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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2005

Mariette Monpierre

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.

Ending keynote

George Lang

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

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

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.

The Pinheiral case

Pedro Simonard

Pedro Simonard is Associate Professor at Laval University (Canada). He made several documentaries and main publications on the artistic and cultural representations of Black history in Brazil and anthropological theories.

The Pinheiral jongueira community is known throughout Brazil. Its participants, mostly African-Brazilians, have developed projects and educational activities based on the “jongo”. This presentation will show how which elements and characteristics of the “jongo” were selected by the leaders of Pinheiral jongo community.

Reading Slavery in the Cinematographic Archives

Michael Martin

Michael Martin a Professor at the Department of Communication and Culture and American Studies Program at Indiana University (USA). He is also Director of the Black Film Center/Archive at Indiana University.

This address engages with memory, its historicity and importance to cinematic accounts and readings of historical trauma. It is also about the relevance of memory to the project of world-making. This paper will focus on the filmic depiction of slavery in plantation societies. Two films serve this purpose: Queimada! (1969) by the deceased Italian Marxist, Gillo Pontecorvo and La Rue Cases-Nègres (1982) by the Martinique filmmaker, Euzhan Palcy.

Crossing of “Léthé” Amnesia Movies?

Pierre Kadi Sossou

Pierre Kadi Sossou teaches at the Department of Languages and Modern Literatures at the University of Ottawa (Canada). He is also coordinator of the Canada Research Chair in Literary and Cultural Transfers. His research interests are on literature and cinemas of the African continent and Brazil.

This presentation will propose a philosophical analyze of the cinematographic art based on the study of commercial films, such as The Man Without a Past by Aki Kaurismäki, After Life by Hirokazu Koreeda and Atlântico negro by Renato Barbieri. The objective is to illuminate some specific issues of memory and on the reminiscence that comes when one is physically transported, either with the person’s agreement or by force, from one space to another, from a continent to another, and eschatologicaly from earth life to eternal life. This presentation will analyze these issues through the prism of platoon myth of the crossing of “Léthé”.