Opening Panel Discussion with UBC Graduate Students and Faculty

Critical Nationalisms, Counterpublics addresses our shared situation of living amongst resurgent and competing nationalisms at a time when our critical and community discourses refuse or redefine the category of ‘nation’ or use other categories entirely. In a context saturated with resurgent populism, white supremacy, colonial settler violence, what do our forms and communities of resistance offer as a counter to the renewed circulation of nationalist language, feeling and action? How do we enact our critical and creative capacities against or despite this daily reality? Later speakers in the series will address the topic from their groundings in black studies, critical theory, anti-colonial resistance and the psychic life of power. The panel discussion will feature doctoral candidates from the department of English connecting their doctoral research to the series themes. Topics include critical Indigenous nationalisms, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and nationalism and sexuality within literature. Each panelist will be giving short presentations on their work followed by a general discussion open to all.

Deena Dinat: African studies, postapartheid South African literature, nation and nationalism studies, world literature, postcolonial theory, critical race studies, subaltern studies, capitalism and the postcolony, photography, urban studies.

Sheila Giffen: Postcolonial studies, queer theory, critical race studies, psychoanalysis, colonial medicine, transnational AIDS narratives.

Madeleine Reddon: Global avant-garde and modernist literatures, postcolonialism, Indigenous and Black studies, psychoanalysis, memorial practices.