This episode presents a keynote talk by M. NourbeSe Philip from Social Justice Week 2017, called Black Be/longing: At the crossroads of art, culture, and human rights.

It was part of the Mandela ECI Lecture series: A unique series of keynote talks by renowned Black public intellectuals and artists. The series was presented by Social Justice Week in collaboration with TMU’s Office for Equity and Community Inclusion.

This talk spotlights one of Canada’s most important contemporary writers and revolutionary thinkers, M. NourbeSe Philip, whose aim has always been to make us see what has gone unseen. As an award-winning poet, essayist, novelist and playwright, she writes about memory upon the margin of history, in the shadow of empire, and at the frontier of silence. Her writing engages in genre-breaking exploration of memory, history and the transatlantic slave trade. In this talk, Philip draws from her latest book Blank to explore questions of belonging, race, politics, art, and the so-called multicultural nation.

Host: Kiké Roach
Editor: Eunice Addo