This Red Line Goes Straight to your Heart by Madhur Anand

Review of Madhur Anand\u27s This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Hear

Racism as a Workload and Bargaining Issue

My main contention is that racism should be read beyond the registers of discrimination, human rights, or harassment – rather, I approach racism as a workload issue that labour organizations and employers need to address at the level of collective bargaining. To illustrate this argument, I focus on racism and workload as it relates to Black faculty, faculty of colour, and Indigenous faculty in universities and colleges in Canada, although the argument can be applied to other job types and other places. While many unions have policies and statements in support of local, national and international anti-racist struggles, the idea of racism as a workload issue has not been seriously taken up by unions/associations, or for that matter by anti-racist activists on university/college campuses. I offer reasons why racism is a workload issue, and consider the potential role of unions in addressing racism

Decolonizing Sikh Studies : A Feminist Manifesto

n celebrating the epistemological reform and empowerment of non-white peoples in the academy, we propose a manifesto that seeks to dislodge the complacencies within Sikh Studies and within Sikh communities, and invite non-Sikhs to engage with radical Sikhi social justice. By dwelling at feminist intersections of postcolonial studies, decolonial studies, and decolonization studies, we are inspired to share the radical possibilities of Sikh Studies, and we also urge Sikh Studies and Sikh people to inhabit an explicit political orientation of insurrection and subversion. Importantly, such a feminist decolonial orientation may well hold promise for other fields of study on the margins as well. In particular, we foreground eight points of action: gendering Sikh Studies; de-policing intimate desire and the diversity of relationships; disrupting Eurocentric knowledge production; de-territorializing diasporas; challenging caste politics; disrupting Islamophobia; undoing our roles in contemporary colonialisms; and fostering care and responsibility for the nonhuman world. In this manifesto we hope to develop interdisciplinary connections, critical interventions, and broader alliances to cultivate debates and action that both challenge tradition and participatewithin broader political campaigns for social justice

Rethinking culture and cultural : the politics of meaning-making

In North American contemporary political thought, theorists have increasingly turned their attention to questions of identity/difference. In particular, liberal multiculturalism has emerged as the dominant public and normative site to address such questions, specifically those related to claims of culture. I explore two key aspects of the theoretical and historical lacuna in liberal multiculturalism: a) how (through processes of signification) and b) why (as a result of arrangements of power) members of dominant and subordinated social groups are differentially located within specific socio-historical contexts. Through multidisciplinary critical approaches, I analyze liberal multiculturalism both broadly and specifically; this encompasses a critique of two of the leading liberal multicultural theories in the discourse — namely those of Will Kymlicka and Charles Taylor — and an assessment of culture as a central organizing concept. Overall, I explore how and why liberal multiculturalism does not fully grasp the complex terrain of identity/difference politics. At best, I contend, it only partially captures the complexity of issues at stake, and at worst it misunderstands, obscures, and erases multiple dimensions of this politics. This is, however, more than simply a project of criticism; it also a re-conceptualization of the way in which identity/difference politics should be theorized. Chiefly, I argue that a conceptual shift from culture to cultural has the potential to open up theoretical and political considerations closed off by liberal multiculturalism, especially those related to the constitution of identities, difference, non-difference and power. As such, in political theory what distinguishes this project from other critical analyses is not a revision of the culture concept but a shift to an alternate concept. The central contribution of this shift lies in radically repositioning the analytical focus away from the object of culture to the processes of meaning-making that constitute identities and relations. To illuminate the theoretical insights of the shift to cultural I explore a number of case studies. These focus on the processes that signify Deaf, transsexual, immigrant, and Indigenous women's identities. The cases demonstrate that the conceptual shift to cultural has the potential tp expand, interrogate, and complicate the study of identity/difference politics. The final chapter concludes by considering the political implications of the shift to cultural for liberal-democratic principles and practices.Arts, Faculty ofPolitical Science, Department ofGraduat

Unsettling settler colonialism: The discourse and politics of settlers, and solidarity with Indigenous nations

Our goal in this article is to intervene and disrupt current contentious debates regarding the predominant lines of inquiry bourgeoning in settler colonial studies, the use of ‘settler’, and the politics of building solidarities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. Settler colonial studies, ‘settler’, and solidarity, then, operate as the central themes of this paper. While somewhat jarring, our assessment of the debates is interspersed with our discussions in their original form, as we seek to explore possible lines of solidarity, accountability, and relationality to one another and to decolonization struggles both locally and globally. Our overall conclusion is that without centering Indigenous peoples’ articulations, without deploying a relational approach to settler colonial power, and without paying attention to the conditions and contingency of settler colonialism, studies of settler colonialism and practices of solidarity run the risk of reifying (and possibly replicating) settler colonial as well as other modes of domination