Race moves: following global manifestations of new racisms in intimate space

Abstract

This article makes tentative links between abstract global forces and the affective and material reworking of race in intimate spaces of culture and community. Using postcolonial and psychoanalytic resources the article follows enduring manifestations of race as racism surfaces and is mobilized through global shifts of people, ideas and capital. The article argues that as national borders become destabilized under globalization, existing significations of race and racism give way to reattach to migrating, vulnerable and displaced bodies. The article argues that teachers and educators in multicultural nations can begin to follow and intervene in race moves by collectively thinking through narrative histories of migration that structure national belonging and non-belonging and our relationships to each other at home and in the world.

Keywords:

• affect
• race
• racism
• globalization
• postcolonial studies
• urban teacher education

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for their support of this research.

This article is in memory of the late Dr. R. Patrick Solomon whose life work is committed to educational equity for all.

Notes

1. In other work Paul Tarc and I cite ‘the failure of multiculturalism' discourse emerging in Western nations as a move to blame the minority for the nation's trouble. See Mishra Tarc and Tarc (2011).

2. Here I am not advocating for a distinctly Canadian urban educational scholarship rather I am putting forth with those scholars mentioned, the idea that our scholarship move to transgress nation-state-fixed analytic categories because nations are made up of citizens arriving with many histories, many experiences and from all walks of life and parts of the world. Through nuanced, connecting work we might gain greater insight into specific dynamics of race structuring changing nationalisms.

3. For media coverage on York's urban diversity teacher education site, see Louise Brown's Toronto Star Article, 2008 ‘Where teachers learn diversity.'

4. See the Ontario Ministry of Education and Training document Antiracism and Ethnocultural Equity in School Boards: Guidelines for Policy development and Implementation (1993). The Ministry recently renewed its equity policy and strategy for implementation in the 2009 document entitled Ontario's Equity and Inclusive Education Strategy. It is critical to note the change from the more explicit mention of race on the basis of visible difference to the new determination of race in terms of the less visibly discernable inclusion which supports my argument in this article. It is too soon to know what the effects of this globally driven, imaginative and discursive change in the status of race in the equity policy will have on urban classrooms.

5. For more information on the exemplary and highly regarded Access policy and program at York University's Faculty of Education see http://edu.yorku.ca/bed/access.html

6. The York Centre for Community and Education at the Faculty of Education ‘enables critical, innovative, and interdisciplinary research, program development and evaluation that lead to community-engaged practices and curriculum.' For more information on the centre's work see http://www.yorku.ca/ycec/

7. For more information on this neighbourhood see jane-finch.com, a community-based website describing various grassroots community creative activities and economic initiatives.