This year (2008) we celebrate the 40 years anniversary of the start of the movement that led to the formation of the Third World Liberation Front and the student strike in 1969 at UC-Berkeley that resulted in the formation of our Department of Ethnic Studies. As a commemoration of this event, this graduate student conference attempts to discuss the challenges of Ethnic Studies for the 21st century and the challenges of the 21st Century for Ethnic Studies. Ethnic Studies is a result of the 1960s civil rights movements and decolonial struggles in the United States. Although focused predominantly in the United States, these movements always made connections with the decolonization struggles in the Third World. Departments of Ethnic Studies proliferated as a result of student strikes demanding programs that would address the history, epistemic perspective and anti-racist struggles of people of color in the United States challenging white supremacy's knowledge production and epistemology. For the past four decades, Ethnic Studies Departments have been the central arenas for the decolonization of knowledge and for cutting edge work in the intersectionality of race, gender, sexual and class oppression, developing critical perspectives toward both the knowledge production of the traditional disciplines in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, as well as Area Studies.

After four decades, dominant Westernized/Eurocentric/Capitalist/Patriarchal elites all over the world developed new forms of colonialism, or what Kwame Nkruma called since the 1960s neo-colonialism, as the latest stage of imperialism. Today the transition from colonialism to neo-colonialism in the Third World as well as inside the First World represents new challenges to decolonial struggles. The end of legal racism (Jim Crow) inside the USA and the end of colonial administrations in the Third World did not imply the end of colonial relations in the world at large. Formal decolonization in the form of “independence” in the Third World or in the form of formal “equal rights” in the First World did not imply real independence or real equal rights. Abstract equality or appearance of equality conceals real profound historical inequalities. If the First World shifted its strategy in the Third World from colonialism to neo-colonialism, the First World shifted its strategy from apartheid to neo-apartheid forms of domination against the Third World inside the First World. These shifts create little if any changes for the struggles of indigenous peoples around the world, but do however restructure the grounds for solidarity for all people on the underside of modernity. New colonial strategies of domination and exploitation have developed since the sixties as a backlash against the achievements of those decolonial struggles. Neoliberalism, militarism, coup-de-etats, the policing of color communities, the prison-industrial complex, and the recent occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Patriot Act, and the re-emergence of Islamophobia at a world-scale represent new challenges for decolonial struggles and Ethnic Studies scholarship. Today a significant amount of U.S. Americans have turned their racist fantasies against Arabs and Muslims in general and Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans in particular.

What kinds of theoretical perspectives and forms of knowledge are required to address these neo-colonial and neo-apartheid structures? Can the paradigms in Ethnic Studies provide answers to these challenges? What kinds of redefinitions in the field of Ethnic Studies are required today? Moreover, within the next decades White America will become a demographic minority while ¨minorities¨ will become a demographic majority. If Ethnic Studies emerged during a context where minorities where a demographic minority, what kind of decolonial theoretical updates in our perspectives and what paradigm shifts are required to address the challenge implied by White America no longer constituting a demographic majority?

Topics for papers may address the following subjects, but are not limited to them.

• Post-Comparative Ethnic Studies or the Philosophy of Liberation
• Ethnic Studies outside of the territorial United States
• Ethnic Studies and the Political Economy of the 21st Century
• Theories and Methods of Comparative Diasporas
• Archives and Counter-Archives of the 21st Century
• Local-Global Articlations of Ethnic Studies
• Ethnic Studies and the Nation-State in the 21st Century
• Ethnic Studies of the Interstate System
• Ethnic Studies and Comparative Religions
Please submit your abstracts of no more than 250 words BY JANUARY 25, 2008 to:
crossingborders2008@gmail.com Co-sponsors: Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego Department of American Studies and Ethnicity, Univ. of Southern California