Andrea A Davis In Person Book Launch “Horizon, Sea, Sound”

Andrea Davis in conversation with Christina Sharpe, and reflections by Eve Tuck, Rinaldo Walcott, and Ola Mohammed

Music by Mark Campbell / DJ Grumps

Doors open at 6pm Eastern

Event begins at 7pm

Food and drinks will be served

Livestream on Another Story Bookshop’s YouTube Page.

Books will be for sale and Andrea Davis will be signing books. Books can be purchased in advance at anotherstory.ca. We ship across Canada.

Presented by Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, York University and Another Story Bookshop

With support from CRC in Black Studies, Dept. of Humanities, York University. This event is made possible thanks to the generous support of Toronto Artscape Inc.

In Horizon, Sea, Sound: Caribbean and African Women’s Cultural Critiques of Nation, Andrea Davis imagines new reciprocal relationships beyond the competitive forms of belonging suggested by the nation-state. The book employs the tropes of horizon, sea, and sound as a critique of nation-state discourses and formations, including multicultural citizenship, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and the hierarchical nuclear family.

Drawing on Tina Campt’s discussion of Black feminist futurity, Davis offers the concept future now, which is both central to Black freedom and a joint social justice project that rejects existing structures of white supremacy. Calling for new affiliations of community among Black, Indigenous, and other racialized women, and offering new reflections on the relationship between the Caribbean and Canada, she articulates a diaspora poetics that privileges our shared humanity. In advancing these claims, Davis turns to the expressive cultures (novels, poetry, theater, and music) of Caribbean and African women artists in Canada, including work by Dionne Brand, M. NourbeSe Philip, Esi Edugyan, Ramabai Espinet, Nalo Hopkinson, Amai Kuda, and Djanet Sears. Davis considers the ways in which the diasporic characters these artists create redraw the boundaries of their horizons, invoke the fluid histories of the Caribbean Sea to overcome the brutalization of plantation histories, use sound to enter and reenter archives, and shapeshift to survive in the face of conquest. The book will interest readers of literary and cultural studies, critical race theories, and Black diasporic studies.

ANDREA A. DAVIS is an associate professor in the Department of Humanities at York University, Toronto and coeditor of The Journal of Canadian Studies. A former director of the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean, she is also the editor of Jamaica in the Canadian Experience: A Multiculturalizing Presence.

Venue details:

Wychwood Barns is a large venue, with large garage doors at both entrances that will be kept open for full ventilation. Food and drinks will be served on one end of the Barns. The event will take place at another end. Guests will be asked to keep masks on unless they are in the food and drinks area. The Barns is wheelchair accessible, both the entrance and bathrooms.

COVID Protocols

Wychwood Barns does not require proof of vaccination for entrance to events. We will ask guests to remain masked unless eating or drinking at one end of the space.