By Neil Armstrong
Christina Sharpe, a leading scholar in Black Diaspora
Thought and Cultures, says there are several people who have been doing work
that inspires hers. Some are still here, others are not, but “their works
continue to be read and felt and continue on in us.”
She thanked professors Andrea Davis and Leslie Sanders who
worked hard to make Black Canadian Studies a reality, and also thanked the
students who made it possible.
Sharpe, professor of African Diaspora Studies, Humanities at
York University delivered the keynote lecture entitled “Still Here” at the
launch of new programs and research in Black Studies at the university on
October 18.
The Black Canadian Studies Certificate provides an
integrated examination of the historical, cultural and various expressive
productions of people of African descent in the America through the lens of
Black Canada and four specific humanities and fine arts approaches: cultural
studies, history literature, and music.
Sharpe started with three epigraphs from -- Saidiya Hartman
“The Terrible Beauty of the Slum,” Tavia Nyong'o’s “Black Survivor in the Unchromatic Dark” and
Dionne Brand’s “Ossuaries” -- hoping that they would help “orient us both to
the logic of the title ‘Still Here’ and to the ongoing and necessary work of
the imagination.”
This semester she is teaching an
undergraduate and a graduate seminar “Imagining Slavery and Freedom” with the
intent to make it clear that African chattel slavery, the abduction of
Africans, Middle Passage and more involved the work of imagination – “involved
the work, in fact, of many imaginations in the service of brutality.”
She noted that, “our freedom, but more
precisely, our liberation needs all of our beautiful imagination to usher it
into being.”
Sharpe quoted from or referred to the
works of Dionne Brand, Rinaldo Walcott, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Hamilton, Camille
Turner and other writers and artists noting that their work underscore the
imaginings of Black people living in the diaspora.
“It is difficult work writing
blackness, difficult work to bring together strands and histories and lives
without collapsing them into each other. But that is part of the work that we
do and that the new Certificate in Black Canadian Studies will do – the work of
seeing these strands and holding these histories and presents. This is the work
of thinking from Black, the work of imagining futures, the work of making Black
life live on and off the page.
“These writers live and work in Canada
and their work articulates our lives but not in the interest of nation
building. I think blackness cuts nation, particularly in the Americas. The one
thing that has remained consistent is the state’s response to the appearance of
blackness. The state responds to Black people with a violent managing of
blackness. Our job is to really look at and describe and apprehend the multiple
ways that Black people make life. How to
describe that living in the face of the state’s malevolence, our work is to imagine
and inhabit otherwises that are already being lived, otherwises that allow for
and sustain black life,” she said.
In part three of her lecture -- the
coda -- she thanked the following people: Sylvia Hamilton, M. NourbeSe Philip, Juliane
Okot Bitek, Dionne Brand, Beverly Bain, David Chariandy, Ama Ata Aidoo, George
Elliott Clarke, Wayde Compton, Toni Morrison, Warren Crichlow, Carl James, Afua
Cooper, Rinaldo Walcott, Mariam Kaba, Ruth Gilmore, Makeda Silvera, Canisia
Lubrin, Clifton Joseph, Lillian Allen, Claire Harris, Camille Turner, Angela
Davis, Grace Channer, Carie Mae Weems, Abdi Osman, OmiSoore Dryden, Andrea
Fatona, Sandra Brewster, Sandy Hudson, August Wilson, Katherine McKittrick,
Akua Benjamin, Maryse Condé, Kamala
Kempadoo, Marlene Green, Sherona Hall, Angela Robertson, Idil Abdillahi, adri zhina, Peggy Bristow, and Andrea Davis.
She noted that her thank you is
provisional, incomplete and continuing.
“I want to give special thanks to
Andrea Davis for her beautiful imagination and her beautiful vision for this
evening. That vision and her commitment and her imagining and good company have
made possible the Black Canadian certificate program at York University as well
as my own presence here.”
Photo credit: York University Andrea Davis, Chair, Department of Humanities at York University |
Professor Sharpe’s work in African
American and Black diaspora literatures, Black feminist theories, queer
diasporas, Black visual cultures and North American multiethnic literatures
positions her within the most exciting and cutting-edge research in Black
Diaspora studies and establishes her as one of the most impactful scholars
shaping the field from the perspective of interdisciplinary humanities, notes a
brief biography of the scholar who joined Department of Humanities in June.
Sharpe is the author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery
Subjects (Duke UP 2010) and In the
Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke 2016).
She came to York from Tufts University
where she taught in the Departments of English and Women’s, Gender and
Sexuality Studies and was the former director of American Studies.
The lecture was presented by the
Department of Humanities, Department of Music and the Jean Augustine Chair in
Education, Community and Diaspora.
Photo credit: York University York University Gospel Choir, directed by Karen M. Burke, Department of Music performs in the Tribute Communities Recital Hall Accolade East, York University |
It opened a two-day event recognizing
these new programs and research in Black Studies at York:
-
Black Canadian
Studies Certificate Program
-
Black Studies and
Theories of Race and Racism Graduate Stream
-
Black Child and Youth
Studies Network
-
Network for the
Advancement of Black Communities
-
Jean Augustine, Inez
Elliston, and Beverly Salmon library fonds
The lecture was followed by “Struggles
and Possibilities of Black Studies in Canada: A Workshop” on October 19 in
Founders College at the university.
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