Resources
The Diseased Horde: Anti-Asian Racism from the 19th Century to COVID-19 (YouTube Video)
Ali Na, Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University
Anti-Asian discourses during COVID-19 are nothing new. Rather, they are media representations that have been repeated in the US and Canada since at least the 19th Century. Through these continually reemerging formations, Asians and Asian North Americans have been depicted as a diseased horde. Collapsing ethnicity and nationality, these images have sutured animality and impurity onto Asianness. Just as these racist imaginings have been “naturalized” through dominant cultural code, they have also been mobilized to spread hate through a public fear of contamination. From 19th Century print to 20th Century film and 21st Century digital culture, Anti-Asian sentiments have been fomented through eating taboos, charges of sexual aberration, and exotification. Trope frames North American culture, making new discourses appear true for both conservative and liberal members of society alike. Asians “as vectors of disease” resonates across society, creating the ideal conditions for both structural and interpersonal exclusions.
Bryan Stevenson’s We Need To Talk About An Injustice: Bryan Stevenson is one of the leading racial justice advocates, working with people incarcerated on death row. If anyone can diagnose recent injustices and understand the steps forward it would be him.
Kimberle Crenshaw on The Urgency of Intersectionality: Following 2016, ‘intersectionality’ became quite the buzzword, yet gets used out of context often by both the Right and Left alike. Hear from the black woman who coined the term in the ’80s as to how we use intersectionality to defend Black women.
Baratunde Thurston on How To Deconstruct Racism, One Headline At A Time: Racism isn’t funny, but in this TED talk you’ll learn about the pervasive nature of racism and laugh out loud way more times than you’ll be able to count.
The Art of Black Cultural Production From the originators of jazz to TikTok creators, Black culture has & continues to be the catalyst for global trends. We chatted with Black pop culture expert Professor Ola Mohammed about the importance of Black cultural production & the need to support Canada's Black arts industry.
Hiring a Black Leader? Learn from my experience and treat it like it matters by Ivan Joseph, Vice Provost of Student Affairs at Dalhousie University
Straight Talk About the N-Word Neal Lester on teaching a course on the n-word
When Every Word Does Not Belong to Everyone Ta-Nehisi Coates on words and their contexts
Conversation on The Black Register Tendayi Sithole’s The Black Register asks: how have Black thinkers confronted and made sense of a world structured by anti-Blackness, a world that militates against the very existence of Blacks? Sithole undertakes a critical interrogation into the work of Sylvia Wynter, Aimé Césaire, Steve Biko, Assata Shakur, George Jackson, and Mabogo P. More to develop a critical perspective from which to confront worlds that are systematically structured to dehumanize. The “Black register” is the ways of thinking, knowing, and doing that emerge from the struggles against anti-Blackness and that dwell in the lived experience of being Black in an anti-Black world.
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Chapter 1 excerpt) by Christina Sharpe. "In this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that comprise what she calls the "orthography of the wake." Sharpe shows how the sign of the slave ship marks and haunts contemporary Black life in the diaspora and how the specter of the hold produces conditions of containment, regulation, and punishment, but also something in excess of them. In the weather, Sharpe situates anti-Blackness and white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature Black death as normative. Formulating the wake and "wake work" as sites of artistic production, resistance, consciousness, and possibility for living in diaspora, In the Wake offers a way forward."
"Black Feminist Visions and the Politics of Healing in the Movement for Black Lives," by Deva Woodly in Women Mobilizing Memory.
A Survival Guide for Black, Indigenous, and Other Women of Colour in Academe by Aisha S. Ahmad
Anti-racist Animation Syllabus by Mihaela Mihailova
Diversity Work as Complaint by Sara Ahmed/ Feminist Killjoy
Decolonization in not a metaphor by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang
Anti-Racism and Political Contagion from Save Darfur to Black Lives Matter by Hisham Aidi. Historicizes anti-racism in the global context of the evolving war on terror thru the lens of Darfur.
The Argument of "Afropessimism": Frank B Wilderson III sketches a map of the world in which Black people are everywhere integral but always excluded
What it was like attending a university with a prof who touted racist 'pseudo-science'
'Telefilm is due for a change': Inside the cultural reckoning of Canada's film funding agency
Ali Na, Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University
Anti-Asian discourses during COVID-19 are nothing new. Rather, they are media representations that have been repeated in the US and Canada since at least the 19th Century. Through these continually reemerging formations, Asians and Asian North Americans have been depicted as a diseased horde. Collapsing ethnicity and nationality, these images have sutured animality and impurity onto Asianness. Just as these racist imaginings have been “naturalized” through dominant cultural code, they have also been mobilized to spread hate through a public fear of contamination. From 19th Century print to 20th Century film and 21st Century digital culture, Anti-Asian sentiments have been fomented through eating taboos, charges of sexual aberration, and exotification. Trope frames North American culture, making new discourses appear true for both conservative and liberal members of society alike. Asians “as vectors of disease” resonates across society, creating the ideal conditions for both structural and interpersonal exclusions.
Bryan Stevenson’s We Need To Talk About An Injustice: Bryan Stevenson is one of the leading racial justice advocates, working with people incarcerated on death row. If anyone can diagnose recent injustices and understand the steps forward it would be him.
Kimberle Crenshaw on The Urgency of Intersectionality: Following 2016, ‘intersectionality’ became quite the buzzword, yet gets used out of context often by both the Right and Left alike. Hear from the black woman who coined the term in the ’80s as to how we use intersectionality to defend Black women.
Baratunde Thurston on How To Deconstruct Racism, One Headline At A Time: Racism isn’t funny, but in this TED talk you’ll learn about the pervasive nature of racism and laugh out loud way more times than you’ll be able to count.
The Art of Black Cultural Production From the originators of jazz to TikTok creators, Black culture has & continues to be the catalyst for global trends. We chatted with Black pop culture expert Professor Ola Mohammed about the importance of Black cultural production & the need to support Canada's Black arts industry.
Hiring a Black Leader? Learn from my experience and treat it like it matters by Ivan Joseph, Vice Provost of Student Affairs at Dalhousie University
Straight Talk About the N-Word Neal Lester on teaching a course on the n-word
When Every Word Does Not Belong to Everyone Ta-Nehisi Coates on words and their contexts
Conversation on The Black Register Tendayi Sithole’s The Black Register asks: how have Black thinkers confronted and made sense of a world structured by anti-Blackness, a world that militates against the very existence of Blacks? Sithole undertakes a critical interrogation into the work of Sylvia Wynter, Aimé Césaire, Steve Biko, Assata Shakur, George Jackson, and Mabogo P. More to develop a critical perspective from which to confront worlds that are systematically structured to dehumanize. The “Black register” is the ways of thinking, knowing, and doing that emerge from the struggles against anti-Blackness and that dwell in the lived experience of being Black in an anti-Black world.
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Chapter 1 excerpt) by Christina Sharpe. "In this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that comprise what she calls the "orthography of the wake." Sharpe shows how the sign of the slave ship marks and haunts contemporary Black life in the diaspora and how the specter of the hold produces conditions of containment, regulation, and punishment, but also something in excess of them. In the weather, Sharpe situates anti-Blackness and white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature Black death as normative. Formulating the wake and "wake work" as sites of artistic production, resistance, consciousness, and possibility for living in diaspora, In the Wake offers a way forward."
"Black Feminist Visions and the Politics of Healing in the Movement for Black Lives," by Deva Woodly in Women Mobilizing Memory.
A Survival Guide for Black, Indigenous, and Other Women of Colour in Academe by Aisha S. Ahmad
Anti-racist Animation Syllabus by Mihaela Mihailova
Diversity Work as Complaint by Sara Ahmed/ Feminist Killjoy
Decolonization in not a metaphor by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang
Anti-Racism and Political Contagion from Save Darfur to Black Lives Matter by Hisham Aidi. Historicizes anti-racism in the global context of the evolving war on terror thru the lens of Darfur.
The Argument of "Afropessimism": Frank B Wilderson III sketches a map of the world in which Black people are everywhere integral but always excluded
What it was like attending a university with a prof who touted racist 'pseudo-science'
'Telefilm is due for a change': Inside the cultural reckoning of Canada's film funding agency