Conference: Critical Ethnic Studies and the Future of Genocide: Settler Colonialism/Heteropatriarchy/White Supremacy

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

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·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
• Ethnic studies and un-disciplinarity
• 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 and its 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
All conference participants will need to register at: http://www.ethnicstudies.ucr.edu/