The 6th Vienna Lecture in Canadian Studies in collab. with the GAIN – Gender: Ambivalent In_Visibilities research platform at the Univ. of Vienna (Web)

Time: 29.06.2023, 19.00 Uhr
Venue: Hofburg, Schreyvogelsaal, 1010 Vienna

The Centre for Canadian Studies at the University of Vienna is proud to announce the 6th Vienna Lecture in Canadian Studies by Andrea Davis of York University at the Hofburg. The event is free and open to the public.
Andrea Davis is Professor of Black Cultures of the Americas. In her most recent book „Horizon, Sea, Sound: Caribbean and African Women’s Cultural Critiques of Nation“ (2022), she imagines new reciprocal relationships beyond the competitive forms of belonging suggested by the nation-state. The book employs the tropes of horizon, sea, and sound as a critique of nation-state discourses and formations, including multicultural citizenship, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and the hierarchical nuclear family.
Drawing on Tina Campt’s discussion of Black feminist futurity, Davis offers the concept future now, which is both central to Black freedom and a joint social justice project that rejects existing structures of white supremacy. Calling for new affiliations of community among Black, Indigenous, and other racialized women, and offering new reflections on the relationship between the Caribbean and Canada, she articulates a diaspora poetics that privileges our shared humanity. In advancing these claims, Davis turns to the expressive cultures (novels, poetry, theater, and music) of Caribbean and African women artists in Canada, including work by Dionne Brand, M. NourbeSe Philip, Esi Edugyan, Ramabai Espinet, Nalo Hopkinson, Amai Kuda, and Djanet Sears. Davis considers the ways in which the diasporic characters these artists create redraw the boundaries of their horizons, invoke the fluid histories of the Caribbean Sea to overcome the brutalization of plantation histories, use sound to enter and reenter archives, and shapeshift to survive in the face of conquest. The book will interest readers of literary and cultural studies, critical race theories, and Black diasporic studies. (Web)

The 6th Vienna Lecture in Canadian Studies is organized in partnership with the „Mobile Cultures and Societies: Interdisciplinary Studies on Transnational Formations“ Research Platform, the „GAIN – Gender: Ambivalent In_Visibilities“ Research Platform, and the Embassy of Canada to Austria.

For more information, including the content of the lecture, please visit the Centre for Canadian Studies‘ website (Web)

Source: Newsletter der Forschungsplattform GAIN