Deconstructing Empire II
Race, Migration & Resistance to Empire
Abstracts
Session 1 – Art and Empire
Panel A – Politics of Representation
To All Appearances a Refuge: Examining the D’Arcy Island Lazaretto through Paul Ching Lee and Marilyn Bowering
Kim Shortreed-Webb
My paper examines the D’Arcy Island lazaretto as a site of literary interest for Paul Ching Lee in his poem, “Refuge: Cordova Bay,” and for Marilyn Bowering in her novel, To All Appearances a Lady. Through Lee and Bowering I explore Canada’s political ambivalence toward Chinese immigration, especially as these sentiments change from an historical to modern context. Between 1894 and 1924 D’Arcy Island became a leper colony, or lazaretto, for nearly fifty men—nearly all were of Chinese descent. Many questions remain with respect to the finer motivations for its creation. My paper offers possible answers to the following questions:
1. What sociopolitical messages did the creation of the lazaretto send to Victoria’s Chinese community?
2. As a Chinese-born Canadian, can Paul Ching Lee offer a more “authentic” literary examination of D’Arcy Island than Marilyn Bowering, a Canadian-born European? Are such comparisons valid?
3. How do Lee and Bowering attempt to reconcile racist political and cultural disparities, especially between European and Chinese immigrants? What can be learned from their inquiries?
In offering possible answers to these questions I show some changes and constants in Canada’s approach to pluralism over time.
State Control and Japanese War Paintings in the Post-War Era
Asato Ikeda
The paper will examine the debates surrounding the repatriation of Japanese war paintings (sensō-ga)—the paintings commissioned by the Imperial Japanese army during WWII—as a discourse that defined socio-political issues concerning sensō-ga that affect their display to this day.In 1970, 153 sensō-ga were returned on indefinite loan to the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. However, the idea of exhibiting sensō-ga by themselves has been considered as taboo, and the museum decided to display only a few war paintings in its permanent exhibition. This prompted a dispute over how to deal with sensō-ga; a few art critics claimed that war paintings were the most extreme manifestation of the state intervention in art that characterized Japanese modern art. The returned sensō-ga accommodated in the national institution, not being accessible to the public, are indicative of continuing state control in the post-war period.
By exploring arguments made in the 70’s, I will examine the reasons why all 153 sensō-ga have not been exhibited. I will argue that as long as the state controls what is presented to the public, the socio-political paradigm in which sensō-ga were created continues to exist.
Some Kind of Canadian Joke: Assessing the Cultural Impact of Heritage Minutes
Corinne Gilroy
“Dr. Penfield, I smell burnt toast!”
“But I’m sure it means the houses, the village.”
“Both of you know I cannot read a word.”
In the small Maritime town where I went to school, the rapidfire quotation of Canadian Heritage Minutes was a favourite party game. Uproarious laughter often resulted from just one well-timed line and the round of quote-duelling that followed. We saw the Minutes as a benign cultural enterprise; poking fun at them was a way to prove to ourselves that while growing up, we had paid attention.
Sadly, there was so much we did not know about this particular cultural institution. We had no idea that the infamous CRB– producer of the Minutes– is a private philanthropic organization run on the wealth of billionaire Charles Bronfman, nor that networks use the minutes to pad their Canadian Content requirements.
There is a definite polarization within the small amount of scholarly work that has been completed on the Minutes; researchers either condemn them for their polished historical glossing, or celebrate them for their ability to seductively educate. In either case, the fact that the Minutes have a cultural weight all their own– something quite beyond the control of their creators– is carefully ignored.
Panel B – Landscapes and Entanglements
Relocating Landscape: Transnational Identities in the Work of Jin-me Yoon.
Nicole Neufield
The artistic practice of Jin-me Yoon (re)imagines the sites and structures of nations which she activates with translocal practices to problematize identity as bound by territorial constructs. In her works, The Dreaming Collective Knows No History (2006) and between departure and arrival (1996-1997), Yoon confronts Canadian articulations of national identity situated in the historically privileged constructs of place and landscape. The Dreaming Knows No History is a video installation that captures the performative movement of Yoon’s body crawling from the United States Embassy to the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, Korea. This work explores the post-memory of Korea’s colonial history and articulates current, post-9/11 racial politics through the movements of her body. between departure and arrival represents two places, Seoul, Korea and Vancouver, Canada, exploring the intersection of national narratives within the personal memories of a translocal identity. Discussion of these two works will provide a framework to examine the trajectory of Yoon’s (re)negotiation of imagined communities defined by geography. The articulations of the body, imbued with memory, engage multiple geographically specific locations as a means of expressing identity and questioning national territoriality.
Complicated Entanglements: Cultural Race Politics in Canada
Caroline Vanderloo
Responding to the rise of the Reform Party in western Canada and the scathing criticisms received by Multiculturalism from both the political left and right between 1988 and 1995, cultural race politics emerged to challenge systemic exclusions experienced by artists of colour within Canadian arts institutions and galleries. These artists, curators and critics of colour confronted the inequitable access they experienced to the means of artistic development, production, representation and dissemination. This paper will examine some of the exhibitions and symposia that worked to insert discourses of race, identity and equity into the fabric of Canadian art, and will also offer several hypotheses about why they eventually declined in the mid-1990s. The necessity of foregrounding the social construction of race as a fundamental term within the politics of difference arises out of Canadian multiculturalism’s tendency to replace it with the depoliticizing terms ‘cultural’ and ‘ethnic difference.’ Recognizing the heightened relevance of this discussion in the current post-9/11 context, this paper begins to rethink the Canadian national imaginary by employing the tools provided by this history of cultural race politics combined with contemporary theories of cultural citizenship and transnationalism, respectively postulated by Roy Miki and Ien Ang.
Panel C – Theory and Empire
The Blind-Spot of Kantian Hospitality
Jen Vermilyea and Jen Bagelman
Kant’s ‘enlightening’ project of hospitality – upon which the current state system pivots - paradoxically leaves us with the most violent of blind-spots. His hospitality sheds light on a universal humanity only by eclipsing and rendering speechless a multitude of lives outside the state, particularly the refugee. Here we draw upon Giorgio Agamben to ask: If the refugee is simply reduced to speechless bare life, where is political agency for this figure? Abas Amini – an Iranian seeking asylum in the United Kingdom – is important in considering this question. By sewing his eyes, ears and mouth shut Amini subverted speechlessness into a political voice thereby viscerally embodying Derrida’s assertion that “Keeping silent is already a modality of possible speaking” (Derrida, 2000: 135). Although the refugee appears powerless, it is precisely through transforming his speechlessness and blindness into a form of political agency that the absences of hospitality can be brought into critical visibility.
Diasporic weavings: Mapping the imaginaries and entanglements of identifications
Serena Thomas
As the conceptual and spatial boundaries of the European Union create a ‘fortress’ of exclusion and containment, nation states play a key role in the regulation of bodies that do not belong. Of late, France’s ambiguous immigration and citizenship policies, treatment of immigrants of color, and production of complicated notions of Frenchness in discourses about the European Union have resulted in tumultuous politics. I am interested in how these global and national politics are localized, negotiated and understood through the identities and lived meanings given to them by the West African ‘Sans-Papiers’ community in the Chateau D’eau locale of Paris. Through an ethnographic study of the space of a hair salon/barber shop among this community of Chateau D’eau, I consider the ways in which identities, resistance, and a sense of belonging and home are fashioned within a community inspired space; through: the maintenance of native languages and cultural expressions, the building of a sense of community, engagement in informal economic practices, and non-verbal circuits of meaning. In this regard I ask: How does the very act of fashioning a sense of belonging and home within this space constitute resistance against systems of Empire? How do the subjective dreams and yearnings of those who constitute this very space, which, “…emerge at the charged border between official politics of the state and the politics of dreams and desires” (Stewart 2000), further represent resistance to hegemonic ways of knowing and being? What is it about the space of the hair salon that allows for this fashioning to occur? And finally, in what ways does the salon become a ‘safe’ space or refuge from external experiences of lived everyday trauma and violence, while at the same moment reinforcing and reproducing this trauma through hegemonic discourses of authenticity and success?
“‘The right of the stronger’: Japanese-Canadian Citizenship and the Politics of Race”
Tod Duncan
In his ‘Society Must be Defended’, Foucault traces the development of a ‘historico-political discourse’ which he refers to as ‘race struggle’. Eventually manifesting itself in state-sanctioned racism, Foucault articulates ‘race struggle’ as a move from the need to protect ourselves from society, to the need to protect society from others. Near the root of his genealogy we find Boulainvilliers, the first French translator of Spinoza. Of no small import, Boulainvilliers’ thinking about struggle can be similarly traced back to Spinoza, and in particular to a theme which permeates both his Ethics and his Theologico-Political Treatise: “the right of the individual is co-extensive with its determinate power.” The latter is at once a positive and negative thesis insofar as it simultaneously accounts for the subversive potential of social struggle and the justification of illegitimate authority. This essay will use the positive and negative attributes of Spinoza’s thesis to frame an analysis of an oft-forgotten point in Canadian history as a possible example of ‘race struggle’: the WWII internment of Japanese-Canadians. My reading will not only outline the right of the federal government to order the internment Japanese-Canadians on account of the power residing in its monopoly on the use of force. But also, it will locate the right of Japanese-Canadians’ procurement of citizenship in 1949 in the power of their actual socio-economic role. In so doing, this paper will articulate the need to see past ‘race struggle’ as a product of ideological obfuscation, and point to the need for right and power to be founded in the actuality of social collectivities and their constant struggle to be realised as such.
Panel D – Global/Local Citizens
The Mexican Tortilla Crisis: Challenging Globalization and the Appropriation of Corn as a Fuel Source
Michael Rio
When the Spanish conquistadors first encountered the Aztecs, they were surprised to find that farmers grew squash, beans, and corn together on a single mound of earth; on intricate terraces carved out of the hillsides; and on floating gardens, or chinampas, in the swamps and canals that surrounded Tenochtitlan.
But the European practice of planting single, high yielding crops, soon displaced many of these indigenous farming techniques.
Corn, for much of the New World, was considered a sacred food source, while Europeans, for the most part, insisted that corn be treated as a commodity, and grown on a large scale for wide distribution and profit.
What happens when this food source is further displaced, and becomes categorized primarily as a fuel rather than as a food?
Without understanding how we see these things in the world, and the ways in which these things are seen by others, our categorial mistakes may result in adverse consequences for those who have come to understand the world in different ways. Corn serves as but a single example to the problematic nature of approaching the world as an object ordered by any one particular discourse, especially in the context of conquest, colonialism, and globalization.
I will examine how empire manipulates our perception of the world to the exclusion of others.
No Need for Greed: A ‘Middle Way’ Approach to Consumerism
Jeff Ralph
Our current rate of consumption is unsustainable. We need an approach that is sustainable. Ideas from a variety of disciplines have been put forth on this subject. In Buddhist philosophy there are various works and corresponding ideas that recommend limiting consumptive patterns and promote a sustainable society. This paper looks at the ways in which we are “sold” our desire to consume, and how our true needs are replaced by wants or false needs. Related Buddhist ideas of ignorance, interconnectedness, and desire (chanda and tanha), are examined. A “Middle Way” solution that features mindful evaluation and a consumptive equilibrium will be proposed as an antidote to our current practice of mindless overconsumption.
Shifting Citizenship: Radical social movements and global/local citizenship in Canada
David Newberry
Drawing on the seeds of work I have been doing for several years, this paper explores the developing ‘local’ and ‘global’ aspects of citizenship and nationalism through the lens of local, radical, anti-poverty social movements.
The goal is to analyze the work being done by these social movements while suggesting that our traditional conceptions of citizenship and nationalism, which are historically rooted in imperial practices, cannot explain the anti-poverty and often anti-imperial work of these organizations. Examples used include the profoundly global/local organization Food Not Bombs, as well as the more spatially localized work of Vancouver’s Anti-Poverty Committee and Ontario’s Common Front groups. To this end, the paper explores the origins of our contemporary understandings of citizenship and nationhood, and demonstrates how some global/local social movements are challenging the imperial origins of these concepts. Links are made to the apparently diminishing role of the state in public life and the increasingly ‘glocalized’ nature of neoliberal systems of international organization.
The paper draws on the scholarly work of recent thinkers such as Derek Heater, Warren Magnusson, Benedict Anderson, and Richard Day, as well as the various publications (books, documentaries, press releases) of the social movements studied.
Session 2 – Imperialism, Rights and Law
Panel A – Imperialism and Migration
Intervention, Imperialism and International Law: Intersections of Power
Rhea Nadine Wilson
International politics, traditionally conceived of as the domain of sovereign territorial states, is today troubled by the question of when it is legitimate – even absolutely necessary – to intervene in a sovereign state in order to protect human rights. This paper considers the way in which “humanitarian” interventions function to establish, maintain and perpetuate imperial power relations. Starting from a discussion of how sovereignty and international law have combined throughout history to legitimize imperial intervention, the paper asks how we can understand intervention and imperialism in a decolonized world. I focus on the model of international intervention put forth in the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty’s document The Responsibility to Protect (2001) in order to demonstrate that both military and non-military forms of intervention may be understood as imperial. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of governmentality, I argue that contemporary international intervention does not function by establishing territorial rule but by governing the conduct of populations in accordance with specific models of development and progress. I conclude that such interventions privilege Western conceptions of the individual and of social/political organization and that they ultimately serve to reinforce imperial patterns of domination and exploitation.
Deconstructing Empire: The Emancipation of Off-Reserve Aboriginal Peoples through Constitutional Change
Ron George
Much has been written about the deplorable living conditions on Canada’s Indian reserves. However, seventy percent of Canada’s Aboriginal populations living off-reserve receive scant recognition by media, governments and academia. Pre-1985 Indian Act enfranchisement provisions caused thousands to be stripped of their Indian status and to be forcibly removed from their communities, culture, language and extended families. This relocation, tantamount to removal to a foreign country, is no less traumatic. Canada provides off-reserve Aboriginal populations with less than five cents for every dollar provided immigrants for settlement and transition and ironically, Aboriginals fortunate enough to be employed pay taxes for this disparity. This paper will illustrate how South African apartheid—a practice of Empire– was modeled after Canada’s Indian policy and make a case for how apartheid still exists in Canada, entrenched within the constitution and reinforced through off reserve Aboriginal policy vacuums at the federal, provincial and municipal level. Finally, I will argue that constitutional recognition of the inherent right for ALL Aboriginal peoples to govern themselves wherever they live as a third order of government, as unanimously agreed by the 1992 Charlottetown Accord, should be revisited to resolve this fiduciary ambiguity toward this Aboriginal taxpaying population.
Panel B – Race and Social (In)Justice
Sebastián Gil-Riaño
The aim of my paper is to understand the controversies surrounding the concept of race in the formative years of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organixation). More specifically, I will look at the claims made in the 1950 and 1951 UNESCO Statements on Race and see how they shaped UNESCO’s social science projects in 1950s and 60s. The Statements on Race generally highlighted the biological unity of the human species and downplayed the scientific benefit of the concept of race; instead of ‘races’ human populations should be grouped into ‘ethnic groups’, which do not say anything about biological differences. In my analysis, I will take seriously the notion that scientific discourses about human beings do not just represent humans as objects of study; they play an active role in the constitution of different kinds of subjects. From this perspective, the dismantling of the concept of ‘race’ and the introduction of the term ‘ethnic groups’ represents an attempt to create new kinds of human subjects. My aim is to understand what the consequences of this move are. How did social scientists working under UNESCO see the difference between ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’? How did this re-classification affect the way they conducted their studies? How did this effect the lived experience of those studied?
Guilty Solidarity: Reaching Out from the Belly of the Beast
Sara Koopman
Not in my name! Many in the U.S. struggle against the actions of Empire taken by our government. We struggle out of horror, rage, but often also out of guilt. Our daily comforts and privileges are in real ways built on the oppression of others. What role does guilt play in anti-imperialist political organizing? Can we build a liberatory solidarity across the divides of Empire with guilt in the background? Can we use guilt productively? This work is based on reflections on a lifetime of activism in the U.S. movement in solidarity with Latin America, and specifically the struggle to shut down the School of the Americas (SOA). The SOA is a U.S. Army training school for Latin American military officers, the graduates of which are notorious for committing human rights abuses, many eerily like those at Guantanamo and Abu-Grahib. This work also comes out of collaborative theorizing with other white middle class women in this movement on how we, as activists, relate to our traditional social construction as benevolent helpers. One of the key themes in our discussion was the role and power of guilt as a motivator for solidarity work.
Panel C – Post-Colonial Imperialism
Africa, Liberal Peace and the Production of Empire
Zubairu Wai
In this paper, I propose to interrogate what has now come to be known as the liberal peace project in relation to the African continent. This liberal project is a function of a new and ‘aggressive’ Northern attitude towards the South. It is a hegemonic “one size fits all” Northern policy panacea for Southern problems, aggressively pursued through the constitution of mechanisms and regimes of intervention that seek to transform and reorder societies in the South affected by incidents of insecurity, conflict, and what is regarded as political, social and economic failures. The dominant views in scholarly, media and policy making circles in the North is that insecurity, seen as permanent features of the social and political milieu of societies in the South, is caused by dysfunctional political and social processes and practises endogenous to these societies, pathologies that reproduce and reinforce poverty, underdevelopment, corruption, authoritarianism and bad governance. These incidents (especially conflicts, societal breakdown, political and economic failures) are believed to create “zones of lawlessness open to exploitation by criminals and terrorists” (DFID 2004: iii), and are seen as having direct implications for security in the North. As a corrective, the argument goes, policy must aim at preventing or controlling these incidents by seeking to reorder and transform the Southern societies plagued by these problems. However, such reordering and transformation processes should only be informed by specific understandings of political and social purpose: neoliberalism and its impulse to impose a liberal peace on the world.
Typically depicted in the dominant contemporary narratives as a continent in “crises”, Africa is represented in Western liberal circles as needing the redemptive power of the West to “save” the continent from itself. This perspective which has become the dominant discourse informing Western policy interventions and approaches to the continent has made Africa a major site for the articulation and imposition of the liberal peace agenda. In this paper, I propose a critique of this liberal project which I interpret as an ideological and neo-imperialist posture rooted in an essentially local (Western) worldview that has been falsely championed as universal human destiny. I argue that this neo-imperialist project is an aggressive attempt to “recolonise” the former colonial world through a complex set of socio-political, economic and cultural arrangements and policy interventions; processes that are aimed at radically restructuring societies in the South along the lines dictated by neoliberalism and its market capitalist logic. It also seeks to reorder the cultural, economic, political structures and spaces of the South, in ways similar to colonial times, (with the difference being perhaps, in large parts, the absence of direct territorial occupation and political control of these societies). I interpret these arrangements as a reformulation of the old civilisational discourses and interventions that sought to “civilise” Africans and other people in the South, processes through which nineteenth century colonialism was legitimated.
In order to understand how this neo-imperialist project operates and is constituted, I seek to propose an examination of the ways in which the policies, practises and narratives of interventions that produce liberal peace are formulated. I offer the speculation that the discourses and modalities of the liberal peace project thrive on crises; and contends that the constitutive moment of contemporary imperialism is the simultaneous generation as well as the management of crises in the South. What may appear as “altruistic” Western interventions in Southern ‘trouble spots’ are in fact processes and practises that simultaneously help in reproducing and reinforcing the neo-imperialist agenda. Like most forms of imperialistic control and domination, the liberal peace project relies on the production of stylised accounts, specific representations of Southern phenomena, and the constitution of regimes of truth and knowledge which foreground specific readings, interpretations and conflation of the narratives on and about Southern social and political formations and realities – war, poverty, underdevelopment, insecurity, social breakdown, economic stagnation and political crisis. Through these narratives and interventions, the neo-imperialist project is constituted and legitimated.
Deconstructing Empire: A discursive task
Banyongen Elie Serge
Using the word ‘empire’ in international relations nowadays might sound strange, particularly in view of the end of colonialism and the new independence of the former colonies. Paradoxically, the concept gains importance within political analysis after the falling of the Berlin Wall and with it, the Soviet empire. Some political analysts conclude that this time represents the end of the world. (Fukuyama, 1992) At once, a fear of dictatorship from the only remaining super power, the United States of America, brings the idea of empire along with it.
To understand the empire of current times, (Odom & Dujarric, 2004, Ferguson, 2004) it is important to draw a distinction between the concept of empire, imperialism, and influence. (Mann, 2003) By doing so, we discover that in scanning a new configuration, we must analyze the power relations between countries and go beyond Wallerstein’s division. It has come out that a Liberal ideology is ruling the world with the concept of globalization. According to Lukes, (Steven Lukes, 1974) there are three dimensions when it comes to analyzing power: behavioral power, where one person has the strength to make another person change their attitudes; structural power, where one person can change rules and laws as another person is evolving; and discursive power, where one person possesses the force to manage and order what another person will think. (Agamben, 1997; Hardt and Negri, 2004)
The aim of this paper is to illustrate that, even though the new Liberal empire grasps the behavioral, and the structural power, it no longer holds the discursive power. The Liberal empire’s monopoly of thought was lost many years ago and this loss inspires the world with a hope to fight against it.
Session 3 – Migration, Movement and Legal Limits
Panel A – Refugees and Movement
Looking Back, Moving Forward: The History and Future of Refugee Protection
Shauna Labman
The origins of refugee protection are commonly associated with the aftermath of the Second World War and the huge outpouring of refugees that it sparked. The 1951 Refugee Convention, however, was in fact a revision and consolidation of previous international agreements relating to the status of refugees. In their own ways, all of the Convention’s predecessors responded to the refugee crises by facilitating the movement of refugees to safe states. With the 1951 Convention, in contrast, non-refoulement – the promise not to send people back to persecution – has come to be considered the core of refugee protection.
While resettlement is indeed part of many countries’ current refugee schemes, it is voluntary, and therefore secondary, to the international legal obligation of non-refoulement. In a period when the fear of terror translates into a fear of foreigners and borders are turning into barriers, it is becoming increasingly difficult for refugees to reach safe states and trigger the legal obligation of non-refoulement. This paper therefore looks back to the refugee agreements made during the first half of the twentieth-century to argue that the international regime of refugee protection is as much about bringing refugees to safety as refusing to send them back to danger.
The Bounds of Ethical COnduct for Lawyers representing illegal migrants in Canada
Sean Stynes
This paper seeks to deconstruct how we conceptualize illegal migration and legal ethics, two topics that are largely misunderstood and understudied in Canada. Focusing on the situation of those facing imminent deportation but awaiting a decision on an outstanding ‘humanitarian and compassionate’ permanent residence application, this paper asks if it is ever appropriate for a lawyer to advise clients to disobey a removal order, to work illegally, to get married or to move into a local Church basement. What are the bounds of ethical conduct for immigration lawyers helping illegal migrants avoid deportation and regularize their status in Canada? These are questions prominent legal ethics scholar, David Luban so eloquently captures with the question, ‘can the good lawyer be a bad person?’Critically examining how we define illegal migration and whether legal ethics ought to engage legal or ethical modes of reasoning, this paper proposes an ethical methodology for lawyers halfway between law and ethics, where the bounds of ethical conduct are defined by the underlying merits of the case allowing for ‘ethical discretion in lawyering’. In this way, lawyers may ethically operate within a legal system that ascribes ‘status’ to different ‘classes’ of people akin to birthright ‘feudal privilege’ but also respecting the rule of law.
Panel B – Education and/as Resistance
UNSETTLED: Interactive Theatre and Dialogue about Internationalization
Catherine Etmanski
The discourse of ‘internationalization’ is increasingly prevalent in post-secondary institutions in Canada and around the world. Beyond the active recruitment of international students, however, what does ‘internationalization’ really mean?
From September to November 2006, seven UVic grad students came together to explore this question. Drawing from our experiences as students in an ‘internationalized’ University setting, we presented our findings to the public in the form of a poem and three short interactive plays entitled, UNSETTLED.
This performance sparks dialogue about how the forces of globalization and internationalization affect us all in our every day settings and intends to be unsettling to viewers. Through acknowledging the subtleties of racism in Canada, we can truly work toward the desire for respect that is central to our Multiculturalism Act.
Holism in Education: Indigenous ways of teaching and learning
Vivian Leik
What is considered knowledge and how is this transmitted? Current educational systems in Canada focus on a Euro-Western approaches to teaching and learning that derive knowledge systems from the scientific method and often disconnected, fragmented viewpoints. Furthermore, within the academy a hierarchy of knowledge systems has been established that devalues or disregards Indigenous knowledges. While Indigenous perspectives have been historically marginalized, there are initiatives that are bridging Indigenous knowledges, pedagogies and cultures into university classrooms. The “Thunderbird/Whale Protection and Welcoming Pole: Teaching and Learning in an Indigenous World” was such a course that introduced concepts, pedagogical practices and epistemological understandings of local First Nations communities to university students through the carving of a traditional house pole. Students were immersed in carving, ceremony, teachings and traditional practices that demonstrated another approach to educational teaching and learning. The students were also involved in documenting the process of the course through video, website design, writing and educational forums. The inclusion of community, Elders, and faculty members strengthened this process and provided a holistic and experiential approach to education rarely seen within the academy. While raising awareness of Indigenous knowledges and pedagogical approaches this course transformed how students looked at teaching and learning and facilitated another avenue for disseminating different forms of information. Through the documentation of such initiatives, we are able to re-evaluate Indigenous knowledge systems and move away from the false hierarchy of knowledge back towards plurality.
Empire in a textbook: What we can learn from international students’ (de)construction of meaning in science
Ryan Deschambault
Science textbooks are lexically dense and include a variety of visual inscriptions meant to serve as facilitative aids for students’ comprehension. For this reason, much of the professional literature concerned with ESL learners portrays them as being at-risk of marginalization where achievement in science is concerned for literacy-related reasons. This literature leaves the impression that science textbooks are a type of ‘empire’ from which meaning is not easily constructed by ESL learners. Based on findings from a study which investigated ten middle school learners’ lexical inferencing processes during a science reading task, this presentation will discuss the range of reading moves learners made in their attempts to construct meaning from their science textbooks. At the same time, the learners were deconstructed meaning in their science textbooks, insofar as their reading highlight some of the assumptions made by the textbook. These findings have potential theoretical implications for the field of second language research and for content area reading research, insofar as they highlight the complexity of the relationship between visual inscriptions, vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprehension. On a more practical level, these findings could be of potential importance for the development of content area reading pedagogy and science textbook design.
Panel C – Migrants through History
“Killing birds… man for man…” – Canada’s response to Great Britain’s Polish Resettlement Act, 1946/47
Helen Bajorek MacDonald
After the Second World War, Canada identified an immediate need for about 44,000 workers in mining, lumber, agriculture, and domestic work. A Senate Standing Committee on Immigration and Labour convened to evaluate options, including culling workers from among the masses of persons displaced by the war.
In Great Britain, about 200,000 demobilized Polish ex-soldiers refused to return to their homeland, now under Soviet Communist rule. Canada was asked for assistance with the Polish problem.
A memorandum to Prime Minister Mackenzie King from a senior official suggested Canada take some of the Poles, “man for man”, in exchange for 4,500 German prisoners of war being returned to Great Britain.
The exchange of Polish ex-soldiers for German POWs set the precedent for all post-war immigration to Canada.
What conditions were placed on the Poles for acceptance into Canada? How were they selected and then distributed across the country? What were the responses of Canadians? What were the early experiences of the Poles [e.g., discrimination]? What did Canadian officials learn from this mass migration? What has become of this diaspora?
This paper will be a historiographical consideration of displacement, migration, and resettlement of Poles after WWII, and subsequent outcomes.
Agra Baroti-Gheorghe
In the late 90’s, tens of thousands of Roma (Gypsies) from Eastern and Central Europe choose to emigrate to Canada, hoping to escape oppression and discrimination. In a multicultural world characterized by fluid movement of populations and the emergence of large diasporas in Canada and elsewhere, the Roma migration is not a new phenomenon. Their exodus started more than 1000 years ago and it is far from having spent itself. Arguably, no other displaced community has suffered and has had so little power in its attempts to simply live alongside mainstream national populations. The plight of the Roma refugees in Toronto is yet another episode in this struggle for equity and search for human dignity.The paper will examine the situation of Roma populations in Eastern and Central Europe, with a focus on school segregation and language achievement as an empowering force in its connection with the human spirit. This situation will be contrasted to the struggle against hate and prejudice, of the Hungarian and Czech Roma that fled to Canada in the 1990’s.In conclusion, the importance of developing a message to end prejudice and discrimination is emphasized, as everyone is affected by this schism between Roma and non-Roma.
“Enclaved Empire: Shifting national identity and the diehard residuals of national imagination of the old regime”
Karl Ren-Hung Wu
One major advancement in the studies of empire and imperial practice at our time is what Michael Hardt called ‘the dialectics of colonial sovereignty’ inspired by Hegelian dialectic thinking regarding the master/slave inter-dependent relationships. This is to say, where there is an empire, there must be a subject nation—be it imposed by force or self-subalternized as discussed by Frantz Fanon. Another facet to this understanding of the dynamics of empire is that: the dyad relationship between the colonizer and the colonized can be reversed under certain historical conjunctures such as those triggered by globalization, war, or domestic contentious politics.
This paper will discuss Taiwan’s recent nationalist movements as examples to explicate on this intriguing process of imperial practice of authoritarian regime which impregnated itself with the seeds to destruction and reversal countercharge from the colonized society. The ‘National Government’ retreated from mainland China in 1949 implemented quasi-colonial policies over Taiwan for 50 years. The harsh oppression and discriminating policies over indigenous society finally led to a series of nationalist movements to confront the unjustifiable rule of the National Government. Moreover, after the power shift in the late 1990s when indigenous society regained political autonomy from this exogenous regime, the colonialist ideology regarding national identity did not simply fade away. This long-drawn influence of colonial power on the political imagination over the ex-colonized society poses an unavoidable question for scholars of contemporary empire regarding the subtler nature of colonial hegemony over the minds of the colonized people which indicates that the engagement with empire is more than struggle for political rights and offices.
Panel D – Imperial Attitudes
Race and Racism to Justify: The First American Imperial Effort in the Philippines (1898-1902)
An American “War Model” For the War in Iraq
Mahshid Mayar
This article is to find the imperial implications of the United States’ first movement abroad during late 19th and early 20th centuries on the “war on terror”. It tries to prove that the American troops were in the Philippines to fulfill their country’s imperial passions, though based on a narrative of “white man’s burden”, and civilizing/Christianizing mission. However, the reality has been to annex it, to make it a base for the US to compete with European Empires, and to provide new markets to the American booming economy of the period. Following a comparison made between this war and the recent “War in Iraq”, not only critical points will get clear about the American way of war, but also a new “war model” would be proposed as the backbone of what Americans call “savage wars of peace”. The “war on terror” has served as a common ground to compare American rising Empire of 1890s to that of the (falling) Empire of the 2000s. Racism, American mission, imperial power, no-hero-war, intention-gap and paradoxical-cause are the key concepts of this article. The conclusion is that American way of war has been shaped into a new model, though based on an old effigy.
Captivation, Colonization, and Civilization: Frederick McKenzie’s Perspective on Imperialism and Korean Resistance, 1904-1920
Darby Cameron
Following the turn of the nineteenth-century, the United States and Britain traded their interest in Korea for Japan’s interest in the Philippines, India, and Burma. These imperial nations needed to justify this political football, a task their journalists took up for the most part. Historian Alexis Dudden argues that “[j]ournalists from countries whose delegates sat at the front of the conference[s] sensationalized the Korean mission and in general agreed with their nation’s representatives about the nonviability of Korea.” Frederick McKenzie, a Canadian war correspondent operating with the Japanese army during the Russo-Japanese War, initially concurred with Dudden’s analysis. However, once he was repositioned as a correspondent on Korean affairs, he began to reveal the sensationalism of “the Korean mission” by divulging how the international community had discredited Korea’s sovereignty and exposing Japan’s “aggressive imperialism.” Journalists like McKenzie are valuable for historical analysis because, as historian Paul Rutherford argues, they can elicit what nations were thinking. Accordingly, this paper displays the evolution of McKenzie’s understanding of Japanese imperialism and Korea. While McKenzie’s opinion of Japanese imperialism changed between 1904 and 1920, and he sensationalized Koreans as “noble savages,” the centrality of the Anglo-American value system and civilization permeated his perception and assessment of Korea.
From Chinese sojourners to Canadian citizens:
How the Sino-Japanese War made Overseas Chinese into Canadian Citizens
Judy Maxwell
Much of the modern world has been astonished by China’s recent economic growth. China’s ascent to major power status has been swift, generating economic opportunities and attracting foreign business and investment. International admiration for China is relatively new. Going back to the mid-1800s, when China was experiencing internal conflict, foreign powers exacted territory and concessions from a weak Chinese Empire. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese men left China, drawn to gold-mining regions, such as British Columbia, in the hopes of making money for their families in the homeland. Canadian laws confined the Asian newcomers geographically, socially and economically. As a consequence, Chinese settlers were relegated to low-paying labouring jobs and a lonely, isolated existence. They were in the demoralizing position of being residents of Canada without full citizenship. It was not until the Asian wars of the 1930s and 1940s — which led to discriminatory laws against Japanese-Canadians — that white Canadians began to re-evaluate their preconceptions and prejudices about the Chinese. The result of this transformed perception was the granting of full citizenship rights to Chinese Canadians in 1947 and the revocation of anti-Asian legislation.
To understand how overseas Chinese gradually came to be regarded as Canadians, I would like to present a brief account of the origins of the Chinese in Canada, the growth of associational support for sojourners in Chinese communities, the reaction of white and Chinese Canadians to Japanese aggression in China and Canada’s involvement in the Second World War, and how the Chinese Canadian war effort galvanized Chinese communities across Canada and created partnerships with white Canadians.
Session 4 – The Policy and Production of Empire
Panel A – (Re)Producing Knowledge
Re-‘Orient’ing History: National Imagination as an Orientalist Project
Shelly Ketchell
In Orientalism, Said (1979) makes a compelling argument that texts in general and representation of the East in particular are highly motivated and thus highly contestable. Discourses which framed the ‘Orient’ in opposition to the ‘Occident’ served to legitimize the colonization of the ‘Orient’ by the Occident. Thus, representation served to simultaneously contain, marginalize and objectify the ‘Orient.’
My goal here is to uncover the ways in which the West created the ‘Other’ in settler societies such as Canada, not through the intense scrutiny and representation of the ‘Other’ as in the discipline of Orientalism, but through the erasure and marginalization of them through the discipline of History. Much like Orientalism, I will argue, the discipline of History is also highly motivated and therefore highly contestable. The power of the colonizer to represent a linear, progressive narrative called ‘History’ has also resulted in the containment, marginalization and objectification of Aboriginal populations and visible minority populations in Canada. Both History and Orientalism were imperialist and colonial projects with the goal of attaining and maintaining power and control over both land and people. However, a comparison will show that what Orientalism accomplished through representation, History did through erasure and marginalization.
Trans/National Identities: Interrogating Identity(ies) and Globalization through the Transnational Feminist Lens
Janel Smith
Transnational feminism provides one lens in which to enter into more robust discussions on globalization. This permits us to begin to investigate and expose some of the specificities of the uneven and unequal effects of various “global” events and practices that dualistic “global-local” binaries and conventional accounts of globalization tend to obscure. By examining “local,” on the ground experiences that are left out of “mainstream” globalization theories, we can begin to create a more complex picture of “global” processes and the means by which these forces (re)constitute the roles and responsibilities of various actors in ways that are often most harmful to women and minorities. This enables an analysis of the diverse articulations of gender; race; ethnicity; nationality; religion; sexuality and class within specific “global” contexts that challenge dualistic categorizations and “global-local” binaries. In this paper I use transnational feminism to interrogate trans/national identity formations in the context of globalization, shifting the analysis away from what is occurring at the “global” level to how certain identities and identity-related stereotypes get (re)constituted and (re)produced within “global-local” interactions.
In order to resist (re)producing a dualistic account of globalization that sets conventional globalization theories and those in transnational feminism against one another and presents transnational feminism as a singular, homogenous and unitary discourse, the paper will first explore the internal debates occurring within transnational feminism. Second, I adopt a transnational feminist lens to explore the factors influencing identity formation in the globalization context that lead to the (re)construction of boundaries that (re)constitute women in traditional, oppressive and stereotypically “female” roles, while simultaneously, also producing identities that challenge dualistic “global-local,” “masculine-feminine” binaries. For the purposes of this paper, four “categories” of identity will be examined to reveal some of the dynamics underlying identity formation in contemporary globalization: (1) Hyper-Masculinisms and the (Re)Feminization of the “Local;” (2) Diasporas; (3) Nationalist Resurgences and Fundamentalisms and (4) Hybridities and Hybridization.
Panel B – Power, Policy and Practice
The Educated Closet: Why Only Some Gay and Lesbian Teachers Are Out
Duane Lecky
Sexual orientation still remains the lost child of the human rights movement. This research project explores why this is so through the voices of public school teachers in one of the safest jurisdictions, British Columbia, Canada. An unusual set of recruitment methods attracted 13 gay and lesbian teachers to tell autobiographical stories about why they are, or are not, out in this part of the empire in 2007. The theme of silence is pervasive and the self opinion of the participants is paramount in their decisions to be out and advocating, or hiding in the closets of our social reproduction, i.e., educational, system.
Regulating Compassion: An Overview of Canada’s Federal Medicinal Cannabis Policy and Practice
Philippe Lucas
In response to a number of court challenges brought forth by Canadian patients who demonstrated that they benefited from the use of medicinal cannabis but remained vulnerable to arrest and persecution as a result of its status as a controlled substance, in 1999 Canada became the second nation in the world to initiate a centralized medicinal cannabis program. Over its six years of existence, this controversial program has been found unconstitutional by a number of courts, and has faced criticism from the medical establishment, law enforcement, as well as the patient/participants themselves. This critical overview examines the three main facets of Health Canada’s medicinal cannabis policy - the Marihuana Medical Access Division; the Canadians Institute of Health Research Medical Marijuana Research Program; and the Prairie Plant Systems cannabis production facility - as well as the nation’s main suppliers of therapeutic cannabis, Canada’s network of unregulated compassion clubs and societies.
Panel C – Bodies and Empire
Bodies and Empire: Migrants and the Canadian Border
Sarah Wiebe
In our contemporary climate of fear and (in)security, disempowered peoples around the world confront various forms of colonialism, domination and discrimination. This paper examines a spatial and geo-political barrier facing marginalized peoples today: the regulation of migrant bodies at the Canadian border. Migrants are not only screened as potential security risks in a traditional militaristic sense, but also presented in Canadian discourse as a threat to economic stability and are consequently screened and surveyed for health concerns. Playing on a fear of the “outsider”, newcomers are screened based on their physical and mental health as part of an assessment upon their likelihood to be contributing and productive members of Canadian society. In this paper, I examine these screening practices from a critical political science approach using Foucault’s theory of biopolitics. I examine this correlation between biopolitics – the governance of life – and migration by focusing on Citizenship and Immigration (CIC) Canada’s policy and legislative discourse, located in various CIC operating policies as well as corresponding Acts and Regulations. I argue that our modern political subjectivity is predicated on the notion that we must be healthy in order to be truly political and to have political voice and agency. In conclusion, this paper suggests that the delocalized, spatialized border exists as a site of Empire, wherein only certain human beings are deemed worthy of citizenship.
“Students for Development” Governance Case Study: Assessing the Health Needs of School-Aged Youth in Trinidad and Tobago
Alison Sum
There has been an increasing trend in childhood obesity and non-communicable diseases in Trinidad and Tobago (T and T), in which globalization plays a large part. The Government of T and T, which is founded upon a British imperialistic structure, is trying to adopt a comprehensive school health approach to address these concerns; however, the existing framework is incongruent with the needs of community members. The objective of this case study was to map out the key health issues that affect school-aged youth, as seen from the perspectives of multiple stakeholders, including policy makers, administrators, teachers and the students, themselves. A PhotoVoice participatory research method was used to engage nine students from three local high schools in producing visual and written meanings of health, as they related to their homes, schools and communities. Several important themes, surrounding educational governance, social justice, western cultural influence and citizenship, emerged from the discussions held during this project. The findings from the PhotoVoice project, and recommendations gathered from interviews and focus groups with Physical Education (PE) teachers, PE curriculum officers and Ministry of Education representatives, contributed to a situational analysis of the multi-level framework that supports children’s health in T and T.
An Analysis of Fatherhood Within Pregnancy Advice Literature For Men
Beth Collins
Pregnancy advice books for fathers are a growing genre within self-help literature. These books speak to issues of contemporary parenthood, gender and liberal governance. The advice within these books presents idealized paternal subject positions, which male readers are encouraged to take up. Through content and discourse analyses of a sample of books from the growing body of literature written for expectant fathers, I explore how male actors are addressed within pregnancy discourses. I contrast the ways that “serious” and “humourous” pregnancy advice literature frame these subject positions and invited men to play particular roles within pregnancy. Based on my findings, I argue that fathers are interpellated into pregnancy discourses in such a way that they are simultaneously subject to responsibilization and invited to govern their pregnant partners.