Encounters Lecture Series 2024-2025: Karina Vernon

3 Feb 2025 - 16:00 / 3 Feb 2025 - 18:00



 

 

 

 

Professor Karina Vernon’s Public Lecture
“Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: The Black Prairies’ Multi-Species Archive”
4 pm, Monday, Feb 3, 2025
Northrop Frye Centre , VC 102
Victoria College, 91 Charles Street West

This lecture follows the muscle memory of Black cowboy songs on the Canadian prairies to retrieve knowledge of the prairies’ ongoing entanglements with slavery and its aftermaths. By working with an interdisciplinary methodology that moves between history, musicology, agrarian and genomic science, this paper argues that the archives of the Black prairies must expand to encompass other-than human species and kinships.

Karina Vernon researches and teaches in the areas of Canadian and Black Canadian literature, archives, critical pedagogy, and Black-Indigenous relations. She is editor of The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology (WLUP 2020) and a companion volume, Critical Readings in the Black Prairie Archives, which is forthcoming. She is the co-editor, with Winfried Siemerling (UWaterloo) of Call and Response-ability: Black Canadian Works of Art and the Politics of Relation (McGill-Queens, forthcoming), which offers a Black Canadian theory of reception and relation.

This lecture is co-presented by the Northrop Frye Centre and the Centre for Comparative Literature.