12, 2011 (NOT 2010)
University of California, Riverside
Plenary Speakers:
Jacqui Alexander • Keith Camacho • Cathy Cohen • Glen Coulthard • Angela Davis • Gina
Dent • Vicente Diaz
Roderick Ferguson • Ruth Wilson Gilmore • Gayatri Gopinath • Avery Gordon • Herman
Gray • Judith Halberstam
Sora Han • Cheryl Harris • David Lloyd • Lisa Lowe • Wahneema Lubiano • Manning Marable
• Fred Moten
José Muñoz • Nadine Naber • Hiram Pérez • Michelle Raheja • Dylan Rodríguez • David
Roediger • Luana Ross
Josie Saldaña-Portillo • Sarita See • Ella Shohat • Denise da Silva • Audra Simpson
• Nikhil Singh • Andrea Smith
Neferti Tadiar • João Costa Vargas • Waziyatawin
CALL FOR PAPERS
Ethnic studies scholarship has laid the crucial foundation for analyzing the intersections
of racism, colonialism, immigration, and slavery within the context of the United
States. Yet it has become clear that ethnic studies paradigms have become entrapped
within, and sometimes indistinguishable from, the discourse and mandate of liberal
multiculturalism, which relies on a politics of identity representation diluted and
domesticated by nation-building and capitalist imperatives. Interrogating the strictures
in which ethnic studies finds itself today, this conference calls for the development
of critical ethnic studies. Far from advocating the peremptory dismissal of identity,
this conference seeks to structure inquiry around the logics of white supremacy, settler
colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy in order to expand the scope of ethnic
studies. An interdisciplinary or even un-disciplinary formation, critical ethnic studies
engages with the logics that structure society in its entirety.
As ethnic studies has become more legitimized within the academy, it has frequently
done so by distancing itself from the very social movements that helped to launch
the field in the first place. Irrefutable as the evidence is of the university's enmeshment
with governmental and corporate structures, the trend in ethnic studies has been to
neutralize the university rather than to interrogate it as a site that transforms
ideas into ideology. While this conference does not propose to romanticize these movements
or to prescribe a specific relationship that academics should have with them, we seek
to call into question the emphasis on professionalization within ethnic studies and
the concomitant refusal to interrogate the politics of the academic industrial complex
or to engage with larger movements for social transformation.
We invite panel and individual paper submissions on a wide range of topics that may
include but are not limited to the following:
• Settler colonialism and white supremacy
• Critical genocide studies
• Queering ethnic studies
• Heteropatriarchy
• Race, colonialism, and capitalism
• Professionalization, praxis, and the academic industrial complex
• Decolonization and empire
• Social movements and activism
• Multiculturalism and colorblindness
• Critical race studies
• Liberationist epistemologies
• Critical ethnic studies, un-disciplinarity, and relationship to other fields
We encourage submissions of traditional academic conference paper and panel formats,
as well as alternative, creative, collaborative, and site-specific presentations,
workshops, roundtables, etc., from academics, independent scholars, artists, cultural
producers, activists, community workers, and others.
Please submit individual paper abstracts (250 words) along with a 1-page CV that includes
contact information. If submitting a panel proposal, a panel abstract (250 words)
should also be included.
Deadline for submissions: June 1, 2010
Email submissions to: criticalethnicstudies@gmail.com
Conference participants/attendees need to register at: http://www.ethnicstudies.ucr.edu/
--
Laura Briggs
Head, Department of Gender and Women's Studies
University of Arizona
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lbriggs
(520) 621-7338
(520) 621-1533 (fax)