CoDE Seminar: Conviviality at/from the border
| Dates: | 31 October 2019 |
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| Times: | All day |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Adults, Alumni, Current University students, General public |
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| Speaker: | Dr Luke de Noronha |
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This CoDE Seminar is presented by De Luke de Noronha, Simon Fellow at the University of Manchester, whose research focuses on immigration control, deportation and racism.
Paul Gilroy’s theorisations of ‘conviviality’ have been profoundly generative, leading some sociologists to announce a ‘conviviality turn’. However, there is a risk that, as Les Back and Shamser Sinha put it, conviviality becomes a by-word for saccharine diversity fantasies. In other words, conviviality gets reduced to everyday diversity and ‘getting along’ across and despite cultural difference, which can only be based on a partial, incomplete or mis reading of Gilroy’s admittedly difficult argument in After Empire. Importantly, Gilroy finds conviviality so precious precisely because the background to everyday multiculture is the nightmare of resurgent nationalism, colonial melancholia and neoliberal statecraft. Without that backdrop, conviviality loses purchase on the relation between culture and power. In this context, Luke's argument is that we might usefully consider conviviality from and at the border - from the wings of Immigration Removal Centres, or in the life stories of ‘deportees’. I suggest that listening to people in detention or post-deportation reminds us not only that there is a radical openness to lived culture in multi-status Britain - i.e. many people subject to immigration control demonstrate an outernational sensibility and are often ‘against race’ - but also demonstrates why conviviality is such a vital resource of hope in dark times. In short, thinking about conviviality from the border might help us recalibrate and reappraise the significance of multiculture in the context of intensifying racist state violence.
Speaker
Dr Luke de Noronha
Role: Simon Fellow
Organisation: University of Manchester
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
G0.20/0.21
Arthur Lewis Building
Manchester
