1978

• Hybrid event
• Library and Archives Canada – Public Archives and National Library Building , Ottawa , ON , K1A 0N4
• Zoom meeting link

All lectures will take place in the Pellan Room at Library and Archives Canada (395 Wellington Street). Lectures will begin at 7pm.

Description: 

Published in 1977, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon is a story of overwhelming grief, the search for gold, and bags of bones. It is a story of flying and magic. The following year, Song of Solomon won the National Book Critics award and in a 1978 interview about her work as an editor, as a mother, about hurt and loneliness, Morrison shares that writing novels brought her relief, a way of ordering the world. It is well known that Song of Solomon and her other brilliant writing projects were acts of creation that were worked on after-hours. Moved by the creative relief that Morrison shares, as well as her demanding schedule, in this presentation, I draw connections between black cultural production, representation, and creative labour that is performed “off the clock” or outside our normative rhythms. Using 1978 as a touch point, or a prompt (call), I will share a set of materials, that are tactile and nostalgically analogue, sonic and groovy and sad, and function to elicit solace and creative relief (response) precisely because they cannot be easily captured or institutionalized.  

Biography:  

Katherine McKittrick is Professor of Gender Studies and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies at Queen’s University. Her book projects include Dear Science and Other Stories, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, and Heartbreak and Other Geographies (edited by Brittany Meché and Camilla Hawthorne). Her collaborative and creative projects include Yarns (Haint Blue), Trick Not Telos, Twenty Dreams, and A Smile Split by the Stars. McKittrick’s research and writing spans black studies, cultural geographies, and the arts, with a steady focus on how black creatives and theorists disrupt and remake spatial and scholarly norms. McKittrick is also a scholar of Sylvia Wynter. She participates in the working group, the Revolutionary Demand for Happiness, who dream and realize small scale placemaking projects and other creative adventures.

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