Showing results by narrator "Christina Sharpe" in All Categories

The second annual Alchemy Lecture was presented in November 2023 at York University to a sold out in-person audience and nearly one thousand live online viewers. Moderated by Dr. Christina Sharpe, the Alchemists—agile thinkers and practitioners working across a range of disciplines and geographies—convened to discuss their radical visions of the beautiful world, and the manifestos that may help to guide us there. Their treatises have been captured and luminously expanded in this book.

A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores with immense care profound questions about loss, and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. Christina Sharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past—public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal—with present-day realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. Throughout, themes and tones echo, always attending, with exquisite care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life.

Spanning almost four decades, Dionne Brand’s poetry has given rise to whole new grammars and vocabularies. With a profound alertness that is attuned to this world and open to some other, possibly future, time and place, Brand’s ongoing labours of witness and imagination speak directly to where and how we live and reach beyond those worlds, their enclosures, and their violences.

In November 2022, the first annual Alchemy Lecture took place at York University in Toronto, bringing four deep and agile writers from different geographies and disciplines into vibrant conversation on a topic of urgent relevance: humans and borders. Now, in this book, that conversation is captured and expanded in insightful, passionate ways.