Abstract
This study explores the politics of engagement in community- based approaches to countering radicalization in Canada with the intent of shedding light on the complexities that surround its application vis-a- vis Muslim youth. A host of activities characterize prevailing community- engaged approaches to countering radicalization in Canada. This article chooses to critique the Canadian state’s latest ventures in the arena of educational awareness intended to expose Muslim youth to counter- radicalization narratives. As per the tenets of critical race theory, this article rejects the myth of emancipatory governance upon which contemporary policy narratives in Canada are founded. Instead, these activities are viewed through the prism of Etienne Balibar’s neo- racism. This article understands youth- targeted community engagement as a form of policed multiculturalism that exploits minority groups under the guise of empowerment. The article illustrates this through its critical deconstruction of the children’s comic book Radicalishow, an educational output produced by the Montreal Centre for the Prevention of Radicalization. Borrowing from the teachings of Edward Said’s Orientalism, this article argues that Radicalishow exemplifies and perpetuates centuries old patterns of domination between the occident and the orient through its active construction of the Muslim as the dangerous and nefarious other in need of watching, rehabilitation and control.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Writer Monica Kim–Gagnon documented the contestations of racialized artists and activists fighting exclusionary Canada Arts Council policies and cuts to provincial arts budgets; in 2004 curator Gerald McMaster fought critics of the National Museum of Indian Art who denied that Indigenous worldviews could constitute a legitimate exhibitionary principal; in 2011 curator and scholar Andrea Fatona’s doctoral dissertation revealed that arts council policies prioritize a European sense of national identity. Black scholar Rinaldo Walcott adds to this philosophical discussion by considering the ontological impact of racially exclusionary practices in Canadian art institutions. Walcott describes a “culture of whiteness ” and dismissal of Black Canadian life as a national State-building strategy.
In his keynote address entitled “Conditions Critical’: Anti-Blackness, the Canadian Artworld and Future Collectivities.”at the “The State of Blackness : From Production to Presentation” conference, Walcott exposed two layers of anti-Black forces: coalitions of racialized artists that do not ultimately support Black artists in the long-run, and Canadian cultural institutions that reject Black Canadian art history and lineage. Combined, Walcott argues, these forces have serious reverberations in undermining Black personhood and denying its place in the constitution of the Canadian state - and even humanity. (Walcott 2014)
- 2.
I follow Rinaldo Walcott’s use of the “Euro-” prefix to distinguish between the European Western hemisphere and the Indigenous Western hemisphere.
- 3.
My curiosity about the Christian roots of racism was sparked by the book Racism, in which critical race historian Robert Miles attributes white supremacy to the Christian binaries of sin and virtue (Miles: 2003, 16), but also disablism and transphobia, a lesson that has profoundly expanded my sense of solidarity with these identities. This led me to three texts that do not cite Christianity , but clarify the connections between racism, transphobia and disablism: Alison Kafer’s 2013 book Feminist, Queer, Crip, A.J. Withers’ 2013 book Disability Politics and Theory and the 2015 Disability Justice Statement by author Patty Berne and the Sins Invalid collective.
- 4.
Other notable white cube church architects include Le Corbusier and Fritz Metzger.
Bibliography
Beneke, T. (1997). Proving manhood: Reflections on men and sexism (Vol. 5). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bennett, T. (1994). The exhibitionary complex. Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory 127.
Bourdieu, P., Darbel, A., & Schnapper, D. (1991). The love of art: European art museums and their public. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.
Cole, D., & Chaikin, I. (1990). An iron hand upon the people: The law against the potlatch on the Northwest Coast. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Duncan, C. (2005). Civilizing rituals: Inside public art museums. London: Routledge.
Eggleston, R. B. (1901). Four Days at Chicago: Descriptive and Historical. Richmond.
Fanon, F. (2008). Black skin, white masks. New York: Grove press.
Fatona, A. M. (2011). “Where Outreach Meets Outrage”: Racial equity at The Canada Council for the arts. PhD diss., University of Toronto.
Foucault, M. (2007). Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78. Springer.
Foucault, M., & Carrette, J. (2013). Religion and culture. Routledge.
Foucault, M., Martin, L. H., Gutman, H., & Hutton, P. H. (1988). Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault. Univ of Massachusetts Press.
Friedman, J. B. (2000). The monstrous races in medieval art and thought. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
Frye, N., & Lee, A. A. (2006). The great code: The Bible and literature (Vol. 19). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Gagnon, M. (2000). Other conundrums: Race, culture, and Canadian art. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press.
Hill, R. W. (2007). Graveyard and giftshop: Fighting over the McMichael Canadian art collection. Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity and Contemporary Art (pp. 211–216). Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Igloliorte, H. (2011). ‘We were so far away’: Exhibiting Inuit oral histories of residential schools. In Curating difficult knowledge: Violent pasts in public places n.d.(pp. 23–40). Houndmills/New York: Basingstoke Hampshire/Palgrave Macmillan
Joiner, T. E. (2013). Sin in the city: Chicago and revivalism, 1880–1920. Ann Arbor: University of Missouri Press.
López, I. H. (2015). Dog whistle politics: How coded racial appeals have reinvented racism and wrecked the middle class. New York: Oxford University Press.
McMaster, G. (2011). “2020: Creating a new vision for native voice.” Past, present, and future: Challenges of the National Museum of the American Indian (pp. 85–105). Washington, DC: Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.
McMaster, G., & Trafzer, C. E. (2004). Our universes: Traditional knowledge shapes our world. Native Universe: Voices of Indian America, 40–65.
Miles, R., & Brown, M. (2003). Racism. Hove: Psychology Press.
O’Doherty, B. (1976). Inside the white cube: Notes on the gallery space. Artforum, 14(7), 24–30.
Schwarz, R. (1958). The church incarnate: The sacred function of Christian architecture. Chicago: Henry Regnery.
Strong, R. (Ed.). (2017). The Oxford history of Anglicanism, volume III: Partisan Anglicanism and its global expansion 1829-c. 1914. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
Sweetenham, C. (2006). Robert the Monk’s History of the first crusade. Historia Iherosolimitana (Vol. 11). Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd..
The New English Bible: Companion to the New Testament. (1972).
Truth and Reconciliation Commission. (2015a). Canada’s residential schools: The history, Part 1 Origins to 1939. Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission. (2015b). What we have learned. Principles of truth and reconciliation. Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Walcott, R. (2014, March 2). Conditions critical: Anti-blackness, the Canadian artworld and future collectivities. Accessed online 1 Jan 2016.
Williams, D. A. (1996). Deformed discourse: The function of the monster in mediaeval thought and literature. Montréal: McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Appendices
Appendix 1
Psalter Map ca. 1260
Detail of monstrous races
Appendix 2
Corpus Christi Church
Rudolf Schwartz
Aachen, Germany
1928–1930
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lim, E. (2018). Renounce or Perish. In: Sefa Dei, G., Hilowle, S. (eds) Cartographies of Race and Social Difference. Critical Studies of Education, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97076-9_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97076-9_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-97075-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-97076-9
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)