Harriet's Legacies
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HARRIET’S LEGACIES Race, Historical Memory, and Futures in Canada Thursday 22 October – Friday 23 October 2015 Brock University Conference Organizers: Gregory Betts, Natalee Caple, Ronald Cummings, Kevin Gosine, and Tamari Kitossa Conference Schedule Thursday - Day 1 Pond Inlet and Sankey Chambers 8:30-9:00 Coffee and Registration 9-9:30 Welcoming Remarks Gregory Betts, Director of the Centre for Canadian Studies Carol Merriam, Dean of Humanities Warren Hoshizaki, Director of Education District School Board of Niagara 9:45 - 11:00 Panel 1: Harriet Tubman, History and Mobility Chair: Kevin Gosine dann j. Broyld: “Tubman From Death to Today: The Grassroots of Developing the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument” Carole Lynn Stewart: “‘Colorophobia’ in Canada: William Wells Brown’s Cosmopolitan Mobility” David Hemmings: “Slave Cottages, the "Coloured Village" and the Underground Railroad in Niagara-on-the-Lake: The case for strategic mobilization of Black heritage” Jennifer Harris: “Amelia Etta Hall Johnson” 11:15 -12:30 Panel 2: Strategizing Survival Chair: Neta Gordon Jessica Ratcliffe: “Eating Ornamental Cabbage and Other Acts of Radical Foraging in Nalo Hopkinson’s ‘A Habit of Waste’” Kate Siklosi: “The Collision of Law and Poetry in the "Liquid Archive" of M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong!” Victoria Partyka: “Postmemory and the Traumatized Female Figure; David Chariandy’s Soucouyant as a Transgenerational Narrative of Suffering, Acceptance, and its Question of Belonging.” Anique J. Jordan: “Possessed: A Genealogy of Black Women, Hauntology and Art as Survival” 12:30 - 1:45 Lunch (served) Performance Her Voice in Black: Black Female Narratives in Opera by Carla Chambers 2:00-3:15 Panel 3: Creative Writing / Writing Through Race and Building Better Communities Chair: Natalee Caple Kaie Kellough Jacqueline Valencia Klyde Broox Clifton Joseph 3:30-5:00: Plenary Addresses Lillian Allen: “Riffing on Blackness” Paul Barrett: “Austin Clarke's Aesthetics of Crossing and Detachment.” Break Niagara Artists Centre 354 St. Paul Street, St. Catharines 7:00-9:00 Readings and Performances Carolyn Thompson Living Tribute to Austin Clarke Clifton Joseph Lillian Allen Friday - Day 2 Pond Inlet and Sankey Chambers 9:00 -10:15 Panel 6: Archives and Pedagogies of Blackness Chair: Marian Bredin Leslie Sanders: “Building an inclusive curriculum grounded in African Canadian life.” Wilma Morrison: “Black Canadian Heritage Education: Successes and prospects” Natasha Henry: “We Were Here: Connecting Heritage Plaques and Classrooms as Sites for Teaching/ Learning about African Canadian Narratives” Jane Andres: “Niagara Workers Welcome” 10:30 - 11:45 Panel 7: Dionne Brand: Orientations, Relations, Revolution Chair: Jade Ferguson Kit Dobson: “Love Can Be Indefinable All on Its Own”: Dionne Brand’s Love Enough” Deanna Henderson: “A Queer Thing Happened in the Archive: Dionne Brand's Love Enough.” Ronald Cummings: ‘“A Woman Can Be a Bridge...A Way to Cross Over’: Dionne Brand's In Another Place, Not Here.” Nalini Mohabir: “Cartographic Imaginaries of Dionne Brand: Mapping the Place from which she speaks to the place of No Return” 12:00 - 1:00 Lunch (not served) 1:15-2:30 Panel 8: Indigenous/African Canadian Relations Chair: Tamari Kitossa Zainab Amadahy Bonita Lawrence Paula Madden Ciann Wilson Visitor Parking lot in front of the Pond Inlet 3:00-6:00 Bus Tour, Niagara’s Freedom Trail Performing Arts Centre (organized by the Niagara Artists Centre) 7:00-10:00 Talk/Demonstration/Film A presentation by DJ Marinko Marinkov on the history of vinyl and Dub, Techno, and Hip Hop followed by a screening of NFB film King of the Hill on St Catharines’ own Ferguson Jenkins, the greatest Canadian baseball player of all time. We are very grateful for the support of the following organizations whose contributions have made these events possible: The Council for Research in the Social Sciences, the Humanities Research Institute, the Centre for Canadian Studies, the Social Justice Research Initiative, the Brock African Heritage Recognition Committee, the Department of English Language and Literature, the Department of Sociology, the MA Program in Critical Sociology, Social Justice and Equity Studies, and the Niagara Artists Centre. Panelists and Performers Lillian Allen is a Creative Writing Professor at the Ontario College of Art & Design University in Toronto Canada. She is an award winning and internationally renowned poet. As one of its lead originators and innovators, she has specialized in the writing and performing of dub poetry. Professor Allen has published several books and recordings, and has worked in poetry, fiction, non- fiction, writing for children, experimental writing forms, and has written several plays. Her work also appears in a variety of media. She has spent almost four decades writing, publishing, and performing her work in Canada, The US, Europe, and England and elsewhere. A selection of her published works in book and CD forms include; Psychic Unrest, 2000, Women Do This Every Day, 1993; Nothing But A Hero, 1992; Why Me, 1991; If You See Truth, 1987. Her recordings (CDs) include; ANXIETY 2012, Freedom & Dance, 1999; Conditions Critical, 1988; Revolutionary Tea Party, 1986; “Revolutionary Tea Party” and “Conditions Critical” both won Canadian Juno awards in 1986 and 1988 respectively. Zainab Amadahy is a researcher/non fiction writer, futurist author, screenwriter and educator. Among her publications is "Indigenous Peoples and Black Peoples in Canada: Settlers or Allies” (co-authored with Dr. Bonita Lawrence). You can also check out Zainab’s interview in the latest issue of the online journal Feral Feminisms, where she discusses relationships across Indigenous and African descended communities. Many of Zainab’s more recent writings can be found on Muskrat Magazine and her own site swallowsongs.com. Jane Andres is owner of Applewood Hollow B+B in Niagara on the Lake and founder of Fresh Start, an initiative that encourages area B+B’s to support local farms. http://www.bbniagaraonthelake.com A lifelong resident of Niagara, it was not until 2005 when she was invited to assist with music at a small church service for farm workers, that she had the opportunity to meet some of her Caribbean neighbours personally. Since that first meeting 10 years ago she has sought to create a more inclusive and welcoming community in Niagara on the Lake. She has visited the island six times, staying with their families and is organizer of the Niagara Workers Welcome Concert https://vimeo.com/workerswelcomeniagara Paul Barrett is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. He is the author of Blackening Canada: Race, Diaspora, Multiculturalism (2015). He has recently published articles in ARIEL and Studies in Canadian Literature. His writing is concerned with questions and representations of race and diaspora in Canada and global contexts. His current research assesses the role of digital forms of textual analysis in Canadian Literature. The most recent manifestation of this work is a digital humanities project that employs algorithmic forms of ‘reading’ to survey Austin Clarke’s archives and corpus. Klyde Broox is an internationally seasoned dub poet with decades of experience in North America, Europe and the Caribbean. He won the Nathan Brissett Poetry Competition in 1978. His chapbook “Poemstorm” was released in 1989 and in 1992, klyde received a James Michener Fellowship to the University of Miami Caribbean Writers Summer Institute. A scholarship followed in 1993, and Klyde migrated to Canada that same year, settling in Hamilton, Ontario. In 2004, he was nominated for a John C. Holland Award for community service. klyde is active in the Toronto Poetry scene and in 2004 coordinated the International Dub poetry Festival there. In 2005, klyde also won the city of Hamilton’s Arts Award for Literature. dann j. Broyld is an assistant professor of Public History & African American History at Central Connecticut State University. He earned his PhD in nineteenth-century United States and African Diaspora history at Howard University in 2011. His work focuses on the American-Canadian borderlands and issues of Black identity, migration, and transnational relations as well as oral history and museum-community interaction. He has worked as a consulting historian for the forthcoming Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument in Cambridge, Maryland to be open in 2016 and is the author of an article titled: “Harriet Tubman: Transnationalism and the Land of a Queen in the Late Antebellum.” Broyld is also currently working on a manuscript with the University of Toronto Press. Carla Chambers is a soprano vocalist whose musical repertoire includes Gospel, Spirituals, and Jazz, as well as classical forms like the German lieder, and American art song compositions by composers including Johannes Brahms, Richard Strauss, and Samuel Barber. In opera, she is equally at home singing the lyric roles of Verdi, Puccini and Gershwin, as she is with contemporary works of American Composer Dr. Nkeiru Okoye. Her upcoming engagements include the Honours Thesis concert: Her Voice in Black: Black Women’s Narratives in Opera. Ronald Cummings teaches queer and postcolonial literatures at Brock University. His research focuses on representations of queerness and marronage in contemporary Caribbean writing. Ronald completed his PhD at Leeds University in 2013 and was the 2013-2014 Postdoctoral fellow in Critical Caribbean