The Here and There: In-Between Worlds online lecture is part of SFU’s 2020 Conversation Series on Identity and Citizenship and will take place Saturday, June 20 from 1–2 p.m.
SFU Scholar-in-Residence and Limited-Term Lecturer Amyn Sajoo started the conversation series in 2018 as a partnership between SFU and the Ismaili Centres Canada.
Amyn Sajoo (Left) and John Ralston Saul (Right) in conversation at the Ismaili Centre Toronto. | Photo by Salina Kassam
“My onstage guests, in both Vancouver and Toronto, have included major public figures in the arts, architecture, ethics, law, and sociology. Each of them brought their perspective on what it means to ‘belong’ to communities, small and large,” says Sajoo. “As tides of nativist populism sweep our landscapes, in the midst of civil conflict, poverty, and climate change, what are the prospects for citizenship as a pluralist idea?”
“More specifically, our upcoming event on June 20 asks: If a home is where we most deeply feel that we belong, then migration puts us between worlds, here and there. How does this fit into modern citizenship, located in a particular place with a fixed border?” adds Sajoo.
The presenters
“My onstage guest – virtual, this time – is the Toronto-based novelist and screenwriter Anar Ali, whose recent Night of Power is on the CBC and Now Magazine’s 2019 best book lists,” says Sajoo. “It’s all about a family’s migrant journey to Canada from East Africa, with the complexity of ethnicity, age, gender, and religion coming into play – in short, about belonging across easy stereotypes of ‘place’ and ‘community.’”
Anar Ali, Toronto-based novelist and screenwriter | Photo by Mike Suta
“I should add that Anar Ali is also a part of the screenwriting team for the hit CTV television series Transplant, which stars a Syrian refugee doctor who thrives in a Toronto emergency ward while also attached to the struggle for democracy in war-torn Syria,” mentions Sajoo.
Sajoo’s own story is a cross between the family in Night of Power and the doctor in Transplant. “I grew up in a South Asian family in East Africa, left at the age of 18 to study law in England, then went to McGill to pursue a doctorate in human rights, with a year at Columbia and the UN in New York,” says Sajoo. After working for the federal Justice Department in Ottawa as a rights-advisor for three years, Sajoo got a research fellowship to spend a year in Southeast Asia, which took him to Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia, where he wrote his first book, On Pluralism. “Then it was back to academia, teaching, and writing in England, and then here in Vancouver at SFU,” explains Sajoo.
A chance for education
“Since my core field of work is international human rights, with connections to public ethics, religion, and the law, this series was a perfectly logical way to engage in that field with a wider public,” says Sajoo. “I have always felt passionate that academic work must do this, interact with people and communities whose taxes and ideas fuel what we do in the first place.”
According to Sajoo, it’s been thrilling to have large audiences – not just his students, but people from various walks of life, including faith communities – join him at the more than a dozen public events held in Vancouver and Toronto.
“This year, we have a particular focus on writers, such as Anar Ali and Vancouver’s own Nazanine Hozar and David Chriandy. All of them will have much to say about the particular time that we are living through – the pandemic, civil rights struggles, and ethnic nationalism,” concludes Sajoo. “I could hardly be more excited.”
For more information, please visit www.eventbrite.ca/e/here-and-there-in-between-worlds-registration-96759005791.
