​

​

Keynote lecture title: “Thinking Through Black/African Futurity” 

 

2024 marks the final year of the UN’s International Decade of Peoples of African Descent! It is important to ask how far we have been accomplished for Black advancement in the Canadian context? In celebrating the Black and African historic presence in Canada, more often the preference is to focus on our achievements. Yet, we do not usually speak more to the obstacles and systemic barriers to continuing presence on Canadian landscape. My address will reflect on some of the deeper structural barriers and systemic issues affecting our communities: anti-Blackness and anti-Black racism in education, law and the criminal justice system, media and media technology, lack of Black representation within the top echelons of our societal institutions, notable health care disparities, and the continuing colonial legacies and impacts on Black mental health and trauma. In the face of these challenges how can we, as a people, think through solutions to our solutions grounded in “our own home-grown cultural perspectives” (Yankah, 2004; p. 25)? How do we build Black and African solidarities for social change? How do we deploy a critical understanding of Land and its Earthly teachings [literacies] of relationality, sharing, reciprocity, connections, mutual interdependence, building relationships, social responsibility and accountability to enrich conversations to subvert colonial hierarchies [see Dei, 2008]?  How do we reclaim Black subjectivities for resistance so as not to betray our Ancestors? What role do we see for our African Elders? How do we acknowledge the past, reflect present conditions and project transformative outcomes onto future? What epistemic and political practices are required for new African futurities that get us out of the “clutches of coloniality”?  As African scholars, how do we embark upon an epistemic turn that affirms our subjectivities rather than doing violence on our subjectivities? What modes of thought, action and agency in terms of self-definition, collective actualization is required? It is contended the search for answers to some of these questions lie in the pursuit of Black fugitivity and Black radical hope.