Students for Palestinian Human Rights (SPHR) McGill have urged a boycott of Congress at McGill this year. CAPS is working diligently on the possibility of holding its conference offsite, as well as expanded options for virtual participation. Part of our decision, as we have communicated to our members, is derived from our solidarity with McGill Law faculty currently on strike, but it is also an effort to emphasize our dissatisfaction with McGill’s treatment of student protesters. We note that we are responding as best as we can as the event approaches. We thank our members for their patience as we revise our plans at this late hour, and wish to communicate the following in solidarity with the students:

The Canadian Association for Postcolonial Studies denounces the actions taken by McGill University on May 13, 2024 in response to the student encampment on its campus. After one injunction seeking the removal of students had already been rejected, McGill sought a similar injunction from the Quebec Superior Court that would see the Montreal Police (SVPM) remove students. We breathe a collective sigh of relief that McGill’s efforts failed, because we have seen the consequences of these actions at Columbia University, the University of Calgary, and the University of Alberta. Those of us who remember the police violence against students in Montreal in 2012 and 2015 know that requesting the involvement of the SVPM to remove peaceful demonstrations is a decisive endorsement of violence that we cannot support.

The students in the encampment have collectively demanded that their institutions: 

1. Disclose “all investments in companies complicit in the genocide of the Palestinian people.”
2. Divest “from all complicit companies and cut all academic ties with Israeli institutions.”
3. Defend student’ right to protest by guaranteeing “No repercussions or disciplinary charges for any actions taken by students of McGill and Concordia university in support of Palestine” as well as dropping “Pending disciplinary charges.”
4. Declare their condemnation of “the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people and [call] on the Canadian government to cease all military contracts with the Zionist state.”

The encampment’s members add their voices to a long line of critics of Israel’s actions in Palestine at this urgent time. We recognize that the language of genocide has been divisive, but we also note that this term has long faced opposition when what it describes is presently occurring, often only being acknowledged in retrospect. It is not a term that can be explained away in this case, being “plausible” even in the cautious rhetoric of the International Court of Justice. Regardless of divergent opinions on terminology, we emphasize that students’ demands use the terms voiced by several widely recognized scholars of genocide, as well as international and human rights organizations. We emphasize that, whatever terminology we use, the unbridled massacre being committed against Palestinian people by the Israeli military is a war crime, deserves unequivocal condemnation, and must be stopped now; the fact that contestations of terminology are being used to distract from the processes taking place only speaks to the widespread devaluation of Palestinian lives in our discourse. In this light, CAPS supports students’ efforts to make visible our higher education institutions’ complicity in the violence currently taking place.

We oppose the war crimes currently being committed against Gazans, and join the students in calling our institutions of higher education to account. We also add the following statement declaring our position on the current conflict, which we will edit in consultation with our members in the coming weeks.

_______________________________

Over the past few decades, the field of postcolonial studies has actively engaged in analyses of the Israel-Palestine conflict. This substantial body of research has highlighted the political, ethical, and cultural complexities of ongoing tensions in the region, in particular documenting the Israeli state’s occupation of the Palestinian Occupied Territories (POT). For our members, many of whose research is informed by decolonial perspectives, this situation demands ethical responses that extend the discourse of decolonization and resistance from theoretical discussions to tangible, material realities.

As the elected executive of the Canadian Association for Postcolonial Studies (CAPS), we are vehemently opposed to the massacre and displacement being perpetrated on Gazans by the Israeli state.  Several have called this a genocide; whatever our association members’ differences are regarding this terminology (and we will update this statement following consultation at our AGM), the facts are clear: we write this as an unpredictable situation unfolds, so information will no-doubt change in the coming days, weeks, and months, but current estimates report 35,000 Palestinians slain and over 78,000 missing, with most of these being civilians. There is no way to describe this as a war of self-defense, as if that would excuse the death toll. While we denounce any attacks on civilians whether they be Palestinian or Israeli, call for the return of Israeli hostages by Hamas, and denounce responses to the current conflict grounded in antisemitism, we also acknowledge the longstanding violence committed by the Israeli state, from the ongoing Nakba, to the occupation of Palestinian lands, to its institutionalized racial segregation. We also affirm that criticizing the Israeli state is not a form of antisemitism, and our institutions of higher education need to keep this in mind when making allegations of antisemitism against scholars and students opposing the war. 

While affirming that criticism of the Israeli state’s violence is not a form of antisemitism, we condemn antisemitic responses to the current conflict that have targeted Jewish or Israeli civilians across the globe. We oppose the forms of discrimination converging during this conflict, whether antisemitism, anti-Palestinian racism, or Islamophobia. We fully recognize the worsening conditions faced by many civilians in the region and believe that these grave circumstances must be addressed with urgency and empathy. Nonetheless, we join many critical voices stressing that it is possible and necessary to condemn Hamas’s killing of more than 1,400 civilians while also noting Israel’s longstanding occupation of Palestinian territories and violence toward its citizens; Hamas’s violent attack cannot and does not justify the current massacre of Gazan civilians, nor the long history of Israel’s violence against Palestinian peoples. 

As an executive committee representing researchers in anticolonial, decolonial, and postcolonial studies, we also affirm that our field demands vigilant attention to this situation, and that many researchers in our association are uniquely positioned to offer critical and vital commentary amid the urgency the current violence involves.

We oppose incitements to the violent harm of civilians while also recognizing the often-unacknowledged violence of settler colonialism that has long been a facet of the Israel-Palestine conflict. This history is well established, with multiple human rights organizations from Human Rights Watch, to Amnesty International, to B’tselem, as well as several UN reports, citing war crimes, dispossession of Palestinian land, strict control over access to vital resources, and racial segregation perpetuated by the state of Israel and opposed by many within Israel, Palestine, and the rest of the world. We believe that as full a picture as possible of this history is necessary if we are to adequately respond to the current violence.

And yet we note that informed commentary on this conflict has been met with fierce opposition and silencing by governments and university administrations across what many call Canada, as well as many influential voices in the national media landscape. CAPS acknowledges the crucial intersectionality between academic research, activism, and humanitarian response, and the importance of scholarly contributions in illuminating the intricacies of the Israel-Palestine conflict. As the conflict has seen 105 journalists (100 Palestinian) and 254 aid workers in Gaza killed, compromising accurate and immediate reportage on the conflict, informed and ethical responses are necessary. With this and the current landscape of higher education’s treatment of Palestinian voices and issues, we also denounce the inadequacy of our institutions’ handling of conversation on this conflict, their refusal to acknowledge the value of Palestinian lives, their refusal to acknowledge the gravity of the violence being directed at Gazan civilians, and their criminalization of student protesters rallying in support of Gaza across North American campuses. These are egregious failures and a chilling reminder of the stifling of academic freedom in our institutions of higher education.

We insist on the importance of teaching and research on the history of this region (as well as the Canadian state’s implication in it) in offering empathetic and informed responses. We note that understanding the current violence must also reckon with the history of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, as well as European powers’ destructive role in the region. 

We affirm the efforts of those peacefully gathering in our communities, campuses, classrooms, and streets to shed light on the current violence and its history. We are heartened by the efforts of our colleagues, students, and community members who—even in disagreement—are dedicated to engaging rather than silencing accurate research, discussion, and calls to end the current violence. We note that our students especially have had to undertake this labour with little support—and in some cases with outright violence and coercion—from their university administrations. We wholeheartedly condemn university administrations’ recent incitements to violence when they have asked police to remove student protests.

As an association, CAPS stands firm in its commitment to freedom of speech and academic freedom, supporting faculty, researchers, activists, and students in their pursuit of truth and advocacy for human rights and social justice. We firmly reject any attempts to censor voices that speak out against the violations of international laws occurring in the POT and Gaza. Our conviction is that scholarship and activism are integral to the global fight for a more equitable and just world, and to bringing an end to the violence currently taking place.

The abstract submission deadline for the 2023 CAPS conference at Congress has been extended to January 15, 2023. You can find more details on our CFPs and Conferences page.

Check out our Resources page for job listings, including a posting for a Tenure-Track Professor in Gender & Women’s Studies at UNB.

CAPS will be returning to Congress, to be hosted at York University, from May 28 to 31, 2023. For more details on our conference, including the CFP (deadline December 15, 2022), please see our CFPs & Conferences Page. We look forward to welcoming cohosting keynote speakers Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Robyn Maynard alongside the Indigenous Literary Studies Association (ILSA). We hope to see you there!

EACLALS Triennial Conference 2023: 6-10 June 2023, Sorbonne Nouvelle University

“Imagining Environmental Justice in a Postcolonial World”

CALL FOR PAPERS

For the 2023 conference of EACLALS (European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies), we invite delegates to:

• bring postcolonial literatures and arts into conversation with environmentalism;
• investigate the power of narratives in all literary genres, as well as images and artistic performances, to evoke environmental injustice; and
• explore the breadth of what environmental justice may mean in postcolonial contexts.

We invite contributions for 20-minute papers or 90-minute panels addressing the conference topic. Please send a 300-word abstract for individual papers or 450-word abstract for panels, accompanied by a short biographical note on all speakers (100-150 words) and 5-6 keywords to EACLALS2023@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr by 15 October 2022.

Confirmed keynote speakers:

Amanda Boetzkes (University of Guelph, Canada)

Elizabeth DeLoughrey (University of California, Los Angeles, US)

Graham Huggan (University of Leeds, UK)

Imre Szeman (University of Waterloo, Canada)

The global ecological and climate crisis is strongly linked to modernity and its history of imperialism, colonisation, capitalism, and exploitation of resources. Postcolonial literatures foreground these connections: key texts include Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist (1974), Judith Wright’s “For a Pastoral Family” (1985), Patricia Grace’s Potiki (1986), Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water (1999), Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2005), Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006), Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2011), Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s “Tell Them” (2012), Uzma Aslam Khan’s Thinner than Skin (2012), and Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2021). These powerful stories reveal the colonial origins of ecological devastation and its dramatic consequences for the Global South. These texts have also prompted new theoretical concepts such as the “slow violence” of delayed destruction (Nixon 2013) and the “plantationocene” (Haraway 2015).

After a turn to ecocriticism developed in the anglophone world in the 1980s, with influential voices coming out of the Americas, a fruitful dialogue in the mid-2000s between the fields of postcolonialism and environmentalism (Huggan 2004, Nixon 2005) gave rise to postcolonial ecocriticism and its distinctive approach to environmental questions.

Postcolonial ecocriticism tends to focus on social ecology and its tensions, and considers nature in the contexts of human uses, built environments and degraded landscapes. Postcolonial ecocriticism sheds light on the links between colonisation and contemporary social, economic, and environmental issues. It pays heed to ways in which human exploitation transforms ecosystems, limits access to natural resources, and generates pollution and other hazards. It is wary of nostalgia for a pure landscape standing outside history, and conscious of the difficulty of representing the nonhuman environment (Cilano and DeLoughrey 2007).

To make these links between colonisation and environmental issues, postcolonial ecocriticism redirects customary postcolonial questionings by triangulating them with the relations between the human and the nonhuman. In doing so, it often favours a materialist approach, attempting to make sense of environmental issues by drawing on climate science, environmental law, geography, and other sciences, which it sometimes challenges. It is also aware of the local specificities of ecological issues linked to colonial history, while acknowledging their global context. As awareness spreads of the need to share the earth’s resources sustainably and fairly, shifting perceptions of the environment are changing people’s sense of responsibility and accountability, individual and collective. In this context, postcolonial ecocriticism reflects on better ways of inhabiting the world and promoting environmental justice.

In one of its best-known early formulations, environmental justice was what grassroots activists in the United States in the 1980s demanded in answer to the environmental injustice and racism that forces disadvantaged, vulnerable, racialised populations to bear the brunt of environmental degradation and pollution (Holifield, Chakraborty and Walker, 2018). Use of the notion of environmental justice then spread beyond the United States, in particular through the action of Indigenous peoples and the development of ideas related to social ecology, such as the “environmentalism of the poor” (Martínez-Alier 2002), social justice, and climate justice.

Topics and approaches can include, but are not limited to:

– eco-injustice and race / ethnicity

– eco-injustice and indigeneity

– eco-injustice and poverty / marginality

– environmental justice discourse and literary genre

– the language of environmental justice discourse

– the rhetoric of “toxic discourse” / “toxic politics”

– environmental justice, monolingualism, and translation issues

– environmental justice in relation to local and global contexts

– environmental justice in comparative context

– environmental justice and:

aesthetics

affect

artistic activism (“arctivism”)

capitalism

climate justice

conservation / discourses of purity / “postcolonial pastoral”

decoloniality

ecofeminism

human rights

interdisciplinarity

intersectionality

materialist approaches

multispecies justice

nature protection

neocolonialism / “toxic imperialism”

pedagogy

petrocultures

science

the nonhuman

the writer activist

tourism

transnationalism

Scientific committee: Aline Bergé (Sorbonne Nouvelle), Kathie Birat (U. of Lorraine), Jaine Chemmachery (Sorbonne U.), Cédric Courtois (U. of Lille), Xavier Garnier (Sorbonne Nouvelle), Fiona McCann (U. of Lille), Marie Mianowski (U. Grenoble Alpes), Claire Omhovère (U. Paul Valéry – Montpellier), Alexandra Poulain (Sorbonne Nouvelle), and Kerry-Jane Wallart (U. of Orléans).

For more information, please contact Christine Lorre-Johnston (Sorbonne Nouvelle, convener) at: EACLALS2023@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr

Miriam Mabrouk (University of Alberta) wins the 2022 CAPS Graduate Student Presentation Prize for the paper “‘The Moment is a Wound’: Perpetual Temporality of War and Occupation in Sinan Antoon’s The Book of Collateral Damage.“

Congratulations to Miriam Mabrouk, PhD Candidate in English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, for winning this year’s Graduate Student Presentation Prize. Congratulations also to the runners-up on on this year’s panel, Jumoke Verissimo (University of Alberta), Jonathan Nash (University of Victoria), and Thomas Hanson (Brock University). All panelists delivered compelling and original papers, which collectively made for one of the highlights of this year’s conference.

For more details, please see the judges’ comments below. Read more ›

Trent University invites applications for a one-year Limited Term Appointment in Racial Justice, Literature, and Culture in the Department of English Literature at the rank of Assistant Professor, starting August 15, 2021. Please note that this position is subject to budgetary approval.
Candidates for this position should have teaching experience and published or developing research in fields such as critical race theory, social justice, and diasporic, post-colonial, and/or global south literatures and cultures.

The candidate will be expected to teach one course during the summer term of 2022, in addition to teaching a course load of 3/3 in the regular academic sessions. Candidates should also have experience teaching introductory literature courses. This is a teaching intensive position and a record of excellence in teaching is expected. Courses to be taught will include an introductory level English literature course, ENGL 2703H “Literature and Social Justice,” ENGL 3605H “Race, Ethnicity, and Literature,” and ENGL 4451 “Postcolonial Texts.” Courses taught could also include several from among ENGL 3307H “In the Borderlands: Latino/Latina US Literature,” ENGL 3309H “African American Literature,” ENGL 3451 “Contemporary African Literature,” ENGL/CAST/INDG 3481 “Indigenous Fiction,” ENGL/CAST/INDG “Indigenous Poetry,” and ENGL 3707H “Literature and Globalization.”

Candidates are expected to have a completed PhD in English by the time of appointment or soon after is preferred. Preference will be given to candidates who self-identify as racialized (visible minority) and/or Indigenous who demonstrate an understanding of systemic racism in their research and teaching.

Candidates are invited to submit applications as PDF format via email to englishjobs@trentu.ca clearly indicating the application is for Racial Justice, Literature, and Culture. Applications should include a covering letter identifying the position for which the candidate is applying and detailing the candidate’s suitability for the position, including the relevance of the candidate’s research and teaching experience; a full curriculum vitae showing qualifications, previous experience, the names and complete contact information (including email addresses and phone numbers) of two academic referees, and confirmation to legally work in Canada; and evidence of excellence in teaching such as sample syllabuses, a teaching philosophy statement, peer evaluations of teaching, and evidence of professional development. Applicants should also provide a statement of their experience/s promoting equity, diversity, and inclusion in learning environments.

Questions about the position should be directed to Suzanne Bailey at sjbailey@trentu.ca

Deadline for Applications: June 15, 2021

Trent University is actively committed to creating a diverse and inclusive campus community and encourages applications from all qualified candidates. Trent University offers accommodation for applicants with disabilities in its recruitment processes. If you require accommodation during the recruitment process or require an accessible version of a document/publication, please contact sjbailey@trentu.ca

All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, Canadian citizens and permanent residents will be given priority.

ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature is circulating a CFP on Postcolonial Affect to our members. ARIEL is a major sponsor of our conference every year, and a journal in which many CACLALS members have appeared. Consider submitting a proposal. Details below:

Call for Papers—Special Issue of ARIEL: Postcolonial Affect

The intersection of postcolonial literary studies and affect studies challenges assumptions in each field. On the one hand, postcolonial literature belies the supposed universalisms of Eurocentric affect studies, as they are articulated within the North American and European academy (cf. Sneja Gunew, “Translating Postcolonial Affect” [2020], in Affect and Literature). Reckoning with postcolonial affect means asking what is translatable and untranslatable about affective experiences across languages and cultures. It requires assessing the ethics of representing subaltern feeling and articulating frameworks for theorizing affects outside of U.S. and European philosophic and psychoanalytic traditions. Insofar as postcolonial affect means the racialization of affect, its examination operates alongside recent work in Black Studies that challenges racist epistemic assumptions about who is imagined to be the feeling subject in western thought (cf. Tyrone S. Palmer, “‘What Feels More than Feeling?’: Theorizing the Unthinkability of Black Affect” [2017], Critical Ethnic Studies). Bringing postcolonial literature to bear on affect studies creates opportunities to both critique the parochialism of the field and to multiply methodologies for understanding what affect is and does.

On the other hand, the breadth of affect studies as it has developed in the thirty years after the “affective turn” raises questions about the affects, feelings, and emotions that have been prominently attached to the category of the postcolonial. Postcolonial literary studies have often adhered to “negative” affects, such as trauma, shame, and disillusionment. Where they have taken up emotions such as happiness and sympathy, they have often been critical of how these feelings maintain an imperial status quo (cf. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness [2010]). The recent exuberant diffusion of affect theory, however, into the fields of posthumanism, sensory studies, and environmental studies, among others, invites charting postcolonial affect anew, such that it is located not only in the relation of colonizer/colonized, but across human and nonhuman subjects, shifting diasporas, neocolonial markets, and postcolonial environments. Following Neetu Khanna’s recent provocations in The Visceral Logics of Decolonization (2020), postcolonial literary studies might then consider the contours of “revolutionary feeling.” It might ask: how does literature render the preconscious intensities of liberatory postcolonial worlds in the present and for the future? How are these narrativized as complex constellations of emotions and feelings?

This special issue of ARIEL explores postcolonial affect as a generative framework not only for analyzing the intimate workings of empire and the relational inequalities of global capitalism, but also for understanding how subjects survive and defy subjugation to imagine collective thriving. We invite essays on postcolonial literature that center the affective experiences and environments of peoples who are frequently marginalized within Euro-American affect studies, and/or that expand the scope of affect studies by showing how analyses of affect must account for histories of (neo)colonialism. Questions we ask include: What are the methodological possibilities and challenges of bridging postcolonial and affect studies? How might postcolonial affect disrupt nationalist and neoliberal discourses of progress and development that perpetuate exploitation? How does postcolonial affect enable critique of the lived immiserations of empire? What are the affects of postcolonial futurity?

Please submit abstracts of 300-500 words by August 1, 2021 to the guest editors, Katherine Hallemeier (katherine.hallemeier@okstate.edu) and Jeremy De Chavez (jeremydechavez@um.edu.mo). The guest editors will review abstracts and invite full essays (6,000-9,000 words) for submission by January 15, 2022.

Are you presenting a paper, chairing a session, or attending an event at this year’s CACLALS conference on June 7-11, 2021? If so, feel free to take a look at our updated best practices document for chairs, panelists, and audience members. It includes information on how to run a session on Zoom, and common issues that might come up during a panel.

Remember, panels this year are capped at 60 minutes, so it’s very important that chairs, panelists, and audience members respect the time limits of 10 minutes (15 minutes max) per presentation and 60 minutes per panel.