Summer intersession courses available

Instructor: Dr. Henry Daniel

Schedule: CA 312 Tue/Thu 9:30-11:20, CA 826 Tue/Thu 9:30-12:20, May 10 to June 20

Location: Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, 149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver

This is a seminar course, 2-hours for undergraduates and 3-hours for graduate students, that asks them to examine the different types of performative actions that Black bodies undertake in efforts to define themselves across increasingly tense Diasporic spaces. It explores the historic circumstances that positioned these bodies in the spaces where they currently exist, to explore the performative actions that help them define themselves, and to examine the results of these actions in the texts, art objects, dances, music, films, and discussions that emerge. Students can expect lectures that help “illuminate the capacities of black performance and black sensibilities to enable critical discussions of performance histories, theories, and practices” (DeFranz & Gonzalez, 2014) in topics such as

“Repainting Black Canadian History with White Brush Strokes”; “Afrofeminist performance from Cuba to Peru”; “Exploring Racial Identities through Code-Switching and Anti-Blackness in Asian Cultures”, “Rhodes must fall to Columbus must fall: from South Africa to Minnesota”; “Carnival as Activist Performance across the Diaspora”; “Colonial Violence, Racialization, and the Evolution of White Supremacy”, “From Black Face in Montreal to Zwarte Piet in Amsterdam”, and more.

Instructor: Webster McDonald

Schedule: Tue/Thu 13:30-16:20, May 10 to June 20

Location: Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, 149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver

To approach Jamaican dance without the specific sites for race and identity; especially via colonial, post-colonial/post-script lenses would only further sweep some of the historical/social and political linchpins under proverbial carpets. This course engages with the seminal works of Nettleford’s Caribbean Cultural Identity: In case of Jamaica, W.E.B. Dubois’s dialectic surrounding double consciousness, Kamau Brathwaite’s-The development of creole society in Jamaica(1770-1820), Olive Lewin’s-Rock in come over, a plethora of dancehall scholarship and astrid erll’s memory in culture that will provide the connective tissue needed to delineate the ways in which intergenerational memory collectively circulates within religious topography. Using a ‘timeline’ approach the course draws on movement traditions via two categories:

1. Spiritual/social/political/Cultural Memory (19th century): Kumina, Bruckins, Revival

2. Retention/Black Consciousness/ Resistance/ Gender Performativity (20th-21st century): Ska, Rock Steady, Reggae, Dancehall