Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies 40th Anniversary Lecture: Celebrating m. nourbeSe philip’s Zong!
We invite you to attend the 40th anniversary Robarts Lecture featuring the poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist m. nourbeSe philip, who is launching a new edition of her acclaimed book-length poem Zong!, about the victims of the Zong massacre, when approximately 150 enslaved Africans were murdered for insurance purposes in 1781, reactions to which led to significant momentum in the British abolitionist movement.
m. nourbeSe philip is known for experimenting with literary form and her commitment to social justice, notably in Ontario. This extended 182-page poetry cycle is composed entirely of the words of the case report, Gregson vs. Gilbert, related to the murder of Africans on board a slave ship. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment.
Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten. Zong! has been disseminated in three dramatic performances by theatrical directors and excerpts of Zong! have been used in six different visual arts installations by different artists in five countries.
When: September 12, 2024, lecture with Q&A from 4-5 pm, followed by a reception and book signing from 5-6 pm.
Where: the lecture will be in the Joseph G. Green Studio Theater, 151 Centre for Film and Theater, York University, Keele Campus. The reception will be in the Fireside Lounge. Find more information on the venue here.
RSVP: to robarts@yorku.ca by September 6, 2024.
Event Sponsors:
– Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies, including the Black Canada Research Cluster and the Commemoration, Pedagogy and Historical Trauma Research Cluster
– Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies
– Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology
– York Research Chair in Linguistic Diversity and Community Vitality
– Department of Theater and Performance
– Vice-President of Research and Innovation, York University
