MLA Panel # 491
Saturday, 9 January 2021
3:30 PM-4:45 PM EST
Session Information
Audio Recording:
Call and Response-ability: Black Canadian Works of Art and the Politics of Relation
How does Black Canadian cultural production call on its audiences to respond? How is that call currently being heard? This panel focuses on Black Canadian artworks, including literature and music, in order to elucidate the politics and aesthetics of their reception. This focus contributes to the fields of reader reception theory in Black Canadian and diaspora studies, an aspect of theoretical engagement that has been overlooked by more thematic analyses of Black cultural production.
In thinking about the various institutional and non-institutional sites in which Black Canadian artworks appear, questions arise about the conditions that mediate reception. To whom are Black Canadian artworks addressed? What novel analytic, reading and curatorial strategies are necessary in order to respond appropriately to this corpus? Finally, how do Black Canadian works of art elicit in their audiences an ethical response that aims at a transformation of the present as well as the future?
Scholarship has energetically accompanied the substantial acceleration of Black Canadian cultural output over the last decades. At its 2005 Convention in Washington, D.C., the MLA scheduled its (probably) first related panel, “Black Writing in Canada.” Its organizer, Winfried Siemerling, went on to survey and theorize the topic in the revisionary The Black Atlantic Reconsidered (2015). One of the speakers, Karina Vernon, similarly prepared The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology (2020) together with a critical companion volume (forthcoming 2020) towards the archival recovery, theorization, and reception of the Black Canadian archive. Building on such work, and in conjunction with a Canadian SSHRC – funded project, our panel will debate how the call issued by Black Canadian writing and art is being heard. The panel assembles cutting-edge work that investigates the communicative strategies and actual reception of a still understudied body of Black cultural work.
By focusing on the issues of audience and reception in relation to Black Canadian art, in a variety of contexts, this panel addresses the significant absence of race in traditional reader response theory and reception aesthetics, and moves criticism of Black Canadian art beyond traditional thematic concerns. We feel that the MLA in Toronto offers an ideal venue for a panel on our topic. In 1851, shortly after the infamous Fugitive Slave Act, author and educator Henry Bibb called Black leaders to the safely removed city of Toronto for the North American Convention of Colored Freemen. The attendees included Josiah Henson, Martin Delany, and Mary Ann Shadd, all of them contributors to an early effervescence of Black cultural achievement in what is now Canada that foreshadowed today’s astonishing wealth of work. While the attendant scholarship of archival unearthing and theoretical conceptualization of this work is still in full swing, we see a chance now to address marginalization and blind spots of traditional reception aesthetics by examining the contextual relations of Black Canadian works of art.
Presentations
Antiphonal Relation and the Politico-Poetics of Marlene NourbeSe Philip
Kyle Kinaschuk U of Toronto
Rhythm of Relation in Black Canadian Art
Mark Campbell, University of Toronto Scarborough
Black Canadian Literature and the Politics of Institutional Relation
Winfried Siemerling, U of Waterloo, and Karina Vernon, University of Toronto Scarborough