Topia-Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies最新文献

{"title":"Black Studies without Excellence","authors":"Rosalind Hampton","doi":"10.3138/topia-2023-0039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/topia-2023-0039","url":null,"abstract":"As the Canadian university expands its market to previously excluded populations and areas of study, Black students and scholars take up positions in academia to engage in intellectual work geared toward liberation, knowing that from the perspective of the neoliberal institution, our value is primarily as new categories of institutional consumer and forms of institutional capital. We work from this incongruous position of within and against the academy, simultaneously posited as visible representatives and visual representations of its reformation as “diverse” and “decolonized.” The university has long asserted its excellence, and in sponsoring “Black Excellence” and “Indigenous Excellence” it now claims its excellence at being inclusive—hence “Inclusive Excellence”. This paper draws on the work of Bill Readings in conversation with Black radical thought and my recent research to examine these issues as they are emerging in the much delayed and ongoing development of Black Studies in Canada.","PeriodicalId":43438,"journal":{"name":"Topia-Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135729976","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Black Feminism and the Failures of the Contemporary “Neoliberal” University Critique","authors":"Zachary Brown","doi":"10.3138/topia-2023-0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/topia-2023-0014","url":null,"abstract":"This article interrogates critiques of the contemporary university elaborated by scholars under the umbrella of critical university studies (CUS) by grappling with the theoretical and conceptual commitments to neoliberalism as a framework to discuss the political economy of higher education and its concomitant practices. Through a Black feminist critique of CUS’s engagements with the “neoliberal function” of higher education, this article suggests the inability of neoliberalism as an analytical frame to consider the history of colonization and chattel slavery in the structuring of the contemporary university. Put another way, the emphasis on neoliberalism in many cultural critiques of the contemporary university disallows an analysis of Black fungibility as the internal logic of neoliberalism and the necessary relation that stabilizes the modern university and allows for the reproduction of post-slavery university subjects. Specifically, this argument coheres to the materialized scene of the university as a site of struggle. Reading Black student leaders’ denigration of the university through a Black feminist lens, this article invites a reconfiguration of the contemporary university critique that both constitutes the current neoliberal paradigm and exceeds the onto-epistemic configurations of the educational subject that enable the emergence of the “neoliberal critique” of the university itself.","PeriodicalId":43438,"journal":{"name":"Topia-Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135779147","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reflections and Refractions of Black Radicalism","authors":"Rosalind Hampton, AJ Bedward","doi":"10.3138/topia-2023-0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/topia-2023-0007","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses collaborative Black study that entails dialogical engagement with a range of texts and podcasts about Black radicalism and is further informed by participation in anti-capitalist, anti-colonial activism. The authors describe their process of examining Black radical thought during the COVID-19 pandemic and the ways in which Black radicalism has been and is now being imagined across contexts. Following the work of Cedric Robinson, the authors understand the Black radical tradition as a negation of Western civilization from within Western society, placing it in hostile relation to the neoliberal university. They discuss Black radicalism as anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, feminist, communally oriented, and opposed to neo/liberal ideologies. They address a range of Black socialist traditions, including those labeled communist, Black anarchist, abolitionist, and antifascist to attend to an ongoing critical-creative practice of Black resistance and collective life-making capable of adapting to and challenging the changing conditions of late capitalism.","PeriodicalId":43438,"journal":{"name":"Topia-Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135778852","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Toward a Post-Apologetic University","authors":"Océane Jasor, Ronald Cummings, Nalini Mohabir, Christiana Abraham","doi":"10.3138/topia-2023-0036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/topia-2023-0036","url":null,"abstract":"This is a reflection on the uses of university apologies, prompted by the recent apology offered by Concordia University for its mishandling of Black students’ complaints of institutional racism in 1969, which culminated in the Sir George Williams University student protest, the largest protest against racism on a Canadian university campus.","PeriodicalId":43438,"journal":{"name":"Topia-Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135729666","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Equity Diversity and Inclusion and Black Higher Education Administrators: Reflections on Illusions of Change","authors":"Neil Price","doi":"10.3138/topia-2023-0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/topia-2023-0016","url":null,"abstract":"Over the past two decades, universities and colleges in Canada have increasingly styled themselves as being deeply invested in addressing anti-Black racism, coloniality, and histories of exclusion. To address these long-standing grievances, academic institutions have ramped up and mass-promoted the implementation of equity-focused initiatives such as equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) offices; executive-level EDI positions; race-based data collection; EDI working groups; subcommittees and councils; anti-racism charters; statements of solidarity; and EDI training and workshops. In this article, the author argues that these efforts have done nothing to meaningfully address entrenched inequities present at every level of academic institutions. Of particular focus is the role of the Black administrator, who, the author argues, is hired to nullify dissent within the institution while manufacturing optics of diversity and progress. Drawing on the author’s own experience as a former college dean, this article first provides examples of how these strategies amount to a nullification of dissent. The author argues that universities and colleges have become sophisticated in stifling legitimate challenges to hierarchies of power through incorporating and co-opting calls for change. The author shows how such practices not only undermine radical demands for change but also provide ways for institutions to maintain their racial capitalist, neoliberal objectives. In thinking about what may yet be possible in “another university,” the author reviews a set of principles derived from Black radical tradition and Black queer feminist theory, which point to ways in which we may move toward an alternative learning commons or what others refer to as the “off-university” or the “undercommons.” Extending on the concepts of the “Black test” and an “ethics of care,” the author suggests some fundamental criteria for moving toward transformed academic institutions while also addressing ways in which we can rethink notions of Black leadership that are too often deployed to frustrate calls for change.","PeriodicalId":43438,"journal":{"name":"Topia-Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"80 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135729783","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>The Silent Enemy</i> (1930) and n’Daki Menan: Reclaiming Mise-en-Scène as Authorial Expression","authors":"Tyson Stewart, Mary Laronde","doi":"10.3138/topia-2022-0058","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/topia-2022-0058","url":null,"abstract":"Paramount Pictures’ The Silent Enemy, released in 1930, is a fascinating cultural artifact made and released during the transition from silent to sound film. One of the last silent feature films made by the studio, this critically acclaimed film took three years to make and was shot in large part on location on n’Daki Menan, the traditional territory of the Teme Augama Anishnabai in northern Ontario. Like other silent films made in Indigenous communities during this period such as Curtis’ In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914) and Myles’ The Daughter of Dawn (1920), The Silent Enemy employed local Indigenous actors and drew on their knowledge and traditions to construct its vision of pre-contact Anishinaabe life. While the exact location and community are never mentioned in The Silent Enemy itself, local Anishinaabe people were hired to act in the film and make the costumes and sets according to pre-contact standards, all elements of the film form that added greatly to the production’s claims of authenticity. This cultural labour went uncredited and unacknowledged. While the film recycles the prominent ethnographic narrative of the dying “Indian” culture, it does feature ironic moments of Indigenous survivance, such as an introductory sequence with Chief Yellow Robe shot in synchronized sound, naturalistic performances, material culture designed by locals that continue to captivate community members, and over-the-top colonial takes on pre-contact life. Until now, most readings of this silent feature focused on the celebrity image of Chief Long Lance and his “outing” as an African American and its use of Native American actors in leading roles, but for far too long, the story of its long-lasting influence as both a personal and a public historical artifact for the Teme Augama Anishnabai has not been told. The authors’ method for telling this story will alternate between oral storytelling and scholarly analysis of the film’s formal and thematic elements. The authors hope that by drawing on oral and traditional storytelling approaches, Indigenous ways of knowing will be foregrounded.","PeriodicalId":43438,"journal":{"name":"Topia-Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"56 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135730619","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Toxic Rhythms: Protest Masculinities of “Brown Indo-Canadians” versus “Surrey Jacks”","authors":"Anjali Gera Roy","doi":"10.3138/topia-2022-0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/topia-2022-0019","url":null,"abstract":"Bhangra music has generically functioned as the site for the articulation of a particular form of Jat masculinity that may be described as hypermasculine. In its glorification of Jat machismo and reification of the female as an object of the Jat’s adoration, it has perpetuated gendered stereotypes originating in feudal Punjabi cultures of honour. Several Punjabi folksongs or those attributed to legendary Punjabi folk singers map strength, courage, and virility on the Jat body in which the objectification of the female body is traditionally sanctioned as a desirable Jat attribute. In hybrid Bhangra genres, Punjabi hypermasculinity is remodelled in relation to the hypermasculinist aesthetic of black genres like rap to produce an explosive toxic masculinity. This article focuses on the hypermasculine ethic underpinning popular bhangra music, particularly the songs of two popular singers, Jazzy B and Yo Yo Honey Singh, to examine the Canadian Punjabi youth masculinities that converge on Punjabi music to reproduce traditional Punjabi patriarchies. It shows that while the appropriation of these bhangra genres enables brown Indo-Canadians and “Surrey Jacks” to constitute alternative protest masculinities in opposition to hegemonic white masculinities, they engender different forms of misogyny and violence.","PeriodicalId":43438,"journal":{"name":"Topia-Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136057743","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Black Light: On the Origin and Materiality of the Image","authors":"Z. Jackson","doi":"10.3138/topia-2022-0044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/topia-2022-0044","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Aesthesis is a political matter, such that black folk have often sought to challenge a mode of representation that mythologizes blackness as mere absence or lack. There is artmaking that seeks to transfigure both the void blackness is thought to represent and a known world whose “facts” depend on a fiction of black vacancy. These are works that, in the words of curator Adrienne Edwards, “are philosophically charged, culturally compounded abstractions” and figurations “that point to discourse beyond medium and art movements,” alternately affirming nothing or attuning to the indeterminacy and incalculability of blackness, whether blackness be attributed to person, place, or thing. Perception and its organization are meaningful and necessarily remain a ground of contestation. This essay concerns the refractive potentialities of blackness as well as its density or fullness that exceed the capture of mimetic representation. It highlights works that critically explore the received terms and limits of representation in the interest of the dissolution of given categories and conceptual forms. Focusing particular attention on Faith Ringgold’s Black Light and American People series, this essay both demonstrates that the aporia and paradoxical power that “black womanhood” has come to represent is pivotal in mediating the relation between abstraction and figuration in modern art and our social worlds as well as considers related works that reposition blackness as incalculable density and a light source in its own right.RÉSUMÉ:L’esthésie est une question politique, dans la mesure où les personnes noires ont souvent cherché à contester un mode de représentation qui mythifie la noirceur en en faisant une simple absence ou un manque. Or, il existe une forme de création artistique qui cherche à transfigurer à la fois le néant que la noirceur est censée représenter et un monde connu dont les « faits » dépendent d’une fictive vacance noire. Les œuvres qu’elle produit, selon la conservatrice Adrienne Edwards, « sont des abstractions lourdes de sens philosophique et culturellement complexes » et des figurations « qui pointent vers un discours qui se situe au-delà des techniques et des mouvements artistiques », tour à tour en n’affirmant rien et en se mettant à l’écoute de l’indétermination et de l’incalculabilité de la noirceur, qu’on l’attribue à une personne, à un lieu ou à une chose. La perception et son organisation sont porteuses de sens et restent nécessairement un terrain de contestation. Cet article porte sur le potentiel réfractif de la noirceur, de même que sur sa densité ou sa plénitude, plus vastes que ce que peut en saisir la représentation mimétique. Il met en lumière des œuvres qui critiquent les termes convenus et les limites de la représentation en vue de dissoudre les catégories et les formes conceptuelles données. En accordant une attention particulière aux séries Black Light et American People de Faith Ringgold, l’article montre que l’idé","PeriodicalId":43438,"journal":{"name":"Topia-Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"56 1","pages":"134 - 148"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81393439","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Bottom Drawer, or, The Beginning of Reading","authors":"Brandon Shimoda","doi":"10.3138/topia-2022-0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/topia-2022-0025","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:A meditation on an image in Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return, in which a young Dionne Brand discovers a book, The Black Napoleon, in the bottom drawer of her grandmother’s wardrobe, and begins to read it. “The Bottom Drawer, or, The Beginning of Reading” is also a meditation on the act of reading as related to tactility, initiation, and transformation; on ancestors and where descendants imagine their ancestors gathering; the pose of the subject in a photograph by Manuel Álvarez Bravo; the influence of The Black Napoleon in Dionne Brand’s writing/life; and the genesis, in reading, of the writer Dionne Brand.RÉSUMÉ:Ce texte est une méditation sur une image d’A Map to the Door of No Return de Dionne Brand, dans laquelle la jeune Dionne Brand découvre un livre, The Black Napoleon, dans le tiroir du bas de l’armoire de sa grand-mère, et commence à le lire. C’est aussi une méditation sur l’acte de lire dans sa relation avec la sensibilité tactile, l’initiation et la transformation ; sur les ancêtres, et sur les lieux où les descendants imaginent que leurs ancêtres se rassemblaient ; sur la pose adoptée par le sujet d’une photographie de Manuel Álvarez Bravo ; sur l’influence du Napoléon noir dans l’écriture et la vie de Dionne Brand ; et sur la genèse en lecture de l’écrivaine Dionne Brand.","PeriodicalId":43438,"journal":{"name":"Topia-Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"152 1","pages":"191 - 194"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73444138","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Futile Plans: Map, Wandering, and the Study of Religion","authors":"B. Gray","doi":"10.3138/topia-2022-0029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/topia-2022-0029","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Sometimes, plans fail. I had planned to write about how Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging spoke to the study of religion in various ways. But after encountering Map’s speaker on the ocean with Yemaya, my plans failed, and opened a different way of thinking about religion and its study. In this regard, this essay speaks to religion not as a category of human experience, but instead as a kind of movement that sets our categories in default. Turning to scholars of religion like Charles Long and Black studies scholars like Sarah Jane Cervenak, I eventually suggest that Map offers us wandering as a method for studying religion; instead of coming with our received categories, I suggest, we must instead adopt wandering as a method; instead of starting with traditions, beliefs, theologies and histories, we should instead insist on life—and allow that insistence to guide our study.RESUMÉ:Parfois les plans échouent. J’avais prévu d’écrire un texte sur les diverses manières dont A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging de Dionne Brand évoque l’étude de la religion. Mais après avoir rencontré l’orateur de Map sur l’océan avec Yemaya, mon plan a échoué, et une façon différente de penser la religion et son étude s’est présentée. C’est ainsi que cet article considère la religion non pas comme une catégorie de l’expérience humaine, mais plutôt comme une sorte de mouvement qui réinitialise nos paramètres catégoriels. Empruntant à des érudits de la religion comme Charles Long et à des spécialistes des études sur les Noir·es comme Sarah Jane Cervenak, j’en arrive à considérer que l’œuvre de Brand nous propose l’errance comme méthode d’étude de la religion : au lieu d’y arriver avec nos catégories reçues, ma suggestion est que nous devons plutôt adopter l’errance comme méthode ; au lieu de commencer par les traditions, les croyances, les théologies et les histoires, nous devrions plutôt insister sur la vie – et permettre à cette insistance de guider notre étude.","PeriodicalId":43438,"journal":{"name":"Topia-Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies","volume":"3 1","pages":"66 - 78"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83337825","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}