Coda: As Told by the Living*- Day 1

Coda: As Told by the Living* is a colloquium that completes the speculative triptych that began with Prelude: Venus Lives and continued with Act 3: As Visible as Blood. Together, these projects trace and dissect the afterlives of the Black Venus, foregrounding the intimacies, violences, and possibilities of Black femme sexuality.

Bringing together the voices of emerging thinkers alongside established scholars—those whose voices are often confined within the institution, yet whose imaginations exist elsewhere—Coda: As Told by the Living* establishes itself as an exercise in what Christina Sharpe names a Black annotation of life in the wake.

Through the words, performances, and gestures of Semilore Sobande, Keisha Scarville, Rebecca Bair, Kariyana Calloway-Scott, Zuri Arman, Zalika U. Ibaorimi, Hunter Shackelford, Kimberly Bain, Abena Somiah, Fatima Jamal, Idaresit Thompson, and Adeerya Johnson, we are confronted with a lingering question, a whisper, an intervention, and a continuation; an insistence on the interiority of Black being against a dominant imaginary of mistranslation, erasure, and objectification.

Info: As national borders harden and information circulates at unprecedented speeds, the boundaries mapped onto Blackness(especially on and through Black women’s bodies)grow both rigid and strangely diffuse. Writing Black women into “unexpected territories” requires reckoning with how knowledge is produced, who is authorized to produce it, and whose narratives are discarded in the process. My presentation offers a Black geographic engagement with the unknowability of Black womanhoods and Black female sexualities. Drawing on Evelynn Hammonds’s idea of “black (w)holes,” which resists the overdetermination of Black female sexuality as simultaneously muted and overread, I examine how Black women’s bodies circulate widely in media while being erased from space, cast as a geographic boundary. I also take up Zakiyah Iman Jackson’s material metaphor of the sublime to consider what it means to write Black women’s bodies back into place through kinetic orality and visual art.

Info: Canada’s domestic order renders the Black femme both hypervisible and invisible, an essential contradiction that underwrites the nation’s racial fantasy. The same libidinal structure that once enabled the slave ship captain’s pleasure now shapes Canada’s humanitarian self-image. Drawing on Hartman, Douglass, and Browne, I read Canadian law as narrative, arguing that the Black femme is staged as simultaneously knowable and unknowable, her suffering mobilized to affirm national benevolence. Through a reading of Baker v. Canada, I frame the decision as a libidinal text in which the nation disciplines and then “rescues” the Black femme, rehearsing slavery’s afterlife through the liberal grammar of rights. Following Hartman’s question of how to revisit the scene of subjection without repeating its violence, I ask what “justice” can mean within a legal order that requires the Black femme as its constitutive limit.

Info: This presentation, Curating Black Culture in Museums, examines how curatorial practices can prioritize Black voices, histories, and aesthetics within predominantly white institutional spaces. I will discuss the development of exhibitions like “Never Turn Back” and MOPOP’s online Hip-Hop archive, which highlight the influence of African American musical traditions through immersive storytelling and community collaboration. By connecting theory and practice, this talk will provide a guide for curating Black culture that avoids tokenization, respects community knowledge, and transforms museums into spaces of cultural affirmation and learning. Bridging theory and practice, this talk will provide a roadmap for curating Black culture that resists tokenization, honours community knowledge, and turns museums into spaces of cultural affirmation and learning.

Info: n0humaninv0lved’s antidisciplinary project BE(CUM)ING: N.H.I. in Three Acts examines the afterlife of Black nationalist masculinist formations of the sixties and the citizen-subject they attempted to produce. The work identifies how this project recast Black gender and sexual classes as degraded, particularly through the figure of the Black wh0re (dis)figure—a formation that exceeds a strictly materialist account and instead moves across sexual, psychic, spiritual, and ontological terrains. Tracing how West Coast Black nationalism of the sixties reappears as residue within the spontaneous radicalisms of the nineties, the project engages Sylvia Wynter’s critiques of the Human. BE(CUM)ING interrogates the “Black sex problem” in Black Studies and the limits of discourses on pornography, sex, and sexual violence through three acts—ontology, politics, and aesthetics—paired with meta-acts that unfold textually, performatively, and visually.

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