April 11-12, 2012
St. John’s College, 2111 Lower Mall, UBC | MAP
Keynote Speakers
- Jean Barman
- Afua Cooper
- Cynthia Dillard
- Crawford Kilian
This conference on Black British Columbians is a collaboration between the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Culture, Identity and Education (CCIE) and the Promised Land Community-University Research Project. It brings together prominent community historians, youth activists and academics to address issues such as Black trajectories including the links between movements within Canada, and historical and contemporary US/Canada border crossings; the lives and works of prominent male and female Black Pioneers; the significance of the African Rifles; interracial relationships, multiracial identities and the politics of difference in historical BC and the curious marginalization of the historical and contemporary presence of Blackness in present day conceptualizations of British Columbia. This conference is intended to highlight the historical and contemporary presence of Blacks in British Columbia, a presence that tends to be relegated to being an “absent presence.”