The 6th Vienna Lecture in Canadian Studies in collab. with the GAIN – Gender: Ambivalent In_Visibilities research platform at the Univ. of Vienna (Web)

Time: 29.06.2023, 19.00 Uhr
Venue: Hofburg, Schreyvogelsaal, 1010 Vienna

The Centre for Canadian Studies at the University of Vienna is proud to announce the 6th Vienna Lecture in Canadian Studies by Andrea Davis of York University at the Hofburg. The event is free and open to the public.
Andrea Davis is Professor of Black Cultures of the Americas. In her most recent book „Horizon, Sea, Sound: Caribbean and African Women’s Cultural Critiques of Nation“ (2022), she imagines new reciprocal relationships beyond the competitive forms of belonging suggested by the nation-state. The book employs the tropes of horizon, sea, and sound as a critique of nation-state discourses and formations, including multicultural citizenship, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and the hierarchical nuclear family.
Drawing on Tina Campt’s discussion of Black feminist futurity, Davis offers the concept future now, which is both central to Black freedom and a joint social justice project that rejects existing structures of white supremacy. Calling for new affiliations of community among Black, Indigenous, and other racialized women, and offering new reflections on the relationship between the Caribbean and Canada, she articulates a diaspora poetics that privileges our shared humanity. In advancing these claims, Davis turns to the expressive cultures (novels, poetry, theater, and music) of Caribbean and African women artists in Canada, including work by Dionne Brand, M. NourbeSe Philip, Esi Edugyan, Ramabai Espinet, Nalo Hopkinson, Amai Kuda, and Djanet Sears. Davis considers the ways in which the diasporic characters these artists create redraw the boundaries of their horizons, invoke the fluid histories of the Caribbean Sea to overcome the brutalization of plantation histories, use sound to enter and reenter archives, and shapeshift to survive in the face of conquest. The book will interest readers of literary and cultural studies, critical race theories, and Black diasporic studies. (Web)

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Katharina Wiedlack in collab. with the GAIN – Gender: Ambivalent In_Visibilities research platform at the Univ. of Vienna (Web)

Time: Fr., 02.06.2023, 6:30 pm
Venue: Universität Wien Hauptgebäude, Hörsaal 1, Universitätsring 1, 1010 Wien

This presentation places US discourses of Ukrainian migration following Russia’s 2022 invasion and of post-Soviet migration following the fall of European state socialism in the late 1980s in the framework of CRT and US migration and refugee studies. Post-Soviet migrants are generally represented as fundamentally different from other contemporary, nonwhite US migrants through association with mythologized narratives of turn of the twentieth century Europeans who achieved full integration into a pan-European whiteness through upward mobility and the severing of transnational ties. Following Russia’s invasion, the US media began to acknowledge the transnationality of Ukrainian Americans in ways that render this portion of the post-Soviet diaspora more similar to other US migrants, while also employing critical narratives of whiteness to highlight the preferential admission of the Ukrainian refugees in European countries and the United States when compared to migrant populations racialized as nonwhite. As this coverage rightly highlights the racialization of US and European migration policies, it has also obscured the deterioration of their migration and refugee systems, as manifested in the inadequacy of even this more privileged response to Ukrainian refugee migration.

Claudia Sadowski-Smith is a professor at the Arizona State University.

Source: Newsletter der Forschungsplattform GAIN