For many Canadians, the history of African-Canadians is limited to the Underground Railroad. It’s a history that some historians are working to expand upon. Boulou Ebanda de B’Béri, professor of Communication and Cultural Studies at the University of Ottawa, and co-editor of “The Promised Land: History and Historiography of the Black Experience in Chatham-Kent’s Settlements and Beyond,” joins The Agenda in the Summer to discuss his efforts to move African-Canadian history out of the margins. Watch Prof. Boulou Ebada de B’béri’s interview with Piya Chattopadhyay here.
PLP FINAL REPORT (Here)
Fethi Mansouri, Boulou Ebanda de B’béri, Eds. (Routledge Research in Comparative Politics), Routledge, 2014
Multiculturalism is now seen by many of its critics as the source of intercultural and social tensions, fostering communal segregation and social conflicts. While the cultural diversity of contemporary societies has to be acknowledged as an empirical and demographic fact, whether multiculturalism as a policy offers an optimal conduit for intercultural understanding and social harmony has become increasingly a matter of polarized public debate.
This book examines the contested philosophical foundations of multiculturalism and its, often controversial, applications in the context of migrant societies. It also explores the current theoretical debates about the extent to which multiculturalism, and related conceptual constructs, can account for the various ethical challenges and policy dilemmas surrounding the management of cultural diversity in our contemporary societies. The authors consider common conceptual and empirical features from a transnational perspective through analysis of the case studies of Australia, Canada, Columbia, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Uruguay.
This book will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, comparative politics, international studies, multiculturalism, migration and political sociology.
Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Routledge (June 2 2014)
The Promised Land: History and Historiography of the Black Experience in Chatham-Kent’s Settlements and Beyond
Coming this summer University of Toronto Press 2014
With a prologue by Afua Cooper
Eschewing the often romanticized Underground Railroad narratives that portray Southern Ontario as the welcoming destination of Blacks fleeing from slavery, The Promised Land reveals the Chatham-Kent area as a crucial settlement site for an early Black presence in Canada. The contributors present the everyday lives and professional activities of individuals and families in these communities and highlight early cross-border activism to end slavery in the United States and to promote civil rights in the US and Canada. Essays also reflect on the frequent intermingling of local Black, White, and First Nations people. Using a cultural studies framework to their collective investigations, the authors trace physical and intellectual trajectories of blackness, which have radiated from Southern Ontario to other parts of Canada, the United States, the Caribbean and Africa. The result is a collection that represents the presence and diffusion of blackness and inventively challenges the grand narrative of History, especially Canadian history.
Un essai, politique, sur l’oralité dans un corpus de films d’Afrique noire francophone de 1950 à 2000. Dans un langage clair, l’auteur illustre comment dans les sociétés de l’écriture, le texte engagerait l’Homme et que cette écriture aurait imposé un genre, un style et des modes de production de sens qui sont propres à ces sociétés de l’écriture d’où, par exemple, la naissance du langage cinématographique formalisé. Ainsi il se demande ce qui arriverait à une analyse de film calquée sur ce langage dont les articulations discursives ne sont pas nécessairement en adéquation avec la mysticité de la parole qui, elle, engagerait véritablement l’Homme en Afrique noire? Qu’arrive-t-il à l’analyse quand l’image d’une parole détourne le sens prescrit dans les modes opératoires du langage cinématographique des sociétés de l’écrit ? Comment le cinéma, à travers la technique audiovisuelle, devient-il une technologie par excellence capable de nous faire voir la nature mystique et culturelle de cette parole ?
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Black history is Canadian history
February 27th 2013
6:00-10:00pm Agora, Jock Turcot University Centre
Sign up at 6:00pm Coffee and tea provided
Special guest: Sonjah Stanley-Niaah
AMLAC&S with the help of Community Life Services brings you an event to remember- On Wednesday, February 27th AMLAC&S (and associations) will be hosting a FREE open mic/poetry slam in spirit of celebrating cultural awareness and Black History Month. For this event we are introducing a very special guest, Sonjah Stanley-Niaah, author of “DanceHall: From Slave Ships to Ghetto” (2010) who is travelling from Kingston, Jamaica to give us an inspirational talk on her great experiences and journeys. Students and the general public are welcome to come share their opinions, songs and poetry on our rich cultural and Canadian history. The event will be hosted in the Agora (UCU Centre-Jock Turcot), the sign-up sheet for those who would like to participate will be posted at 6:00pm and the show will begin at 7:00 pm. Coffee, tea and snacks will be provided for those who attend the event.
A Retrospective on African Canadian History
Fifth General Symposium, 2012
June 14-16, 2012
Speaker: Lawrence Hill
Ticket Price: $16.50 inclusive
As part of the fifth annual Promised Land Symposium “Claiming the Promise: A Retrospective on African Canadian History”, the symposium is offering an evening with award winning and international best-selling Canadian author Lawrence Hill. Among his work including Any Known Blood and Some Great Thing is the critically acclaimed and influential The Book of Negroes.
Lawrence Hill’s talk this evening will touch on various topics from his personal experiences growing up in suburban Toronto and the effect of that experience on his creative work; his experiences writing about and researching “Black History” in this country and; the themes of this year’s Promised Land Symposium.
Also this evening a special award ceremony will take place as representatives of Distinguished Women in International Service recognize the winners of a local youth Black History writing competition. Read the rest of this entry »
Articulations of memory in cinemas
Friday 02 September – Saturday 03 September 2011
University of Ottawa, Canada
Download the Programme PDF or the timetable in French or English.
The subject of this interdisciplinary and bilingual (French and English) workshop is the articulations of memory in African, diasporic, national, and black cinemas. Representations of memory are linked with the questions of identity and identity structures, because they not only shed light on the past but also reflect on the actual constructions of the past. In our multicultural societies, audio-visual representations of memory seem to question individual identities (Histoires de Sable by Hyacinthe Combari 2004; Corps Plongés by Raoul Peck 1998; Ezra by Newton Aduaka 2006), as far as collectives ones (Camp Thiaroye by Sembene Ousmane 1988; Summer of ‘62 by Medhi Charef 2006; Africa United by Eric Kabera 2010). Through these examples, cinema can be a recording medium in which complex and trans-temporal structures of memory are “rebuilt” or “reinterpreted”.
The Promised Land Project (PLP) is a multidisciplinary research project that focuses on the study the role and evolution of the early black settlements in the Chatham-Kent area, whose role has been uncelebrated and contributions neglected.
The description of such communities as the “final stop on the underground railroad” points to a historical ideology suggesting that this extraordinary heritage is simply an ending rather than the birthplace of something significant and unique. It is not widely known that when Canada became a country in 1867, the sixth-largest population group was people of African descent. The Canadian national history still terms these citizens as “fugitive slaves” disregarding their efforts towards the fight to end slavery in the United States, on the implementation of civil rights in modern Canada, and on the social, cultural and economic development of this region.The overall objectives of this project are:
- to protect primary historical materials
- to make these materials publicly accessible
- to support new academic research and teaching
- to promote community development in this historic region of Canada
- to use the new knowledge generated by the project to frame current discussions of ethnoracial identity, social justice, migration and Canadian multiculturalism
Mariette Monpierre is a filmmaker and a producer. She completed her Masters Degree in media and languages at the Sorbonne University and Smith College in Massachusetts. She lives in New York. She began her career as a producer at BBDO NY, then created documentaries (Sweet Mickey for President) and films (Rendez-Vous).
Motherland (2005; 5’00). A 10-year old girl from west Indian descent, claims to be at home at Paris, France during the 70’s. This film is part of Paris la Métisse, a feature length collection of 15 different stories.
George Lang is Emeritus Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Ottawa (Canada). From 2004 to 2009, he was Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ottawa. He published several articles on African literature and poesy.
Three questions arise immediately from the terms set forth for this workshop, and a fourth, the nature of translation, hovers alongside by virtue of the fact that our theme and proceedings are bilingual. What is, or what isn’t, memory? How is memory articulated or deployed in cinema? Are there special ways in and particular ends to which memory is depicted or manipulated in African cinema? This last question begs, however, yet another: is there even an autonomous theoretical object by the name of African cinema, or is this entity a critical construct which, to borrow a now well-worn phrase coined by our distinguished colleague V.Y. Mudimbe, has been invented?
Unreasoned memories of the Black African legacy in contemporary Brazilian cinema
Hudson Moura is instructor at Ryerson University (Canada). He has created several Experimental and documentary works in digital video.
Speech as a discourse of the subject “in action” is seen in relation to social context, marked by tensions. These tensions are present in three black voices that retell Brazilian history from a particular perspective. Through mythical discourses, prophecies, fantastic imagery, and artistic endeavours, these voices express their inner worlds in an attempt to reregister their own history and their vision of the world. These three distinct voices, in a “subversive” and marginal way, reinstate the African Black legacy within Brazil’s history, a legacy of which they are very conscious and always reminding their “audiences.” This presentation will analyze the presence and legitimacy of African Black diaspora discourse in recent Brazilian cinema.
Trauma of the Haitian debt
Cilas Kemedjio is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Rochester (USA).
Through the conceptualization of the impossibility of speaking, listening and the remaining silence of trauma, this paper will analyze how the relationships between Haiti and France, haunted by the imposed repair of 1825’s trauma, block the emergence of any shared memory which may works as a site of conciliation between these two countries. To what extent, the French autism is symptomatic of what Glissant calls “the memory of the slavers” when the need to talk which characterized the Haitian may be a sign of a “memory of the slaves”. This analysis will keep in mind the Haitian’s difficulty, victims or butchers, to tell the memory of the recent traumas and more specifically the ravages caused by Duvalier.