Summary of Discussion for Sunday April 2, 2006
DIASPORA STUDIES PANNEL
Sunday, April 02, 2006
930am-1130am
Chair, Wambui Mwangi (University of Toronto)
Kachig Toloyan (Wesleyan College)
Ato Quayson (University of Toronto)
Kachig Toloyan
ABSTRACT
PROFESSOR TOLOYAN explained that the previous night he was moved to prepare a
totally new paper than the one he had planned to deliver. This new paper rises from a
certain bemusement he has been feeling about the language used at this conference and in
these studies. His paper treats the terms “dispersion” and “diaspora” and in particular,
the “current tendency of the media to label all kinds of dispersion” as diaspora. “There
is” he explained “an element of terminological fussiness [in the argument]… but it pays
good intellectual dividends.”
Toloyan began with the classical definitions where dispersion refers to “willed migration
or forced exile,” and diaspora, to “generations of survival of distinct community that
maintains contact of the homeland, that believes it shares some identity with the
community there.” This later definition was constraining, said Toloyan, for “it excluded
Indian, Chinese communities and many more.” In the evolution of the terms, it was
decided that, for example, “African Americans were in fact a diaspora.” There developed
an “extension of term to new dispersed communities [that] gathered steam. Now [there
are] three dozen communities where artists, politicians or community elites use these
terms to describe themselves.”
However, argued Toloyan, “do not automatically equate the resulting dispersion to
diasporas.” Diasporicity is “a quality that manifests itself in relations of difference.”
Communities see themselves as different from the communities where they settle, and do
political and social work to sustain those qualities. The less there is a direct persecution
the more is there needed cultural work to sustain the difference. The cultural work is
organized, institutionalized, funded; it is also carried out by artists and other autonomous
individuals.
The dispersion and the people of a particular homeland change over generations -- when
affect is no longer natural, when the dispersed feel little nostalgia for a homeland they do
not know. If a community is sustained (this happens no earlier than a second or third
generation) and the people can no longer feel sameness with the people in the homeland,
then dispersion becomes diaspora. A new identity emerges. The community then
endures as a distinct diaspora as the result of the work of memory, as well as practices of
connection to the homeland.
Summary of Discussion for Sunday April 2, 2006
Toloyan explained, “the concept of identification often replaces the need for a shared,
often invented identity. This is the successful diaspora.” His reason for reviewing these
definitions, he argued, is that “tensions and subtle conflict between diasporas and
homelands not talked about enough” in forums such as this colloquium.
Toloyan’s next concern was with the terminology and concepts in “the border crossing
that is characteristic of diaspora.” He uses the transnational term differently than his
colleagues here. “Trans” once meant “across”; it did not mean “supra-national.” In his
courses, he said, he insists that the terms “Diaspora,” and “Transnationalism,” bleed into
each other, and they are both nested in the term “Globalization.”
Regarding the terms “ethnic community” versus “diaspora” he argued, “an ethnic
community lacks the commitment to maintain contact with the homeland and the identity
of communities elsewhere.” For an example he sited the Italians living in North
America. Individual Italian Americans manifest concern for relatives in homelands, but
these ethnics are “highly unlikely to act consistently to … develop an agenda” for contact
with the homeland. And so the lines shift in response to a complex dynamic.
“Diaspora is a label” he continues, “that has lost a great deal of precision. My own
personal use is an attempt to separate the components of a dispersed community that are
on their way to exist as ethnics.”
Regarding the term “mobility,” Toloyan noted that only a small percentage of the people
in the world are actually mobile migrants. There is a privileging logic of mobility that
has become oddly attached to dissociations with nationalism. In his recent work he’s
argued against the certain diasporic elites who celebrate mobility, but, he argues, the
“consistent celebration of mobility as a virtue” needs to be examined. Assumptions about
movement in terms of globalization attach themselves inappropriately to discussions of
diaspora. He argued, electricity flows between fixed poles of anchored difference; so
diaspora depends on these nodes of difference, that “part of the cultural work that
sustains diasporas. Contemporary transnational diasporas require settled nodes in which
identity production develops.” Hence, he stressed, the importance of locality and place,
the immense tasks diasporas face and carry out locally.
In conclusion, Toloyan argued that earlier diapsoras sustained a discourse about
themselves, but intellectuals and artists are now being displaced by what we call the
scholarly activity of “diaspora studies.” Furthermore, “the category of diaspora is not an
unchanging social given.” Theoretical conceptions, specific terminologies, interests and
intentions, methodologies, these combine to reformulate diasporas. Also diasporas “are
sometimes objects of knowledge, and at others, co-subjects… the object of knowledge in
Area Studies is sometimes a given, and sometimes created.”
The sometimes unacknowledged political commitments of Diaspora Studies must remain
under close scrutiny, Toloyan argued. We must examine our own political commitments
and how they affect our work. There is nothing preordained about the future of diasporas
and diaspora studies, especially as potent, non-academic settings are setting the agenda.
Summary of Discussion for Sunday April 2, 2006
Toloyan closed by saying that he is still “not convinced Diaspora Studies may have no
more in common with Area Studies.”
Ato Quayson
ABSTRACT
Professor Quayson explained the genesis of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational
Studies at the University of Toronto. In 2003, Professor Quayson thought, “the
University of Toronto seemed to me to be missing out on something that I thought should
be fundamental to its developing vision of itself as a cosmopolitan university with
aspirations to being one of the best in the world. And that, simply put, is the cultural
energy of the city of Toronto itself… it seemed to me then that for the university to
properly plug into the amazing synergies that were to me transparently available in the
city would be a crucial first step towards defining its view of itself as a University for the
future.”
Regarding the team taught undergraduate program that has developed he said, “I am
happy to note that the tri-campus initiative pursued by DTS is now being touted as a
model by the university administration and that various other units are giving serious
thought to similar tri-campus delivery… the mere fact of a tri campus course delivery is
opening up amazing new dialogue between faculty, students and community.”
In an anecdote, Quayson explained that his daughter has been reading Sophie’s World,
and she began asking Quayson, “Daddy, who am I.” Quayson muses, her identity is first
and foremost, intersubjective. He says, “her identity is inextricably intertwined with the
identities of all the other people she interacts with. Thus to answer the question ‘who am
I’ also involves answering the question ‘who are these people I interact with’?”
However, those people, “themselves [are] undergoing processes of transformation, [and
so] her provisional answer would have to reflect the transformations of the social world
of which she is a part. The third crucial consideration to her answer is that of place. For
the answer to the question of ‘who am I?’ would necessarily be entangled with those of,
‘what is this place, and how does it affect who I am?’”
Quayson continues, “a discussion of a diasporic imaginary is that ‘place’ is first and last
dialectical. This place is always in some form of dialectical relation to elsewhere; it is
also created out of a relationship to its own past and to the imaginary investments that
press upon its landscape, its urban or rural texture and its overall capacity to provide a
sense of homeliness or un-homeliness.” There is also “no diaspora that does not involve
some story telling,” or the evocation of memory through narrative. Of course this
exercise takes place, no only through stories, but photographs, monuments, and
genealogies. Genealogies repeat the act of difference.
Quayson they stated, “bringing these three components – genealogy, narrative, and
contingency – alongside the first three vectors of identity I mentioned earlier – affect,
place, and social relation – gives us a multi-tiered and variegated set of elements that
Summary of Discussion for Sunday April 2, 2006
might enable us to come to a more complex understanding of the diasporic imaginary.
He outlined “what it means to be a global citizen of a world in flux.” This citizenship is
built upon a “crucial empathy… not merely charity or nostalgia, for the condition of the
diaspora.” This empathy is an ideal of the global citizenship.
Quayson also explained that most diaspora programs focus on one or two particular
groups. The program at the university of Toronto will be shaped to encourage “a crossfertilization of diasporic perspectives which should lead both to a productive set of
insights about similarities and differences among various groups. At the undergraduate
level this is being pursued by making it obligatory for them to study and write about at
least two diasporas.” In the developing graduate studies program, Quayson hopes to
encourage this cross-fertilization by introducing the “requirement that students
demonstrate a firm historical grasp of at least two distinct groups for gaining an MA in
the field.”
Fieldwork will be imperative in this developing program. Quayson explained, “for me
the idea of making fieldwork central to the student experience of diaspora and
transnational studies is undergirded by two basic principles: first is that I want to place
people at the centre of the study of diaspora and transnationalism (what happens when
processes “hit the ground” as Alissa [Trotz] poignantly put it yesterday in referring to the
work of Saskia Sassen; what impact do these processes have on the lives of real people,
and what does it mean for them to be attempting to translate some of these processes into
their daily lives? The paired face of this would of course to see how wider processes are
generated by and dialectically related to the lives of ordinary people).”
DISCUSSION
The discussion session opened up with a contribution from the FLOOR; in terms of the
humanities and the social sciences; are the latter more directly pertinent to public
policies? Our policy makers want to tap into the knowledge that communities have
about their country of origin. “At the same time, our policy makers are concerned, well,
who’s side are they on? The Iranian Canadian , the Jewish Canadian, the Chinese
Canadian… who’s side are they on? Does the government trust them to be Canadian?”
The speaker noted that the divide between “gown and town” continues. The insight
people possess about their country of origin just doesn’t make it into university
curriculums. How can we address these constellations of concerns?
A question came from the FLOOR for ATO QUAYSON. The speaker remarked that
over the last two and a half days, they were frustrated by the lack of linking discussion to
policy at a world and local level. The CTDS in trying to grapple with diaspora issues are
really looking for answers and links with academic community, “but” the speaker went
on, “what I’ve heard in last two and a half days here, is a complete non-interest in the real
world policy aspect of diaspora studies”.
ALYSSA TROTZ suggested that perhaps diaspora studies can take into account the role
of the state. There are, she noted, various scales at which we can be thinking through
Summary of Discussion for Sunday April 2, 2006
these processes. “The role of the state is really important regarding the question of
transnationalism and how the state is reinventing itself. Emphasis on community is
understandable, but the state is really a generative player.” She used the example of the
Indian state inventing categories of diasporic citizens, “offering scholarships to India only
for Indian diaspora subjects.”
She went on to remark that the center needs to think about this question critically. USA,
IMF, CIDA, they are thinking about diaspora in instrumental ways, in terms of
remittances to the liberal economy. What needs to be done, she insisted, is that the state
needs to be taken on, but not in a way that would provide appendages for policies that
treat diasporas as untapped capital. What we must be concerned with, how we intervene
has to be articulated in terms, and be motivated by principles, that these agencies and the
state don’t want to hear.
KHACHIG TOLOLYAN began to respond by saying that these are very rich remarks.
He noted he absolutely agreed that especially after terrorism and immigration debates,
governments will begin to approach diaspora with instrumental interests. TOLOLYAN
remarked that in attending conferences funded by the CIA and the Department of
Homeland Security, a whole other discourse emerges that one must try to engage. “Yes
the state has a growing and important role.” Tololyan went on to suggest that diasporas
possess stateless power, and contrasted this with the powerlessness of diaspora in the
more traditional sense. The diasporic must have an understanding of financial, cultural
even political power, though the state will always remain more powerful. Every
“diasporist who knows the story of her people, knows that divided loyalties are available
as a weapon to the state”
In terms of “grey areas” in the study of diaspora across state and academic efforts,
PROFESSOR TOLOYAN noted that more and more that state-instigated investigation
may arise from the fear that “the people are the ocean in which dangers to the state
swim.” This is a legitimate statement, though. However, he argued, we must “address
those [concerns] without oppressing innocent people.” We must avoid the “clumsily
addressed questions.”
As for the discussions about “dual allegiances,” as an Armenian refuge born in Syria,
then having immigrated to Canada, he faces questions about his “allegiances” constantly.
These national interests, however, are an ideological construction. Invoking Marx, he
explained, the bourgeoisie convinces the general population that special elite interests are
the interests of the whole. Similarly, diasporas convinced the generality of the population
that their interests coincided with that of the general interest. It is, he said, “part of the
cultural/social/political work that diasporas do.”
Diaspora, however, is not a term all communities embrace. He cited Chinese
communities in South Asia. He also cited his African American colleague at Duke who
accepts invitations to speak at church luncheons, for African American society ladies.
Ordinary, well-read women will tell her,” we’ve been fighting for 300 years to be
Summary of Discussion for Sunday April 2, 2006
accepted as Americans and now you want to tell them we’re not Americans. Are you
crazy?” Divided loyalty is an instinctive and a never to be dismissed response.
PROFESSOR QUAYSON addressed all three questions together. Regarding pragmatic
governmental logic and the social scientific approach, he said, “we see it in migration
studies. There is a tendency to focus on social typologies… asymmetries of assimilation.
Problems that emerge [center around the fact that there is pressure for] clear cut
allegiances.” This approach ignores what humanities know persists across diasporas and
over time. The question of nostalgia and confusion. There is a state of constant
perplexity about identity. “The diasporic individual has this perplexity as part of his
existence.”
It is important to establish and environment of multi- and inter-disciplinarity. It is good
for different disciplines to attend to diaspora in their particular ways -- scholars,
historians, different approaches. There should also be an environment to interrupt those
discourses.
PROFESSOR QUAYSON also added, “don’t demonize the state. That is a big mistake.”
It is good for governments to worry; but the terms are what we need to address. We must
provide them terms that enable a productive interruption for what they think is common
sense. We must “shape the interface between scholars and policy makers.”
PROFESSOR TOLOYAN added, “it is my job as a scholar to make and distribute ideas
in new ways. It is good for states to worry in the right way.”
A speaker from the FLOOR added, in terms of the state’s positioning of diaspora, and
especially in terms of the Indian state, and it’s attempt to fashion new roles for indoTrinidadians, “this is not so much a question of allegiance but more of capital. The
Indian state is now expanding…”
A speaker from the FLOOR said, “I’m glad Ato talked about the dangers of demonizing
the state.” We can engage in “productive disruptions.” The Diaspora Studies, the Area
Studies, if one looks at the genealogy, it applies to all Area Studies, the movement from
anthropology, sociology, political science. “Why do people panic about policy? We
train students to become bureaucrats!”
Another speaker from the FLOOR thanked the panelists for an interesting discussion
about the state, about dual loyalties. The state mobilizes dual loyalties in instrumental
ways… like military citizenship. The military has envisioned recruiting diversity and
diasporic communities in such a way recently that it has decided to promote global
citizenship and participation in place of national military practice. Also the creation of
multicultural policy, such as the mobilization of immigrants in the war effort during the
Second World War, this period saw radical transformations in the practice of Canadian
citizenship.
Summary of Discussion for Sunday April 2, 2006
PROFESSOR QUAYSON referred to PROFESSOR TOLOYAN’S paper, thinking about
the points made “in terms of time, energy, capital, as markers of allegiance.” In the shift
between ethnicity and ethnicization, “we find in the Indian example – Shalini – the
question of trying to get the capital. The Indian state is trying to create symbolic capital.”
This may or may not be converted into social/economic capital. The Indian state can be
assured of being able to facilitate processes of conversion.
PROFESSOR TOLOYAN said, “it is certainly true that the Indian government is trying
to get non-residents to contribute to financial capital.” This is the best known
phenomenon, but scholars have no idea how wide spread this practice is – the Dominican
Republic, the recent Italian vote. Even descendents of Italian citizens are getting partial
votes in the Senate of Italy.
Egyptian government officials who have been trying to destroy Christian activity, are
now looking to included those groups in North American lobbying.
A speaker from the FLOOR said, “this question of the state, our perception of it …this is
topic for a whole other conference -- the state and diasporic communities… in that
discussion of the state, and role as oppressor or protector… women’s studies have been
doing this for decades…”
A speaker from the FLOOR noted they were “taken by [PROFESSOR TOLOYAN’s]
brief encouragement to think about the political significance of this work.” This
comment connects to Ato encouraging students to think about people, fieldwork,
grassroots,” to think through different sites where we can get our students to engage.
In terms of the conversion of the mobile, the sites of incarceration are very important,
“like the Don Jail, a very diasporic site. The mobile are now immobilized bodies.” The
speaker encouraged the room to think about “a more social justice-oriented diaspora
studies.” How can we build on wonderful insights made here? What challenges can we
present for the future of diaspora studies?
A speaker from the FLOOR remarked, “I’m dismayed here this morning. I don’t know
where I am. I hear calls in audience for something that I thought was a prior historical
moment. The one that gave rise to Area Studies as we understood it in the US.”
The post 911 moment has brought back a similar kind of configuration that we saw give
rise to Area Studies; and now it is “crucial for helping us to think through kind of work
we do.” For this moment we must think about how academy is linked to sate apparatus.
How is Diaspora Studies to be configured in our locations? The university is also
concerned about international, global citizenship.
PROFESSOR TOLOYAN noted that some of these topics had no traction for him. “I
don’t reject them, but I don’t understand them.” Regarding the cosmopolitan and its
relationship to global citizenship he said, “I draw a blank I don’t understand why it
means so much. I understand cultural citizenship.”
Summary of Discussion for Sunday April 2, 2006
PROFESSOR QUAYSON added, “Julia’s fine comments raise another issue.” Regarding
the definition of the fieldwork site, he said, “we must think it through. The assumption is
that the fieldwork site will have to be a group site in the community – the household, the
prison.” What is this business of what is a site? In what ways is it useful for thinking
about diaspora?
PROFESSOR TOLOYAN added, regarding the question about the military, “there is
actually a fascinating field that studies the relationship between the military and
Diaspora. The problem is that serious military history is so disdained in the academy that
you can’t get contact with people actually trying to talk about it.
__END__
Panel, Critical Pedagogies
12-1:30
Chair/ Discussant: Rinaldo Walcott (University of Toronto)
Ananya Kabir (University of Leeds)
Issac Quist (Wesley College)
Rinaldo Walcott began the panel with a few opening remarks. In spite of the tight
timelines, he hoped for a “riotous, boisterous conversation”. He remarked that some
provocative questions had been skirted about diasporas and pedagogy. Walcott noted the
Somali context of the 1990’s where “education for the children prepared them for living
the lives of blacks in a white land”. He suggested that Toronto is an excellent place to
examine this type of enterprise. He noted that contrarianism isn’t narcissism, that “we’re
all committed to ethically remaking the university, to living and working in its ruins”.
However the vicious critiques the university makes of itself are another marketing tool.
He called for a conclusion of the last 500 years of history and a pedagogical demand of a
higher order. Pedagogy is “as much about restrictive notions of teaching as it is about
expansive new practices”.
Walcott outlined five potential strategies for a new pedagogy;
1: Cosmopolitan networks, can we find a pedagogy of academic circulation?
2: Area studies might be reinvented to and replaces by a “nuanced and deeply inflected,
reflected study” that approaches the every day multiculturalism of Canada.
3: The institution, DTS, is “compromised by its configuration, it must be pan-university”.
He asked, in the context of HIV and AIDS, how a model of DTS can make any
significant impact beyond advancing our individual careers which it is constricted by
these institutional arrangements.
4. Beyond nation / within nation: “Black Canadians continually repeat the condition of
being second generation”. Walcott insisted on the need for work to be done on Black
Canada, wondering why these scholar were not here. This scholarship is “always in
excess of this nation and its institution”.
Summary of Discussion for Sunday April 2, 2006
5. Towards new forms of human life. He called for work towards a “radical humanist
project of unknown/known, found/lost, new/old, human not just as a category of
European Enlightenment”.
Ananya Kabir
Abstract
How does the subject position of teacher meet that of the student as well as that of the
text. There are three positions at work. Where is other? Is it in the teacher, the student,
or the text. We must not forget the layers of class within a diaspora. The way that
English literature is carved up for consumption is central to her paper. The categories
have profs attached to them and the funding follows suit. Spoke about the resistance on
the part of students to allow the teacher to recede into scholarly apositionality. They seek
to position the teacher though she reminded them that as textual scholars there needs to
be close readings of the texts, and not the teacher, that produce their conclusions and
analyses.
Kabir noted a number of other strategies for locating the other. Namely she mentioned “a
contrapunctal reading practice” between South Asian texts and Eurocentric theories of
trauma which tries to juggle “familiarity and otherness”. This juggling has to take place
if the students are to become aware that in “culturally different texts” there are “familiar
lineaments and preoccupations that contour the ‘other’.
Professor Kabir used examples of course syllabi as well to suggest how the regional
interacts with the larger, international theoretical umbrellas. She used the example of
Derek Walcott, a writer who sits easily among both surveys of postcolonial texts as well
as specifically regional texts.
Isaac Quist
Abstract
Isaac Quist located his paper by making acknowledgements about his own position.
Namely, he is not a university professor, not attached to a discipline, does not belong to
an academy and would not consider himself a “scholar in any sense of the word”. He
noted the proliferation of “institutional jargon” that has dominated the last few days
discussion. Though he claims to “feel like a fish in rather murky and turgid waters”, he
admits [rather humbly and sagely this rapporteur adds] that he has “grasped enough of the
concept (or is it spectre) of ‘tenure’ and its implications to be grateful that I am spared its
attendant anxieties.”
Quist raised three questions with regards to how to teach a student population alive to the
tensions, challenges and consequences that “attend globalization”. He asked what the
main challenges are that “a globalized world order poses for education even at this preuniversity level”? Secondly he addressed the issue of how “policy makers and other
educational practitioners respond to these challenges such that the education that their
Summary of Discussion for Sunday April 2, 2006
students experience is one that is fit for the 21st century purposes”. Finally Quist
wondered would then be the “implications for curriculum aims and pedagogical
practice”?
What followed was an attempt to address these questions by looking at the mandate for
the International Baccalaureate Organization as well as UNESCO and OXFAM, all
organizations that “contribute to the current discourse in international education in terms
of what they recommend should be the aims and objectives of a curriculum and pedagogy
fit for out times.”
Quist concluded with the point that answering some questions leads to more questions.
Namely, where will technology lead us in the next 10, 100 years? What is the role of
experiential learning as “virtual learning” expands? Where is the time for silence and
reflection within the curriculum that reflects a the frenetic and hectic pace of lives? What
“of the spiritual dimension what is vital to billions of people, even as some education
systems become more and more secular?” Finally, how can curricula prepare students to
deal with the reality of their environmental inheritance?
Discussion:
A speaker from the FLOOR, framing the comment she wanted to make, noted “there is
an unusually good looking group of people here today.” This seemed, she thought, the
best way to introduce “the elephant in the room… the unofficial narrative of text, courses,
and evaluations of professors… all North American faculty know all about
ratemyprofessor.com… and we all know [that on that site] the only thing that matters is if
you have the chili pepper.”
She continued, “we can’t ignore the sorts of embodifications and dynamics that obtain in
the classroom… one thing there’s been silence about [at this conference] is the economy
of pedagogical desire. There are dynamics of sexual energy and desirability between
students and professors, among students, and among professors.”
PROFESSOR HESCHEL then noted, “I’m not sure how to translate [the panelists’ work]
to the classroom that I have.” Teaching at an Ivy League university with 4000 students,
and a 2.5 million dollar endowment, what she notes about her students is: “they’re the
consumers. I’m the salesperson… [and] they want a pretty transcript with A grades to
match the money they spend..
“These very right wing students,” she explained “are attending the kind of university that
George Bush likes. For them this ‘critical empathy’ is compassionate conservatism.”
How, she asked, can we translate this critical pedagogy and empathy to the political
atmosphere at institutions like hers, those attended by “the next business and political
elites of the United States.”
Summary of Discussion for Sunday April 2, 2006
A third speaker from the FLOOR noted, “I’m always wary of disciplines that harness
Area and Diaspora Studies… I’m concerned about what I would call a somewhat
narcissistic level of pedagogy… a 1980s model of identity politics.” He asked, “how can
one cross boundaries at the pedagogical level… [how can] conversations [become] more
focused on local and ethical considerations? How do we cross disciplines and move
beyond the disciplines to speak about our pedagogy?”
PROFESSOR KABIR noted that “desire is extremely important… we all face it as
teachers… Authority is always attractive, [and] it doesn’t matter how one looks [as a
professor].” There are erotic circuits set into motion in the classroom in relation to
authority.
In a job interview she was once asked, “what would you do in a class that wouldn’t talk?”
She answered “turn cartwheels?” No, seriously, she pressed, we must “mine the charges
released in classroom and put them back into something productive.”
Otherwise, in terms of the question about erotic pedagogy, the answers are in each
person’s “personal ethics of teaching. We all grapple with it. That circuit of pedagogy.
At least [we can] acknowledge and re-circulate it.”
Regarding the question from PROFESSOR HESCHEL about religion in the classroom,
PROFESSOR KABIR replied, “we have to grapple with issues of religious belonging. In
all areas of the academy. We have to work this out.” The solutions lie in the “language
of inquiry, empathy, bridging gaps…confronting the uncomfortable moments will arise in
classroom. We have to deal with them. That is what critical pedagogy is about.”
To the third speakers question “navel gazing narcissism, PROFESSOR KABIR replied,
“my paper is about a personal negotiation of issues.” English literature is her language,
the language of the humanities; but certainly the urban space as another node for thinking
bout pedagogy. She added, “well that space too can be narcissistic. Whatever mode you
foreground is potentially narcissistic… we must be alive to those issues. It’s the only
way to save ourselves from narcissism.”
PROFESSOR QUIST replied, “I don’t feel qualified to talk about these issues. They
don’t have same immediacy for me. My colleagues’ answers will have to suffice.”
He did speak to the question, “what do we do in a university to attract a different kind of
student?” He asked in turn, should we develop a mission statement for the university? Is
the university interested in that sort of introspection? That critical self-review? If that
reflection becomes possible, then other things become possible.
PROFESSOR WALCOTT added that PROFESSOR HESCHEL’s question about a whole
class of miniature George Bushes was a “cute question”, and that his first response to her
would be to tell her to get out of that school! The audience chuckled.
Summary of Discussion for Sunday April 2, 2006
A speaker from the FLOOR noted, in terms of Post Colonial and Diasporic studies, she
was struck by PROFESSOR KABIR’s comment that she [Kabir] referred to
“remembering partition” in her course instead of using the term “Post Colonial.”
How, she asked, does “Post Colonial become equal to diaspora in literary studies at
least?” Last year a survey of Can lit courses and found literally none of the “hyphenated
authors” and this poses a real concern.
A speaker from the FLOOR said, in relation to the discussions about the “Ivy programs…
there is a discrepancy between the published aims and practice…does the Ivy do anything
about making teachers available for the options they profess to have?” She used for an
example literature courses in native tongues. She noted, “those schools don’t seem to
have faculty to do what the Ivy league claims it can do?”
PROFESSOR ALEXANDER then posed “some questions for collective consideration.”
They were: “how do location and space shape and transform pedagogy practices? How
do critical knowledges form themselves within the context of a bounded space called the
classroom – which is not bounded. Do critical pedagogies matter? For who we are as
teachers? Where we’re trying to engage? What are our particular ethics? The qualifier
critical – does that mean radical? Does it mean transformative?”
PROFESSOR TROTZ noted that PROFESSOR ALEXANDER’s was a “wonderfully
provocative question… there should be an insistence on ones’ right to be there. How
would one think about settling while also unsettling students? How can we use the
classroom to unsettle what appears to be so normative?”
PROFESSOR MILLS added, “there are a number of ideas coming together here. We
should be wary of this tendency to separate what’s happening in Toronto and this
‘classroom of George Bushes.’” We have, he argued, as teachers, the “responsibility to
shape the thought worlds of all these people… we need to take responsibility for
pragmatic action in our classrooms, the ways we constrict ourselves and our reference
points.” We must work to “set out aspirations, infuse our classrooms with content.”
PROFESSOR QUAYSON then explained that he had found himself “in a similar position
at Cambridge, [having been] the only person of color in the history of the university in
800 years [teaching English].” His students there were, middle class, white, pampered,
but intelligent, “motivated students. They were curious but skeptical.” His colleagues he
noted, were surprised that he stayed.
QUAYSON’s strategy was to gain the respect of the students, “then unsettle their habits.”
His methods were rooted in a “thoroughness, and the demand of that thoroughness from
them.” Also, he explained, “as minority scholar, you have to understand where the
dominance speaks from. Get a sense of English and Western literary history. Unmask
the assumptions.”
Summary of Discussion for Sunday April 2, 2006
“Counterpoint” was his other strategy, “to read Achebe in relation to Aristotle. That way
you won’t see the cannon in the same way…[present] an understanding of Achebe in
which [students] can no longer view Sophocles in the seam way. Figure out how to
disrupt, unsettle the cannon.”
PROFESSOR WALCOTT agreed, but stated he’d be careful not to reduce the importance
of speaking back to the structure of the university. “The institution as we enter it,” he
argued, “is working its own pedagogy on us.” How can we unwork that pedagogy? We
have to have a serious, grounded conversation about ways the pedagogy of the institution
makes us complicit because we’re so deeply invested as academics.
Consider the “two for one” strategy of hiring faculty. PROFESSOR QUAYSON teaches
English lit and DTS. We must, he says, “recognize how to reshape the institution.
[which may involve] working ourselves out of our jobs… [this is a] fundamental
position… so configured by global capitalism at this moment.”
PROFESSOR KABIR said, we must “remind students about materialities of diaspora…
be vigilant. So nothing reduces the other. No shortcuts.”
To the other comments from the FLOOR she said, as for the “ethics of teaching we can…
be conscious of the pitfalls [we spoke of today] and hope consciousness doesn’t cripple
but allow to engage in act of unsettling.”
___END___
Keynote Address
Neil Smith, Center for Place, Culture and Politics, Graduate Center, CUNY
Title: “Areas, Regions, Scales; Fluid Geographies in a Global World”.
Professor Smith began by suggesting that in theorizing temporality a lot more discussion
of fluidity has been allowed to take place. He remarked that spatiality has, however, been
fixed. If the history of time allows for leeway, then theorizing of space must do the same.
He quoted, “war is God’s way of teaching Americans geography”.
He outlined his paper as firstly a movement through a history of Area Studies, a thinking
through of globalization and the language that surrounds it, a look at the language of
nation states, and finally an excursion through scale which would bring him to his
concluding point about the shift from Area Studies to Area Knowledge.
Area Studies
Professor Smith offered that it is common practice to trace the history of areas studies
back to the United States in the post WWII period. However the “real precursor to area
studies actually come from within the state itself”. Woodrow Wilson’s thinktanks, the
league of nations, the council of foreign relations, these all wanted to understand how the
Summary of Discussion for Sunday April 2, 2006
US could take on the world. The army’s specialized training programs also provided an
areas studies vista.
The reason these histories are important, Smith asserted, is because the State Dept, as late
as 1939, had no effective intelligence branch to run foreign policy. Other European
powers were doing this work. Once this gap was recognized, the council of foreign
relations became absorbed by the State Dept and there arose then the “large apparatus
that gives us area knowledge”.
Smith asked, “why the lacuna in the first place?”
He resolved that academic geography as a discipline was underdeveloped. It did not
engage the emerging geopolitics in Europe or Japan. It was “asleep at the switches.
There was no broader despatialization. To be geographical and political was to be
geopolitical. There was no question of deeper relational questions that existed beyond
physical territorial questions”.
Area Studies, according to Smith, emerged as a means of creating instrumental
knowledge for the state, for a particular state. This is a “United States that thought its
empire was coming in”. Area Studies then has always been tied to an imperial vision. It
has of course become much broader and more varied, but many Area Studies programs
are still instrumental.
In the face of various mounting criticisms of AS, in 1995, the Ford Foundation decided to
rethink its funding of AS. It is responding to a crisis of critiques within AS that can be
articulated in four points:
1. Area studies was instrumental, designed as an arm of state information gathering.
2. The objects of study were never allowed to be the subjects of study.
3. Who was included and who excluded from processes of AS.
4. Rumblings began to emerge about the usefulness of old categories of Asia, or Latin
America when there are so many discrepancies between the regions attempting to exist
under the umbrella of one area.
Area studies, initially a US invention, Smith claimed, became a global pursuit.
Consequently, Smith suggested that he is happy to relinquish the language of AS.
However he is unsure about moving entirely away from it, from totally abandoning it.
This is of course a question about how we organize area knowledge.
Globalization
Area Knowledge (AK) takes place in the context of globalization, Smith began. AK
takes place in a world which is more global that it was in the past. The language of
globalization is so ubiquitous so as to make us think it is inevitable, omnipresent and
undefeatable, but it might yet connote something useful. What is globalization? Smith
contended to answer this question by answering the question, “what is new?”.
Summary of Discussion for Sunday April 2, 2006
Globalization itself is not new, not inevitable, we are “only approaching the levels of
financial integration that existed in the 1970’s right now.” This is not the process that
Friedman notes in “The World is Flat”. Maybe it is from “an airplane, from business
class, but not when you are looking up at that plane from the ground”.
Smith encouraged us to contest the language that would have us believe that globalization
is new and that it has flattened the world. Conversely, he cautioned against the Marxist
view as well, that nothing is new. What has happened in the last 20-30 years is new and
it is not the globalization of commodity trade. Global finance capital is not new either.
Neither is the globalization of culture; immigration, empire, movements of people all
evince this.
”What is new is the globalization of production capital. What is different is that the
production process is organized in commodity sectors. Cars, computers, are never made
for national markets. Components are collected from different national settings.”
Attendant to this then is of course the globalization of the labor that is doing this work.
There is a real unevenness in attention between how much globalization affects capital,
and how it effects labor and migration.
Smith pointed out that “all of these are connected to the production process.”
Deregulation of trade is connected to the production process. Money has to be raised by
corporations in the places where they have production processed. They raise stock
profiles in these countries. First there has to be the creating and liberation of stock
markets and then the establishment of the production facility and along with that the
public face of the corporation.
The Nation State
The nation state, Smith contends, has been painted as the bogeyman of globalization. It
is supposedly a constraining obstacle to globalization. There have been nation states for a
considerable length of time. The system of nation states is what is modern, not the state
itself. The nation state solved the problem of the transition into capitalist societies.
Feudal political formations were incapable of providing the leadership, culture or military
authority needed to accommodate the accumulation of capital that was occurring. The
nation state allowed for a synchronization between territory and capital accumulation.
“Globalization today marks a point where the system of nation states no longer is
adequate for the way that capital accumulates”. Nation states today have exceeded the
limits of how they were first devised. The EU is an attempt to re-coral the accumulation
of capital on a European scale. The EU has therefore figured “regions” as the places of
belonging, not the individual nation. Returning to a metaphor of puzzle pieces being
thrown up into the air, Smith suggested that the “pieces that went up were the nation
state, the ones coming down are multiunits and multiple”. It is a complicated process to
reproduce the view of the world.
Viewing the world involves issues of scale that have to do with class and race and gender
based politics of who is included, who excluded.
Summary of Discussion for Sunday April 2, 2006
In terms of the US state, its power is not declining. In this market, “small states don’t
make sense”. The US is trying to be THE GLOBAL STATE. There is nothing
progressive or reactionary about the way we think about transnationalism. “What do we
fill transnationalism up with?” The kinds of multicultural social practices that fill up
transnationalism, and this “impulse towards inclusion was co-opted and mulched into the
state at every level of social discussion. We can create a radical transnationalism.
Space and Spatial Metaphors
Theoretical frameworks have been so heavy on spatial theory because of globalization.
“The language is spatial, but the meaning is not”. What is the purpose of these spatial
metaphors. When everything is fluid, space needs to be still…said one theory. What if
space is moving though? For example the word/ concept of THE SITE. For example,
“gender is a site of struggle”; we are giving to that category all of the social relation that
it involves but still fixing it. “The site is a black box. Everything is a site. A politics of
absolute space as fixed sneaks into the language of fluidity”. In terms of metaphors and
scales, Smith suggested that if the world was really to be rescaled there are limits to the
fluidity of geographies that are out there. “There is a hardening of the borders around
families and identities. We need to reproduce scale without allowing spatial metaphors to
drop a curtain between us and the realities that we are trying to structure”.
There is something safe about areas, Smith remarked. If space is up in the air though,
then how do we think about what we study. How to look at family without fixing it
spatially. “If that’s the intellectual dilemma, how do we solve that problem
institutionally?”. Area Studies is being lived through a bifurcated afterlife. Bush has
after all committed millions to Arab language development. Therefore there is a
reinstrumentalization of area studies going on. The bifurcation comes in a different way.
There is an academic struggle to build area knowledge that will have to exists without the
support of Ford Foundation etc.
What the new Area Knowledge will look like is up for grabs.
Professor Smith concluded with a quote from Pascale “Truth is a matter of a few degrees
of longitude”. This is the language that is emerging of the fixity of places in space. The
task that confronts us is to rethink what defines plausible ways of fixing space in the
future that connects to relationships to landscape and environment, the link between the
conceptual and actual world.
Discussion
From the floor: Remarked on the nation as the boogeyman of the global. “You need to
elaborate on contradiction between EU and UN. They are not sources of power. What is
the relationship between these organizations and the US?”
Summary of Discussion for Sunday April 2, 2006
NIEL SMITH replied that the relationship is contingent. “The US looks vulnerable right
now. The resort to geomilitary is extraordinary blunder. Clinton was happy to negotiate
the world into boredom. The EU is strengthened and China too, but in the end that
calculation only gets us so far. The US is geoeconomically weakened. Their debt is
unsustainable. They’ve played the last card.”
Back to floor: “How are we going to see the collapse of globalization”
NEIL SMITH: “That’s already happening and George Bush knows this. His closing the
borders of his nation puts the globalization processed in peril.”
ATO QUAYSON elided on three notes for helping to “fine tune your discussion. China
taxation and cemeteries. China in relation to US global hegemony. This is an economic
challenge. Taxation, the state’s appetite for extracting money from its citizens, and
cemeteries to rethink what places are not up in the air. These are nodal points.”
NEIL SMITH responded by suggesting that China has become a huge competitor
economically in all realms. They are running 8-12% growth per year. He wonders how
will this pace keep up. “It is only a matter of years before Chinese Communist party
insists that capitalism is the highest ideal of communism.”[audience laughed] What exists
now in China is a deracinated communist economy with strong state control. Taxation.
Yes, tax happens, that hasn’t changed. With stagnation of neoliberalism that taxation is
uneven. “It is suicidal to stop thinking about the state as a target. Webber was right that
the state claims control of legitimate violence. When it is illegitimate the state simply
changes the terms of legitimacy.”
A speaker from the floor adds military outposts to ATO QUAYSON’s idea about
cemeteries.
NEIL SMITH responed that to speak about military outposts is to resort to a geopolitical,
geomilitary argument. “There is actually a lot more going on there”.
MJ ALEXANDER Thanked Neil and wished to offer two interventions at the
institutional level and to ask about how he has formulated the question of Area Studies.
“You argue that globalization of production is new and that there are places, family,
region, that are the new places wherein we find what this production is all about. These
are the places where questions of gender are vital. Not an absolute space, but rather a
productive space. Who is doing area studies right now. The chaps doing history, are the
chaps doing AS”.
PROFESSOR ALEXANDER’s second point involved returning to Rinaldo Walcott’s
point that we are involved in a radical or contestatory program. How might we think the
limits of AS in relation to new programs. How do we think exclusion into new programs.
What is a pan-university structure where disciplines are brought in form disparate places?
Summary of Discussion for Sunday April 2, 2006
NEIL SMITH responded that we must restructure the scales or metrics of social life. “All
social differences come in there. The nexus from household to work, to state, those
relationships are the places within which new scalar relationships are being formed.
Class is not a factor here within an individual household, class tends to be similar.”
SMITH remarked on the function of the household as a means of social reproduction. He
suggested that the nation state, it’s language is so gendered. And race too, borders
always raise this issue. “If spatial structuring is destabilized there is possibility for
political change. The question of radical work in the academy…” He sighed. “One of
the things that is happening regards the second critique about the subject/object of study
divide. The result is that is in some places there is an attempt to recenter other categories
in places of area studies (gender, sexuality, etc). We would be loosing something if that
knowledge was despatialized. Are the galvanizing concepts of race fused with
geography? It depends on the given place as to what kind study makes sense.”
From the floor: “The very material fact is that division of labor is gendered. My question
is about nation states.” She remarked that the evolution of nation states was largely a
colonial project. Communities, not formerly associated with each other before
colonialism were now forced to live together. The global project is speeding up what
eventually becomes the shape of the nation sate in the south. What will the
reconfiguration of the existing nation state look like?
NEIL SMITH replied that given that nation states were set up to solve a particular
program, and that the state had to maintain authority as well as provide infrastructure,
this is where the dilemma of the colonial nation state began. There was a competition
between Hegelian absolute and the Weberian bureaucratic. The postcolonial state was
established without the resources for both infrastructure and authority. These are called
“failed states” but the condition for the solution to that state did not exist.
--END--