The potential for Black Studies programs in Canada

Abstracts

BUILDING BLACK STUDIES IN CANADA: MOVING BEYOND ANTI-RACISM COURSES

This talk considers the possibilities for the creation of Black Studies programs in Canada that reflect Canada’s unique position as a site of global Black diasporas, as well as historic Black communities going back 300 years. Challenging a growing trend in anti-racism courses and training, this talk will both draw on and critically expand existing practices and perspectives from the United States and UK.

By locating Black Studies within an interdisciplinary set of knowledges that center Black histories, philosophical thought, theoretical ideas, and expressive cultures, the lecture argues that Black life is a valuable area of study in and of itself.

DID SOMEONE SAY BLACK BRITISH COLUMBIA? ROUGH AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTES ON BLACKNESS AND THE PROSPECTS OF BLACK STUDIES AT UBC

It is quite the journey from Africa where I was not Black to North America where I was interpellated into Blackness and to a present moment in Vancouver where I am particularly interested in the establishment of Black Studies in an environment in which Blackness is, paradoxically, both invisible and hypervisible. Blackness is a floating signifier for me even as it is fixed and natural and variously idealized, denied and denigrated by some others (Black/black and otherwise).

What has crystalized for me is a sense of the importance of, indeed an almost desperate need for, Black Studies at UBC, a Black Studies that would hold in tension a comprehensive Africana/Pan-Africa/Africa and its (sometimes double) diaspora on the one hand and a much needed focus on the ‘local’ – characterized by a triad of denial, erasure and forgetting. I concentrate somewhat on the conditions of the making of Black Studies at UBC- the nuts and bolts institutional characteristics that would stand in the way of and those that would facilitate such a project on both campuses.