UPDATE: UTQ Special Issue: Discourses of Security (8/1/07; journal issue)
Please, note that the deadline for submissions to this Special Issue of the _University of Toronto Quarterly_ has been extended to AUGUST 1, 2007.
CFP: Special Issue of the University of Toronto Quarterly
Guest editors: Heike Härting 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 developm!
ent 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 August 1, 2007.
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Received on Fri Apr 13 2007 - 17:31:06 EDT