Dr. Warren Crichlow is Associate Professor at York University Toronto, Canada where he teaches cultural studies and education. He is a co-editor of Race, Identity and Representation in Education, Routledge, 1993 & 2005; Toni Morrison and the Curriculum (Cultural Studies, 1995) and Spaces of New Colonialism: Reading Schools, Museums and Cities in the Tumult of Globalization (Peter Lang, 2020), He is of author “Baldwin’s Rendezvous with the Twenty-first Century: I Am Not Your Negro,” (summer 2017), and co-author of “A Grand Panorama: Isaac Julien, Frederick Douglass, and Lessons of the Hour” (summer 2020), both in Film Quarterly. His current project is a co-edited book on intersections of education and architecture in the prose-fiction of W. G. Sebald (1944-2001), tentatively titled Unsettling Complacency: Hope and Ethical Responsibility (in-progress).
Title: “Prodigious Presence: After the Door of No Return.”
Abstract: Recollecting sojourns to the castles and forts I made along the Cape Coast of Ghana in the early 1970s, long-forgotten affect recompose into unanswered queries: What was the intention, however deeply buried? What did I sense—then and revisiting again—decades later, gazing through the “Door of No Return” on Gorée Island, Dakar out to the Atlantic’s vast, prodigious presence? This paper maps a return to Dionne Brand’s resplendent cartographic poetic now, twenty years into the twenty-first century.