Global Blackness Summer School ‘23

For Wholeness. Black being well

Join us as over five weeks we think, feel, stretch, play, dance, dialogue, listen and delight our way into radical, creative, community based practices of Black being well.

Launched in 2021, the RGC Global Blackness Summer School is an annual, hybrid gathering that takes place in the summer months of the Southern hemisphere. A space for collective exploration and experimentation, this year’s summer school has been made possible by funding from the National Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences and the University of Johannesburg. 

We use the term “global Blackness” to attend to the ways in which Black life exists across the globe, but is not always the ‘same’ experience. This year’s school is “For Wholeness – Black Being Well.” Celebrating praxes of creativity, repair and wellbeing that refuse co-option, our hope is to collectively re-envision liberatory projects on terms that do not presuppose the abnegation of Black joy (as the weighty cost of our ‘freedom’), nor the perennial deferment of Blackness as living with/as possibility. As self-care industries recycle whiteness-as-wellness and ‘global responses’ to a planet in crisis routinely disavow historical imperatives of reparation and repair, we ask: How can we language grammars and practices of being well otherwise? How do we perform the world differently now, refusing the binarization of modernity, progress, the subject, Man? What does it mean to work collectively, and hopefully, as we strive towards whole, if not always well, selves? 

Ever mindful of the question of “from where?”, the RGC Global Blackness Summer School is rooted in the Southern Hemisphere, and in Johannesburg specifically, where as a home for global Blackness studies we gather in-person and online as a local, regional and diasporic community. Presenting scholars, artists and collectives for this year’s programme include: Christina Sharpe, Cathy-Mae Karelse, Danai Mupotsa, Dee Marco (with Lakin Morgan-Baatjies & Maria McCloy), Gabrielle Goliath & Maneo Mohale, Jovan Scott Lewis, Milisuthando Bongela, Nombuso Mathibela, the Nest, and Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi.

We are grateful to our featured artist Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi for generously allowing us to use her beautiful painting, Ceremony, as our visual marker for this year’s Summer School. Image credit: Ceremony, 2020, 115 x 145cm, oil on canvas © Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi. Courtesy of Stevenson Cape Town | Johannesburg | Amsterdam. Photo: Nina Lieska

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Programme