About the Workshop
There are few works published in the past 20 years that have had as profound and generative an influence on diverse audiences as Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return. A poetic text comprised of essays, memories, vignettes, historical fragments, and readings of painting and literature toward a theorization of Diasporic Black life (Toronto and Vancouver, Johannesburg, Grenada and Trinidad) in the wake of slavery, A Map to the Door of No Return has inspired and challenged readers in North America and around the world who have taken up Brand’s work on the door as schema—the opposite of a shoring up of a narrative of origins—and its challenges to what nation and belonging might mean, after that step through the ‘door of no return.’
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Schedule
- Wednesday Nov 3
- Thursday Nov 4
- Friday Nov 5
- Saturday Nov 6
- Day 1
- Day 2
- Day 3
Shaunasea Brown (Moderator)
Dwellers Play Collective is a budding, ever-growing theatre ensemble that makes space for Black folks to play, experiment, question and dwell. With love, we strive to create conditions in which Blackness may be boundless, diasporic and defy binaries on every front.
Iyer and Smith have made music together for nearly two decades, frequently over the last several years as a duo, as on their award-winning recording A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke (2016, ECM). Writing in The New Yorker, Alec Wilkinson described their music in this way: “[It] begins with Smith playing a bright rising phrase like a herald, that seems to announce a character’s taking the stage. What follows might be a two-figure play in which the exchanges involve mortality or impermanence or divinity. The musicians seem to trade remarks and sometimes talk along with one another […] Sometimes they appear to reflect on an exchange and sometimes they brood separately. The discourses are both cultivated and passionate.”
- Day 4
Christina Sharpe (Moderator)
Rinaldo Walcott (Moderator)
Registration is now closed.
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