Black Lives Out West Video: Creative Reading with David Chariandy, Cheryl Foggo, and Rain Prud’homme-Cranford

In light of the recent and ongoing police brutality, anti-Black racism, and anti-Indigenous racism in Canada and the United States, we are pausing our regular podcast release schedule to highlight the Black and Indigenous voices who joined us for the TIA House symposium Black Lives Out West in November 2017.

TIA House stands in solidarity with the movements to end anti-Black racism and find justice for Black and Indigenous lives. As an organization committed to social justice and innovative aesthetics, TIA House will continue to amplify and connect the creative work that educators, writers, and artists are taking on in academia and in the community at large to end racial violence and discrimination.

In this recorded video, David Chariandy, Cheryl Foggo, and Rain Prud’homme-Cranford open the Black Lives Out West symposium with readings of their creative work:

About Black Lives Out West:

Recent discussions about the relationship between Black and Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island underline the expropriation of land on the one hand and the making-property of human beings on the other. With this paradigm in mind, Black Lives Out West recognized the Western territories of Turtle Island as a zone of exclusion, a site of social death, and a contact zone. Scholars, critics, and writers deeply considered what relationships can and should be, and how to imagine ethical practice in light of that condition that Lisa Lowe has called “the intimacy of four continents” but with a particular focus of Black and Indigenous concerns and subject positions. Speakers took Kamau Brathwaite’s term “arrivant” recently elaborated by Jodi Byrd in The Transit of Empire to nuance the modes and intentions (or lack of intentions) in movement. From the history of the black Albertan cowboy, John Ware, to that of Hogan’s Alley in Vancouver, to that of the recent asylum seekers crossing the US border at Emerson, Manitoba, this symposium began to re-imagine, re-member, and re-make the contact zone in the hope of better relationships and ethical practices. This symposium was organized by TIA House and Suzette Mayr.

David Chariandy lives in Vancouver, the traditional and unceded territories of the Musqueam, the Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. He teaches at Simon Fraser University, specializing in Canadian, Caribbean, and Global Black literatures, and is the recent co-editor, with Phanuel Antwi, of a special issue of Transition Magazine (124) entitled “Writing Black Canadas.” He is the author of two novels: Soucouyant, nominated for several literary prizes and awards, including the Governor General’s Award for Fiction; and Brother, winner of the 2017 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

Cheryl Foggo, a descendant of the Black pioneers of Alberta and Saskatchewan, is an award-winning writer who has been published and produced extensively in multiple genres. John Ware Reimagined won the 2015 Writers Guild of Alberta Gwen Pharis Ringwood Award for Drama. In 2014 Cheryl co-produced Alberta’s first Black Canadian Theatre Series with Ellipsis Tree Collective Theatre Company. She is currently in production with the National Film Board of Canada on the documentary film John Ware Reclaimed.

Rain Prud’homme-Cranford (Rain C. Goméz), PhD is a “FAT-tastic IndigeNerd” and an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Literatures in the Department of English and Affiliated Faculty in the International Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Calgary. Dr. Prud’homme-Cranford’s research focuses on Trans-Indigeneity in the US, Canada, Gulf Caribbean, and Latin America. Her first book, Smoked Mullet Cornbread Crawdad Memory (MEP 2012), won the First Book Award in Poetry from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. She is Co-Editor and Chief, (along with Carolyn Dunn), of This Painted Horse Press, a Borderless Indigenous Press of the Americas. Her critical and creative work can be found in various publications including The Southern Literary Journal, Louisiana Folklife, and many others.

Special thanks to Ben Groh for editing this video.