Welcoming Emerita Professor Sneja Gunew

Good morning everyone. My name is Daniella Trimboli. I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at Deakin University in Melbourne and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Intercultural Studies. On behalf of my journal colleagues, I extend a very warm welcome to all of you on Day 2 of Migrating Concepts. I was talking to one of these colleagues on the trip over to Singapore a couple of days ago about the embodied labour that this kind of work on intercultural studies tends to involve, and that I don’t feel we talk enough about. Even if we are not autobiographically-motivated by the research that we do, the mode of self-reflexivity that we all demand of ourselves; that we all should and hopefully demand of ourselves, lends itself I think to a particular mode of being-in-the-world that can be quite tiring. And yesterday was quite tiring. It was compelling, and it was motivating, and it was an extremely productive day—but it was tiring. So, I just wanted to take a small pause before introducing our wonderful keynote, to thank those of you who came along yesterday committed to doing that tiring work, and committed to doing it in a considered and collaborative manner. I am really looking forward to more of that today. Now, onto today’s keynote speaker, Emerita Professor Sneja Gunew. Professor Gunew is currently cross-affiliated at Canada’s University of British Columbia between the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice, and the Department of English. In many ways, this cross-affiliation hints at one of the important aspects of Professor Gunew’s eminent scholarship, notably its ability to create critical dialogue between formerly disparate fields, theories and cultural phenomena, and to connect them in a way that allows each one to become more rigorous and yet more supple. In Australia, Professor Gunew has been a key activist in the space of multiculturalism and “ethnic” arts and culture. She pioneered migrant literature, bringing it into view in Australian literature and the literary canon at large. Crucially, she always ensured this view had a sharp feminist lens. Professor Gunew published widely on multicultural, postcolonial and feminist critical theory and co-edited four anthologies of Australian women’s and multicultural writings: Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct and A Reader in Feminist Knowledge (Routledge 1990-91). She compiled (with others) A Bibliography of Australian Multicultural Writers (the first such compilation in Australia) and co-edited Striking Chords: Multicultural Literary Interpretations (1992), the first collection of critical essays to deal with ethnic minority writings in the Australian context. She set up the first library collection of ethnic minority writings in Australia. Continuing her focus on cultural difference, Gunew edited (with Anna Yeatman) Feminism and the Politics of Difference (1993) and (with Fazal Rizvi) Arts for a Multicultural Australia: Issues and Strategies (1994). I must say that when I was preparing this introduction I was reminded of why it was so difficult to track down her location in 2010 when I set about convincing her to be my PhD supervisor! Indeed, at the risk of being facetious, I can’t help but think that Professor Gunew is a migrating concept herself!—and an incredibly inspiring one at that. Anyone who has followed her work will have, in one form or another, followed her across East and West Europe, South-East Asia, the Pacific Rim, and this is to say nothing of the temporal and spatial dimensions that Gunew threads into her selection of case studies and accompanying theoretical propositions. Professor Gunew completed her BA and PhD in Australia, at the University of Melbourne and University of Newcastle respectively, and was awarded her MA at the University of Toronto. She has taught extensively in Australia, Canada, and England. Since 1993 Professor Gunew has been based in Canada. She was Director of the Centre for Research in Women’s and Gender Studies between 2002 and 2007; and Associate Principal of the College for Interdisciplinary Studies from 2008 to 2011 at the University of British Columbia. She was the North American editor of Sage’s Feminist Theory between 2006 and 2010. Her work turned more sharply to comparative multiculturalisms and diasporic literatures and their intersections with national and global cultural formations, as mapped in her books Framing Marginality: Multicultural Literary Studies (1994) and Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms (Routledge 2004). Her most recent book – Postcolonial writers as neo-cosmopolitan mediators – was published last year, intervening into cosmopolitanism scholarship in a manner reflective of her incisive, bold, and yet utterly graceful scholarly approach. I know I speak for many people in this room when I say how enabling I find this new book. Before I hand the floor over, a little anecdote. Last week, I started re-reading the short conversational book between Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings the Nation State? Upon reflecting on the performative politics created when the national anthem of the United States of America was sung in street protests – in Spanish – Butler stated: “I want to suggest to you that neither Agamben nor Arendt can quite theorize this particular act of singing, and that we have yet to develop the language we need to do so. It would also involve rethinking certain ideas of sensate democracy, of aesthetic articulation within the political sphere, and the relationship between song and what is called ‘the public.’” I shot up, in the middle of the botanic gardens where I was at the time, and exclaimed, excitedly, to no one: “Sneja! Sneja has helped develop the language we need in her new book!” Sneja might actually tell me that she hasn’t, and that these two things are unrelated, but that is conversation for another time. Please join me in giving a very warm welcome to Professor Sneja Gunew. Migrating Concepts Day 2 Welcome