Sie können sich nun bis zum 31. Januar mit diesem Formular für die Tagung anmelden und Ihre Übernachtungen im Tagungshotel buchen.
Weitere Infos und Updates zur Konferenz gibt es hier: http://www.kanada-studien.org/jahrestagung/
Autor: GKS
International Conference on Canadian Studies at Centre for Canadian Studies, Jadavpur University, 14-15 February, 2023
Deadline: January 26, 2023
Humanities and social sciences have already made the inevitable inter-disciplinary turn towards an understanding of the natural sciences which deal with ecology and the environment. This turntowards the natural sciences, needless to say, takes into account the nuances of how humans have inhabited, changed, and engaged with the planet. Nature and environment are comprehended as entities that cannotbe understood holistically if the functioning of human agency is discounted. Human agency and the activities that they manifest have apparently caused some irreversible changes tothe planet and hence their contributions in terms of how the ecosystems develop, falter, and function cannot be ignored anymore (Dipesh Chakraborty, 2021).These activities also involve steps that proceed towards different conservationist and sustenance practices— and not just resource extraction, pollution, technological ravage and other negative practiceswhich are often conflated as sole features that define the human relationship with natureand the environment. Though scholars are at a quandary with respect to realising if the ‘negative’ effects of human agency on nature are irreconcilable or not, efforts to understand the consequences of the environment/environmental change on human historyare also being undertaken in the humanities worldwide. This attention has opened up newer ways of looking at phenomena like imperialism, colonialism, post-colonialism, and globalisation. In a colonial and neo-colonial order, environmental degradation, or in other words, ‘taming of nature’, is often validated by asserting the need of a progressive nation that is open to the idea of a technological boom (Ursula Heise, 2006).This dependence on technology for the functioning of our lives— the over-encompassing influence of the ‘technosphere’ — is apparently very difficult to exterminate.It has percolated and intermeshed itself inextricably in our relationship/understanding of the ecologiesthat we inhabit (Peter Haff, 2014;2017). Nonetheless, humans have also proceeded towards the realisation that it is the ‘world’ that will precede and succeed them and stand testament to the inter-generational time and values. Hence a lot of attention has been directed towards the redressal of the ‘irreconcilable changes’ that human activities have caused to the environment — climate change being one of them Climate activists, conservationists, and sustenance policy makers (like David Suzuki in Canada) have emerged globally to address and redress these changes and have tried to contest the very utility-based relationship humans have with the environment. This requires individuals to go beyond an understanding of human engagement with nature as ‘means’ to a beneficial (mostly monetary) ‘end’, and to denounce an existent hierarchisation between different species that inhabit an ecosystem (Arne Naess 1989).
RIAS Vol. 16, Fall–Winter (2/2023)
Deadline: March 30, 2023
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a drastic loss of human life worldwide. An unprecedented challenge to the human existence and survival on the global level in the post-World War-II history, the pandemic caused devastating economic and social disruption. Over six million people died, countless others lost their jobs, often falling into extreme poverty, thousands of businesses folded. Suicide statistics skyrocketed; the count of isolation-related depression cases has never been higher, and mental health, especially among the youngest, has become imperiled. The impact of the pandemic has been so abrasive that human perceptions of the essence of life have undergone an enormous transformation. And although the Ruscist invasion of Ukraine has diverted the world’s attention from the pandemic, millions of people world-wide continue living under the constant threat of the virus. Beyond doubt, the experience of the pestilence affected everyone. Yet, a renewed focus on the fundamental truths of life, such as survival, livelihood, human dignity, and basic human rights, much as many a government would prefer to avoid it, is an absolute necessity.
https://dukeupress.edu/biopolitics-geopolitics-life
The contributors to Biopolitics, Geopolitics, Life investigate biopolitics and geopolitics as two distinct yet entangled techniques of settler-colonial states across the globe, from the Americas and Hawai‘i to Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. Drawing on literary and cultural studies, social sciences, political theory, visual culture, and film studies, they show 
how biopolitics and geopolitics produce norms of social life and land use that delegitimize and target Indigenous bodies, lives, lands, and political formations. Among other topics, the contributors explore the representations of sexual violence against Native women in literature, Indigenous critiques of the carceral state in North America, Indigenous elders’ refusal of dominant formulations of aging, the governance of Indigenous peoples in Guyana, the displacement of Guaraní in Brazil, and the 2016 rule to formally acknowledge a government-to-government relationship between the US federal government and the Native Hawaiian community. Throughout, the contributors contend that Indigenous life and practices cannot be contained and defined by the racialization and dispossession of settler colonialism, thereby pointing to the transformative potential of an Indigenous-centered decolonization.
Contributors René Dietrich, Jacqueline Fear-Segal, Mishuana Goeman, Alyosha Goldstein, Sandy Grande, Michael R. Griffiths, Shona N. Jackson, Kerstin Knopf, Sabine N. Meyer, Robert Nichols, Mark Rifkin, David Uahikeaikaleiʻohu Maile
Guest Editors: Caroline Nepton Hotte and Marie-Eve Bradette
Deadline: December 1, 2023
« Il y a longtemps, fort longtemps, le monde tel que nous le connaissons aujourd’hui n’était qu’un vaste océan. Il était peu habité, sauf par quelques animaux aquatiques. À cette époque, les ancêtres des Wendat vivaient plutôt au-dessus, dans un autre monde : le Monde-Ciel. »
Louis-Karl Picard-Sioui, La femme venue du ciel. Mythe wendat de la création
In Comparing Mythologies, Cree writer Tomson Highway employs the term “mythology” and defines it in relation to Cree stories, but also to Greek and Christian mythologies, which he compares and distinguishes from First People’s epistemologies. In Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back, Nihsnaabe scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson brings this idea further when she suggests that Indigenous epistemologies are opposed to and resisting colonial supremacy12. Both thinkers are thus proposing that Indigenous myths and cosmologies are creating and transmitting Indigenous knowledge systems. In this perspective, Highway writes that “mythology defines, mythology maps out, the collective subconscious, the collective dream world of races of people, the collective spirit of races of people, the collective spiritual nervous system, if you will, where every cord, every wire, every filament has a purpose and a function, every twitch a job in the way that collective human body, mind, and soul moves and operates from one day to the next and the next and the next13”. He insists on the ways in which myths function and are governing relationships with the land and the cosmological world. Nonetheless, what we wish to bring to light in relation to Highway’s conception of mythology here is, on the one hand, that stories map the collective consciousness, and on the other, that myths are turned towards the future (one day to the next and the next and the next). We are insisting on this aspect because the connection between space and time is key to current Indigenous literary and artistic studies.
Over the last decade in the Francophone context, and for the last twenty years in the Anglophone milieu, in America, New Zealand and Australia, studies that address the spatio-temporal dimensions of Indigenous literary, visual and film works have proliferated14, even suggesting the establishment of a significant critical turn. From it then emerged a current that gives way to Indigenous Futurisms15, and that draws its source from the very core of cosmological narratives that link the terrestrial world to that of the stars, but most often focusing on the world below.
In this issue, we wish to consider another way of thinking, imagining and (re)creating Indigenous mythological stories: that of the celestial world or what Wendat writer Louis-Karl Picard-Sioui calls the “Sky-World”. This Sky-World of the Wendat creation story “ressemblait beaucoup à celui que nous connaissons aujourd’hui ici-bas16”, but it also had its singularities. For example, while this world was bathed in the yellow light of the flowers of a large apple tree, the world below had to create stars, the Sun and the Moon to guide the Woman from the sky’s journey on Turtle Island17. A perennial relationship between the world above and the world below was therefore necessary to ensure the Woman from the sky’s survival, and eventually the survival of all human and other-than-human beings (fauna, flora, spirits, etc.).
Among the Cree and the Innu, in Northern Quebec, the young Tshakapesh, at the end of his life on Earth, is the one through whom day and night came to be. To reach the Sky, he climbed a tree, and with his breath, he made it grow, which gave him a vision of the whole country. He invited his sister to join him in the land of the Sky. As usual, he decided to set snares, and he caught the Sun without wanting to. A plan is then put together to release the Sun while the Moon continues her course18.
Within Ojibwe astronomy, “the correlation between sky and earth, or above and below, is an important underlying theme19”. In their book Ojibwe Sky Star Map Constellation Guide. An Introduction to Ojibwe Star Knowledge, Annette Lee, William Wilson, Jeffrey Tibbets, and Carl Gawboy explore this knowledge through an exploration of traditional constellation stories20. Through these stories, the authors seek to revitalize Elders’ knowledge of the stars and account for celestial knowledge as a mirror of life on Earth. The constellations and the stories associated with them thus become teachings that change as the seasons pass.
By offering to think about stories that speak of the celestial world and the stars that populate it, we see a change of perspective, but also a transformation of creative practices. But how can we transform them and set our eyes on the immensity of the sky? How, finally, can we dream of the stars? By doing so, it is perhaps the ways of reporting, symbolizing, and expressing the relationship to space, but also to time, to the intersection of past, present and future, that will be changed, because “when looking far away in astronomy, we are actually looking back in time because of the time it takes for light to travel across vast distances21”.
In this issue of MuseMedusa, we are wondering whether the fictional and artistic possibilities opened by an engagement with the world of the stars might not allow us to think differently about our relationship to the world, to space and time, and, in doing so, about our relationships with human and other-than-human beings. We therefore invite the submission of critical texts and creative works (literary or visual) that ask, but are not limited to, the following questions or that address the following perspectives:
– The transposing and reinterpreting of celestial myths in contemporary Indigenous literary or artistic works.
– The future tense transposition of celestial narratives.
– Temporality and its links with the terrestrial world, the underground world and the Sky world.
– Grandmother Moon and the revitalization of Indigenous feminine knowledge.
– The possibilities of science-fiction to reimagine astral knowledge.
– The intersection of Haudenosaunee creation myth, science fiction, and the digital (in Skawennati works for example).
– The connections between astronomical, literary and Indigenous mythological knowledge.
– Is the sky a decolonized space? Alternatively, how can the sky be decolonized through Indigenous stories, arts and literatures?
This call is part of the current decolonial movement in Canada and beyond. In the spirit of transforming and turning the power relations between Indigenous peoples and literary and academic institutions, we encourage those who submit a proposal to consider ethics and respectful engagement with Indigenous peoples’ knowledge23.
Those interested in submitting a critical or theoretical paper, a visual work or a creative text for this issue are asked to send it along to musemedusa@umontreal.ca, by December 1st, 2023, cc’ing Caroline Nepton Hotte (hotte.caroline@uqam.ca) and Marie-Eve Bradette (marie-eve.bradette@lit.ulaval.ca). Each contribution must be accompanied by a brief bio-bibliographic note, two abstracts (except for creative works) and two lists of 10 keywords, one in French and one in English (see Guidelines on the website). For any additional information, you can contact the two guest editors for this issue.