CERLAC is Co-sponsoring: Tubman Talks with Keisha Bell-Kovacs: Archie Alleyne & a Black sense of Place in Toronto
Date: Thursday, November 21, 2024
Time: 3:00-4:30pm Eastern Time
Location: Tubman Resource Room (314 York Lanes), York University, Keele Campus
In-person Registration: https://research.apps01.yorku.ca/machform/view.php?id=211660
Zoom Registration: https://yorku.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAlfuGrpzMvGdJIT7kzd08X4vqCPZpoXhuO
Title: Archie Alleyne & a Black sense of Place in Toronto
Abstract: Archie Alleyne (1933-2015) was a Toronto-born musician, entrepreneur, activist, and archivist who was active in the formative years of jazz in Canada. He was the first Black musician to “break the colour barrier” at the CBC in the early 1960s. Black Canadians had to navigate spaces in creative ways during the early 20th century when racial discrimination went largely unchallenged and was upheld by the judicial system. Two of Alleyne’s later projects speak to the musician’s complex relationship to place in his hometown. The first, a septet called Band 355, was founded by Alleyne and comprised of former members of the Toronto branch of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), also known as “The Hall,” was located at 355 College Street, and was one of the few spaces for Black social life in the city during the early 20th century. The second project was Toronto’s first soul food restaurant, aptly named ‘The Underground Railroad.’ Alleyne and three of his friends, Howard Matthew and two former Toronto Argonauts, John Henry Jackson and David Mann opened the venue on February 12, 1969.
Black geographies are located in fugitivity, a separate realm that refuses the choices of the established hierarchies. A black sense of place is multidimensional, produced not only by the social and material but also the temporal. Weaving together the Ghanaian-Akan concept of sankofa – ‘looking back while moving forward’ with ideas of fugitivity within black geographies, this research considers the relational nature of black placemaking. This work suggests that the Underground Railroad and Band 355 exemplify how Alleyne creatively remapped and reasserted Black presence in the city.
Bio: Keisha is a musician whose creative practice seeks to incorporate elements of Jamaican folk music with heritage Black American forms. She also enjoys performing repertoire that has roots in the wider Caribbean and South America. Her research interests include themes of identity, social justice, geographies, and Canadian jazz scholarship.
