"Who Is She and What Is She to You?" Mary Ann Shadd Cary and the (Im)possibility of Black/Canadian Studies

This paper addresses the relationship between Black Studies, Canadian Studies and Black diasporic discourses and incorporates the figure of Mary Ann Shadd Cary as an intellectual guide to argue for a place within Canadian Studies for a sustained conversation concerning Blackness. The paper is a conceptual exercise in working through the concern of why discourses of Blackness in Canadian Studies operate much like a special effect and why Canadian Blackness is also not sustained in Black Studies discourses.Cet article adresse la relation entre les Etudes des Noirs, les Etudes canadiennes et les discours dispersifs noirs et, incorpore Mary Shadd Cary en tant que guide intellectuel pour defendre une place a l'interieur des Etudes canadiennes et pour avoir une conversation soutenue au sujet de la negritude. L'article est un exercice conceptuel qui se fait avec le souci de savoir pourquoi le discours sur la negritude dans les Etudes des Noirs fonctionne comme un effet special et pourquoi la negritude canadienne n'est pas soutenue dans les discours des Etudes des Noirs non plus

Desire Lines : Access to Print

"This network shows us how the absences, or received lack, in one publishing project generates desire for new ones. These panelists will share their personal memories of scenes and magazines as sites of discursive community, reflecting on how one magazine can emerge as a response to another. For instance, the poststructuralism and cultural theory of Border/Lines can be read as a response to the materialist politics of FUSE. Despite these formal differences, Border/Lines and Fuse emerge as two parallel discursive spaces where the language and practice of queer identity and cultural race politics were developed in the 1980s and 1990s. Further, the absence of a certain form of content creates desire for new forms that can hold new content, as these two magazines acted as points of consolidation for discourses that resonated into other socio-cultural contexts and prompted the creation of even more publishing spaces, such as Topia." -- Publisher's website

Making Mas: TruDynasty Carnival Takes Josephine Baker to the Caribbean Carnival

Jacqueline Taucar, in conversation with Thea and Dario Jackson, investigates the sculptural qualities of the Josephine Baker Mas for the Scotiabank Caribbean Carnival Festival in 2011. This article traces the conception, construction, and complexities of choreography for this carnivalesque reimagining of Baker in Paris of the twenties for a contemporary Canadian ambulant expression. This Queen Mas talks back to the objectification by Parisians and embodying Queen Mas as an instance of female empowerment

"The Book of Negroes’ illustrated edition: circulating African-Canadian history through the Middlebrow"

This article examines the 2009 deluxe illustrated edition of Lawrence Hill’s Commonwealth Writers’ Prize– and Canada Reads–winning novel The Book of Negroes, originally published in 2007. It relates the story of Aminata, a West African girl kidnapped and sold into slavery, and her experiences on an indigo plantation in the American south, followed by further displacements to Charleston, Nova Scotia, Sierra Leone, and London. In New York, as the Revolutionary War comes to a close, Aminata becomes the scribe for the Book of Negroes, documenting the Black Loyalists, as well as the slaves and indentured servants of white Loyalists, granted passage by the British to Canada. Hill has commented that the Book of Negroes is an important document about which Canadians are largely ignorant. This desire to circulate knowledge about African-Canadian history through the novel is particularly manifest in the illustrated edition of 2009, where a photograph of the Book of Negroes features prominently, along with countless other images and captions which supplement and interrupt Hill’s narrative. This article considers the significance and implications of this “keepsake” or “souvenir” edition, particularly its circulation of knowledge about African-Canadian history through visual pleasure

Contribution

Rinaldo Walcott, Contribution to the panel ‘On Arrangement’, part of the symposium The Ontology of the Couple, ICI Berlin, 9–10 June 2016, video recording, mp4, 28:46 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e160609_18

A History of Violence

Rinaldo Walcott discusses how the convergence of police violence and COVID-19 on George Floyd’s body encapsulates a history of violence that Black people collectively experience in North America. Walcott unpacks how, in the midst of a pandemic and under stringent restrictions on movement and gathering in groups, George Floyd was murdered publicly for allegedly passing a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill. His murder by police tells a story of the kind of society in which we collectively reside and the necessary changes that need to be made to achieve justice for all