We are pleased to invite you to the fourth lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2023/2024 Fall semester
Agnieszka Rzepa
(Adam Mickiewicz University)
“What are you?”: Canadian Black and Multiracial Writers on Race, Home, and (Un)belonging
Thursday, December 14, 2023
at 4:45 p.m.
You can get 3 OZN points for participating in this event.
Where?
Dobra 55, room 2.118
(the building features some mobility accommodations: ramp and lift)
What?
Canada’s relatively small, but highly diversified black population, holds a different position within the contemporary multicultural framework than the black minority in the United States. While similarly affected in the past by enslavement and segregation, and still subject to discrimination and race-based violence, it has remained much less visible within the cultural landscape of the country. This lecture focuses on life-writing texts—memoirs and personal essays, the majority published in the 21 st century—by Canadian black and multiracial (though black-identifying) writers. The discussion will include texts by Esi Edugyan, David Chariandy, Dionne Brand, Tessa McWatt and other authors. Their reflections on race, home and vagaries of belonging, which often range far beyond Canada, will be nevertheless discussed against the backdrop of specifically Canadian historical, social and cultural contexts.
Who?
Prof. Agnieszka Rzepa is head of the Canadian Literature Research Unit at the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. She has taught and conducted research on Canadian literature since the early 1990s, focusing on contemporary Canadian fiction, Canadian postcolonial studies, as well as Indigenous Canadian literatures and Canadian life writing. Her publications include the monographs Feats and defeats of memory: Exploring spaces of Canadian magic realism (2009) and The self and the world. Aspects of the aesthetics and politics of contemporary North American literary memoir by women (2018; With Dagmara Drewniak and Katarzyna Macedulska) as well as edited collections of articles Eyes Deep with Unfathomable Histories: The Poetics and Politics of Magic Realism Today and in the Past (2012; with Liliana Sikorska) and Kanada z bliska: historia-literatura-przekład (2012; with Alicja Żuchelkowska).
