The (Un)Restricted Knowledge Speaker Series: Black Studies as a Living Archive

 

US-based researchers have faced increasing restrictions on their ability to conduct and present research on the United States. The Trump administration has frozen, blocked, or cut billions of dollars in federal grants that supported research in the social sciences, natural sciences, and the humanities. Several universities and their supporters have stated that this suspension of funding, along with other policies seeking to restrict DEI programs and student admission criteria, will restrict the scope and the nature of the research that they can conduct.

 

It is in this context, CSUS is sponsoring “The (Un)Restricted Knowledge Speaker Series” to highlight the research conducted by our affiliates on topics that have become increasingly difficult for U.S. based researchers to discuss. This series will highlight our affiliates, their research, as well as showcase the community of scholars that study the United States, and its role in North America and the world, across disciplines at the University of Toronto.

 

 

There has been an ongoing political project in the United States to delegitimize and defund scholarship that centres race, power and historical accountability. Under the Trump administration, the federal government has threatenedto withhold funding from any educational program that embraces “pervasive and repugnant race-based preferences and other forms of racial discrimination.” States have started passing laws to remove ethnic studies from their high school curriculums. Information on slavery and the underground railroad was also removed from government websites as well as references to discrimination, racial inequality, and racial justice. These actions are part of a broader political project to delegitimize and defund scholarship that centres race, power and historical accountability, including Black Studies.

 

In this session, we bring together a group of University of Toronto scholars whose research is informed by Black Studies. These scholars come from a range of perspectives, adopt different methods, and write different forms of scholarship. Their work shows the enduring and continuing relevance of Black Studies.

 

 

 

Shauna Sweeney is an assistant professor of Women and Gender Studies and History at the University of Toronto. She is a historian of the African Diaspora, specializing in the interrelated histories of gender, economy, slavery, and emancipation in the Caribbean. She is currently finishing her first book, A Free Enterprise: Market Women, Insurgent Economies and the Making of Caribbean Freedom, which examines the licit and illicit economies of enslaved and free people of African descent, especially free and enslaved market women, in Jamaica and the wider the Atlantic world. Shauna’s work has appeared in The William and Mary Quarterly, American Quarterly, and Social Text.

 

 

 

I. Augustus Durham is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto. A former President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in English at the University of Maryland, College Park, he worked in New York prior to his arrival at Toronto. His research interests span numerous centuries to account for the emergence, presence, and meaning of blackness in modernity. Durham’s first monograph, Stay Black and Die: On Melancholy and Genius (Duke University Press), takes up such ideas to examine the relationship between black mothers and sons whereby through abstraction, the black feminine/maternal maintains a psychoanalytic and affective role in the making of melancholy and genius in the black masculine. He has published work in Syndicate, Black Camera: An International Film Journal, Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, and Journal of Religion and Health; and an essay on the film Moonlight for an edited collection on Tarell Alvin McCraney. Durham is currently working on three new project.

 

 

 

Maya Harakawa (she/her) is assistant professor in the department of Art History and the University of Toronto, St. Geroge. As a specialist in the art of African Diaspora in North America, she studies histories of Black radicalism and their impact on the discipline of art history. She is particularly interested in questions of methodology and historiography, and looks to Black Studies to find alternatives to art history’s reliance on the logics and values of whiteness. Her current book project is an art historical study of Harlem in the 1960s.

 

 

 

Derefe's research examines black liberation and black radical thought in the modern world, writing at the intersection of political theory and black studies. He has published in journals such as Perspectives on Politics, Political Research Quarterly, PS: Political Science & Politics, Philosophy & Global Affairs, The CLR James Journal, Comparative Education Review, Theory & Event, among others, including several book chapters in edited volumes. His work interrogates the racial logics of colonial modernity and draws on Africana thought for critically rethinking the human condition, with particular interest in theories of freedom.

 

 

 

AJ Bedward is a poet and Ph.D. candidate at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto.