CFP: Special issue of UTQ: Security & Canada (5/1/07; journal issue)
Call for Papers for a Special Issue of the University of Toronto Quarterly
Guest editors: Heike Harting and Smaro Kamboureli
Discourses of Security, "Peacekeeping" Narratives and the Cultural
Imagination in Canada
A TransCanada Project
In 1957, Lester B. Pearson's Nobel Peace Prize not only marked the
Canadian invention of the UN Blue Helmets, but it gave rise to Canada's
self-reinvention as a nation dedicated to international peacekeeping in
the service of human compassion, responsibility, and protection. As the
historians J. L. Granatstein and Norman Hillmer ironically remark, "if
nations must have images, it is certainly better for Canadians to think
of themselves as umpires, as morality incarnate, than as mass murderers
or warmongers" (Empire to Umpire 350). As global umpire, Canada has
helped establish a new global and martial humanitarianism, while
systematically ignoring the ways in which peacekeeping remains a deeply
imperial project rooted in discourses of race and exclusion, national
and global security, and moral affect. Recently, Canada's new defense
policy A Role of Pride and Influence in the World has stressed Canada's
international "responsibility to protect," while fostering global
development and relative national autonomy. Peacekeeping narratives,
then, constitute cultural engagements with Canada's ambivalent
investment in humanitarian discourses of protection abroad and at home.
On the domestic plane, these narratives intersect with discourses of
security and insecurity and signal the rise of a "new racism" which
translates cultural difference into racial stigma and diasporic segments
of the population into native informants. Whether focused on Canadian
society or dealing with Canada's role within the global community, a
large number of Canadian cultural representations such as those in film
and literature reflect the ways in which peacekeeping, protection, and
(in)security complicate Canada's self-image in interesting ways.
For this special issue, we strongly encourage interdisciplinary papers
that offer a critical dialogue between cultural texts (e.g., film,
documentaries, literature, media presentations, public inquiries) and
policies. Contributions may be about the following issues:
* different cultural and indigenous genealogies of Canadian discourses
of militarism, (in)security, and humanitarianism (from the Boer War to
Kosowo and Somalia)
* "new racism" and "peacekeeping narratives" (Sherene Razack)
* peacekeeping narratives: Somalia, Rwanda, and the Oka crisis
* the intersections between Canadian discourses of security,
citizenship, and diaspora
* Legitimizing discourses of unease and fear: the cultural technologies
of Canadian defense policies and the politics of affect
* the ways in which the moral and economic values of neo-liberalism
operate through racialized violence and perpetuate a perceived need for
military intervention
* Gender, military intervention, and peacekeeping narratives
* the "politics of protection," "white civility" (Daniel Coleman), and
military prevention
* security, citizenship, and nation narration
Send papers to:
Smaro Kamboureli
Director, The TransCanada Institute,
School of English and Theatre Studies
University of Guelph
Guelph ON N1G 2W1
Please submit your full papers no later than May 1, 2007.
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Received on Wed Jun 07 2006 - 10:15:06 EDT