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Introduction
The Centre for South Asian Studies at the University of Toronto and the University of Windsor jointly host "Imagining Collectives: Continuities, Changes and Contestations," the second annual Tamil Studies Conference from May 31 - June 2, 2007. This conference will bring together Tamil Studies scholars from North America, Europe, South Asia, and Australasia. Over 40 scholars from disciplines ranging from Anthropology, Archaeology, Diaspora Studies, History, Linguistics, Literature, Political Studies, Psychology, Public Health, Religion, Sociology and Theatre Studies will present papers.
The annual conferences have the following goals:
- To make Toronto an important centre for Tamil Studies in North America.
- To bring the Toronto Tamil community into a creative relationship with both the University of Toronto and the academy of Tamil Studies scholars in North America.
- To provide North American scholars with a regular opportunity to present their work before their academic colleagues and informed members of the Tamil community.
- To introduce students in Toronto to the diverse disciplines of Tamil Studies and the scholars pursuing them in North America.
- To enable scholars working on Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka to engage with each other’s work and to develop a more comparative approach to the study of these Tamil regions.
- To make the Tamil diaspora an important subject of academic study and engagement.
- To publish selected conference papers.
Theme
Contemporary scholarship raises challenging questions in
understanding the continuities and transformations of Tamil collectives.
Yet questions of "nation" and "identity" are critical to political and
social movements and self-fashioning in the Tamil regions. The
continuities and disruptions of "nation" and "identity" are also
particularly salient to diasporic Tamil communities engaged in
articulating and transforming a sense of "Tamilness" they can inhabit.
The conference organisers have, therefore, invited scholars to submit
papers about the history of the formation, elaboration, transformation,
interpretation and contestation of collectives and identities within the
Tamil speaking regions of Southern India, Sri Lanka and the Diaspora
throughout history and in our scholarly disciplines.
In keeping with our emphasis on the Tamil diaspora as a critical subject
within Tamil Studies there are certain panels concentrating on the study
of linguistic practices and social issues in the diaspora.