Programme


Inaugural Tubman Graduate Student Conference Schedule
“Black Lives Matter: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on 
Black Liberation and Activism,” 6-7 May 2016
(Room 305, Founders College)
FRIDAY, May 6th

• 09.00-09.45AM: Registration
• 09.45-10.00AM: Opening Remarks, Francesca D’Amico and Funke Aladejebi
• 10.00-11.00AM: Keynote Address
Introduction: Dr. Michele Johnson, Director, Harriet Tubman Institute
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Barrington Walker, Queen’s University
“Changing Same: Mapping Canada’s Histories of Blackness”
• 11.00-11.15AM: Coffee
• 11.15-12.45PM: Panel 1 – At the Crossroads of Cultural Production and Black Social Movements
Chair: Dr. Michele Johnson,  Director, Harriet Tubman Institute
1) Ashley Irwin (University of Waterloo, English)
“Northern Geography, Southern ‘Civility”: Uncovering the White Supremacist Aims of the Canadian Opposition to Lynching in the U.S.A.”
2) Sajdeep Soomal (McGill University, History)
 “Beyond #SouthAsiansforBlackPower: Centering an Afro-Dalit Political Imagery”
3) Justin Nathaniel (York University, Political Science)
“Black Lives in Formation: Beyoncé and Cultural Production”
• 12.45-01.30PM: Lunch
• 01.30-03.00PM: Panel 2 – Exploring the Personal and Political Through Historical Narratives
Chair: Dr. Vanessa Oliveira, Post-Doctoral Fellow, University of Toronto
1) Kyle Prochnow (York University, History)
 “African Elites in a British Colony: Exploring Race and Power in Early Colonial Gambia”
2) Dadrien Brown (York University, History)
“Biographies of West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade”
3) Bruno Véras (York University, History)
 “M.G. Baquaqua: Biography, Identity, and Self-Representation”
• 03.00-04.30PM: Panel 3 – Policing the Black Body Across the Black Atlantic
Chair: Dr. Andrea Davis, Chair, Department of Humanities
1) Sheri Crawford (McMaster University, History)
“The Jamaica Constabulary Force”
2) Chinelo Ezenwa (University of Western Ontario, English)
“Representations and Re-Representations of Slave Memories Through Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: New Formations”
3) Jean A. Smith (York University, History)
“Activism By Any Other Name: An Analysis of How Slave Rebellions Have Been Reconstructed”
4)  Tim Bryan (York University, Socio-Legal Studies)
 “From Hate Crime to Carding: Examining the Contradictions and Continuities of Contemporary Policing”
• 04.30-05.00PM: Coffee
• 05.00-06.30PM: Book Launch
Winfried Siemerling, The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: Black Canadian Writing, Cultural History, and the Presence of the Past
Introduction by Andrea Davis (Chair, Department of Humanities) and Maryann Buri (PhD Candidate, Department of Histoy)
• 06.30PM: Dinner and Reception

SATURDAY, May 7th

• 08.30-09.00AM: Coffee
• 09.00-10.30AM: Panel 1 – State Practices, Violence, and Black Activism Throughout Africa and Its Diasporas
Chair: Dr. Annie Bunting, Deputy Director, Harriet Tubman Institute
1) Wendell Adjetey (Yale University, History)
 “Saving Jimmy Wilson: Canadian Racial Consciousness and Alabama Justice, 1958”
2) Ashkan Etemadi (York University, Political Science)
“Incarceration Incorporated”
3) Onyekachi Nwoke (York University, Development Studies)
Rethinking Resource-Curse and Development: A Case Study of Community Perspective to Shell and Nigerian Government in Ogoniland”
4) Daniel Huizenga (York University, Socio-Legal Studies)
“’Elite Capture’: Race, Custom, and Resistance in Mining Affected Communities in South Africa”
• 10.30-12.00PM: Panel 2 – Erasure and Black Resistance in Historical and Contemporary Canada
Chair: Jennifer Mills, Independent Researcher , The Harriet Tubman Institute
1) Nadine Valcin (York University, Osgoode Hall Law School)
 “Whitewash, or the Erasure of Slavery from Canadian History”
2) Danielle Brouwer (York University, History)
 “De-Romanticizing the Underground Railroad: Tracing the Roots of Anti-Black Racism”
3) Marlene Gaynair (Rutgers University, History)
 “Where’s the Beef?: Food, Politics, and Cultural Diplomacy of the Jamaican Community in Toronto” 
• 12.00-12.45PM: Lunch
• 12.45-02.15PM: Panel 3 – New Frontiers in Praxis, Knowledge-Making, and Black Communal Resistance
Chair: Dr. Carl James, Director, York Centre for Education and Community
1) Janelle Brady and Zuhra Abawi (University of Toronto, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education)
 “Toronto District School Board (TDSB) Upgrades though African Indigenous Epistemologies”
2) Ola Mohammed (York University, Social and Political Thought)
 “’I’ll Reprogram Your Mind’: Afro-Sonic Futures in Black Popular Music”
3) R.C. George (York, Sociology) and Natasha Henry (York, History)
 “Young, Gifted, and … Black: An Examination of Race, Space, and Academic Opportunity in the GTA”
4) Charlotte Henay, (York University, Humanities)
 “My Grandmother’s Garden”
• 02.15-03.45PM: Panel 4 – Black Healing Practices and Spirituality as Counter-Hegemonic Interventions
Chair: Brainerd Blyden-Taylor, Artistic Director, Nathaniel Dett Chorale
1) Ateeka Khan (McMaster University, History)
“Resistance Through Religion: Black Identity, Muslim Brotherhood, and Politics in Twentieth Century Guyana”
2) Adil Ahmed (Queens University, Cultural Studies)
“’We gon’ be alright’: Tracing Liberation in Black American Music and Religion: Themes of Evil, Resistance, and Redemption in D’Angelo’s Black Messiah and Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly”
3) Sandria Green-Stewart (McMaster University, History)
“Historical Perspectives of Afro-Jamaican Medical Women During the Immediate Post-Slavery Period”
4) Deidre “D-Lishus” Walton (York University, Faculty of Environmental Studies)
“Afro-Past, Afro-Future: Spiritual Reclamation as Counter-Hegemonic Practice”
• 03.45-04.00PM: Coffee
• 04.00-05.45PM: Panel 5 – Cumulative Discussion, Academics and Activists
Chair: Dr. Kamala Kempadoo, Department of Social Science
Black Graduate Students Collective, York University
-          Sam Tecle (Sociology) and Ola Mohammed (Social and Political Thought)
Additional panelists TBA
• 05.45-06.00PM: Closing Remarks, Annie Bunting, deputy director, Harriet Tubman Institute

Key-note Speaker

Barrington Walker

Barrington Walker  is an historian of Modern Canada who focuses on the histories of Blacks, race immigration and the law.  His work seeks to illuminate the contours of Canadian modernity by exploring Canada's emergence as racial state through its histories of white supremacy, slavery, colonization/immigration, segregation and Jim Crowism. Much of his work considers how these practices were legitimized, and in some instances contested, by the rule of law and legal institutions. He is the author ofRace On Trial: Black Defendants in Ontario's Criminal Courts (University of Toronto Press and the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2010) which was shortlisted for the Ontario Legislature Speaker's Book Award for 2012.  He has also edited two collections: The African Canadian Legal Odyssey: Historical Essays (University of Toronto Press and the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2012) and The History of Immigration and Racism in Canada: Essential Readings (Canadian Scholars Press, 2008).

He is currently working on two new books.  Colonizing Nation: A Canadian History of Race and Immigration  is under contract with Oxford University Press and due for publication in 2014.  Dark Peril: Blacks and the Social Order in North America's Urban Landscape, 1992-2012 is the second book project. Dark Peril is a study of four case histories of Blacks' encounters with violence, state power and the law in North American cities. It is a long epilogue to many of the themes and arguments originally developed in Race On Trial but builds upon them to consider the historical violence that created Black modernity from slavery to its "afterlife"- to quote Saidiya Hartman- in the North American  neoliberal carceral city of  the turn- of- the- twenty-first century.