A Critical Symposium Bringing Together Activists, Academics, and Artists

Sessions:

• Anti-Racism and Multiculturalism: Transforming Multiculturalism from Within?
  
• Cultural Accommodation, Structural Racism and Material Inequalities
  
• Migration, Citizenship, and Borders
  
• Anti-Colonialism and Aboriginal Peoples
  
•  International Interventions, National Imaginaries, and Security
  

Confirmed speakers:

• Nouman Ashraf
• Natasha Bakht
  
• Andrew Baldwin
  
• Himani Bannerji
  
• George Elliot Clarke
  
• Glen Coulthard
  
• Caroline Desbiens
• Grace-Edward Galabuzi
  
• D. Memee Lavell-Harvard
  
• Nandita Sharma
  
• Rinaldo Walcott
  
• Margaret Walton-Roberts
  

Some framing questions:

• Does official multiculturalism, which adopts a generalized rhetoric of difference and diversity, effectively serve to mask the continued salience of race and racism in the lives of many Canadians?
  
  
• How does the cultural fetishism of multiculturalism de-politicize difference and obscure material inequalities while masking the mechanisms that produce cultural difference in the first place?
  
  
• Can multiculturalism address structural and legal inequalities to which undocumented workers, migrant labourers, trafficked women, and others from the global South are subject once they enter Canada?
  
  
• Does a generalized language of multiculturalism work to marginalize and diminish the particular claims and histories of Aboriginal Peoples?
  
  
• What role do multicultural discourses play in differentiating Aboriginal peoples from "Canadians"? How has "aboriginal identity" been organized in opposition to Canadian identity through multicultural discourses and state practices? What role does/has/might this play in envisioning ancestral territories and homelands as undifferentiated national space?
  
  
• How are stories and myths about multiculturalism deployed to strategic ends?
  
  
• How does Canadian multiculturalism as a national imaginary shape Canada's actions abroad?
  
  

Saturday evening literary event featuring Diaspora Dialogues writers

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