LAMACS

A Retrospective on African Canadian History

Speaker: Lawrence Hill
June 14-16, 2012
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”.

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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:

1. to protect primary historical materials
2. to make these materials publicly accessible
3. to support new academic research and teaching
4. to promote community development in this historic region of Canada
5. to use the new knowledge generated by the project to frame current discussions of ethnoracial identity, social justice, migration and Canadian multiculturalism

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Reframing multiculturalism for the 21st century’s realities

Monday 21 November – Tuesday 22 November 2011
University of Ottawa, Canada

Citizens of multicultural nations often struggle to realize and establish an identity that bridges both their complex past with the uniqueness of their multiple cultural connections as well as their (trans)national belongings. Indeed, in many cases, multiculturalism, as a political structure based on institutionalizing social justice and social equality in many nations is being challenged, not merely because such politics for equality and social justice have failed to establish their main objectives, but because the ideal of such politics must not disregard the human capacity to resist, negotiate or embrace.

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The Conversation Series is a project that focuses on creating a dialogue with filmmakers, researchers, and teachers who examine the world through a cultural perspective. More specifically, the project brings to the surface voices and perspectives that are normally held to the margins of national and cultural grand narratives.

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The purpose of this project is to create a comparative study aiming at understanding how racial and cultural identities are articulated in the independent cinemas of Canada, South Africa, and Australia. Given our global contemporary context of new identity practices that are fertile with crisis, we are exploring what can be learned from a study of these specific representations.

The three main objectives of this research are:

1. to establish a corpus of thirty films from independent cinemas of the multiracial and multicultural countries of Canada, South Africa, and Australia
2. to gain an understanding of the significant factors representing identity practices of center and peripheral groups within the three target countries. This will be achieved by analyzing the epistemological markers of the films as well as interviewing ten of the filmmakers
3. to compare historical and ideological foundations represented in these films through their articulations of identity and racial identity practices.

This project is financed by SSHRC from 2007 until 2010.

Memory is a slippery concept. When one considers how culture, history, and society overlap and intertwine, memory becomes a complex of the relations between these elements. If we consider the affects of global, transnational, and trans-disciplinary landscapes, add in the various forms of production, distribution, exhibition and consumption, the movement of memory becomes incredibly dynamic and at times, overwhelming.

We can see how this occurs within the redefinition and re-articulation of macro/micro cultural identities and citizenship within, across, and beyond the traditional, canonist conceptions of continent, nation, geopolitical space, and sociocultural identity (ethnicity, race, gender, social class, sexual orientation, etc.).

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This video is a conversation with Olivette Otele, the European coordinator for the Promised Land Project.

This conversation was conducted by University of Ottawa professor Boulou Ebanda de B’béri and his research assistants Virginie Mesana and Zaida Marquez.

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The state of cultural race and representation in Australian cinema

This video is a conversation by notable Australian filmmakers, including Don Featherstone, Ray Lawrence, Nick Parsons, Jo Dyer and Michael James Rowland. It also includes reputable film critic Peter Castaldi.

It was conducted by University of Ottawa professor Boulou Ebanda de B’béri’s research assistants Virginie Mesana and Peter Hogart.