Diasporic Solidarities: Islands, Intimacies, and Imagining Otherwise

2022 John Douglas Taylor Conference

Conference Dates: June 9-10, 2022

Conference Website: diasporicsolidarities.ca

Submission Deadline: January 20, 2022

Please submit a 150-word proposal and 75-word bio to jdtcon@mcmaster.ca 

How might we move, imagine, and struggle across (de)colonial experiences and diasporic intimacies in-and-through solidarities? What commonalities and differences arise in-and-between diasporic desires, and how do we navigate these differences? How do we co-create, challenge, and/or support solidarities for resistance? How might we decenter imperial, colonial, and capitalist epistemologies, ontologies, and practices through the poetics and politics of these solidarities?

We welcome interdisciplinary proposals for presentations that engage with the complexities of constellating solidarities in so-called North America and in relation to historical and contemporary transnational flows of people, information, and capital with particular focus on the island (including land, movement to-from-and-away, Turtle Island, and more). In line with Black, Pacific, Caribbean, Southeast Asian North American, and Indigenous studies, “Diasporic Solidarities” will be a practice of imagining otherwise together to emphasize not only intimacies between diasporic peoples, but also their relations to Indigenous peoples. The conference aims to grapple with how we might enact a feminist praxis of co-creating solidarity that will illuminate sites where these solidarities already exist and garner tools that help us to imagine new ways of resisting together.

Potential topics for presentations might include: 

• Diasporic Methodologies

• Diasporic poetics and/or affects

• Memory across place

• Migration diaries, memoirs

• Mapping relations

• Difficult solidarities

• Islands, shores, intertidal, land, nonhuman contacts and coalitions 

• Queer intimacies and desires

• Food, taste, and gastropolitical solidarities

• Artistic representations of solidarity

• Diasporic and Indigenous solidarities

• Activist practices of solidarity

• Decolonizing diasporas

We encourage individual and collaborative paper and panel proposals from across the disciplines and from community activists.

“Diasporic Solidarities: Islands, Intimacies, and Imagining Otherwise” is hosted by the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Ohròn:wakon (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada) and supported through the John Dogulas Taylor Conference fund. The conference format will be virtual and synchronous via Zoom webinar. The two-day conference program features a plenary panel and several research panel presentations.

Questions can be directed to the John Douglas Taylor Conference email address: jdtcon@mcmaster.ca