Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Examines why identity is such an important issue for contemporary diasporic communities and former colonies. Introduces students to critiques of representations that construct "racialized" groups as inferior, primitive threats to civilization and their constitution of passive, disciplined subjects. Primarily focuses on innovative cultural strategies developed in Indigenous People, the Black diaspora, Asian/Canadian communities and survivors of the Jewish Holocaust to create ethical communities and critique the impact of colonial violence on contemporary societies. Students who have taken CMNS 487 in terms 1037, 1047 and 1067 cannot take this course for further credit.

COURSE DETAILS:

Overview:

This seminar explores the role of culture in anti-colonial movements, with special attention to settler colonialism in Canada. Mohawk scholar, Audra Simpson (2011), at Columbia University states, “Settler colonialism is predicated on a territorial possession by some and, thus, a dispossession of others.” She states that, according to Wolfe (2006), “the settler never leaves, so the possession of territory requires the disappearance of the native.” But she points out that as “indigeneity has survived this acquisitive and genocidal” process, colonialism has in fact failed in North America. What remains is “working resolutely to assert their nationhood and their sovereignty against a settler political formation that would have them disappear or integrate or assimilate.”

Many indigenous societies initially established equilateral relations with the British, French and Spanish, but, over time, as the first section of the course outlines, colonial knowledge began to be used to impose belief systems which were articulated with environmentally destructive systems of resource extraction necessary for expanding capitalist markets, dehumanizing systems of labour, and genocidal population management programs that relied on torture and other sadistic as well as sexualized forms of cruelty.

After establishing the violence of colonial knowledge and systems of representation, the course moves from “negative” representations and its dehumanizing consequences to the work of anti-colonial and Indigenous artists, activists, scholars, elders, film-makers like Linda Tuwhami Smith, Alfred Taiaiake, Rebecca Belmore, and Alanis Obomsawin, who have made critical contributions to developing knowledge, cultural institutions, and media practices in support of Indigenous “resurgence” (Coulthard, 2014).

In terms of media and identity, the course will examine the work that has been done in areas of voice and narrative, the body, the land, and language. The course will also address the challenge of establishing settler-Indigenous alliances that call for an emotional disinvestment in settlers’ investments in colonial systems of exploitation, property and profit.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: