Limited-window screening: “Whisper Network Intelsat 502” / view

Global Blackness Summer School ‘22

Black Geographies, of Care

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 on “Black Geographies, of Care”, as we seek to centre practices and processes of Black spacemaking. In Demonic Grounds (2006), Katherine McKittrick deploys Sylvia Wynter’s 1990 “Afterword” (to Davies and Savory Fido, Out of the Kumbla) and its assertion of ‘demonic ground’ as “outside of our present governing system of meaning, or theory/ontology” (Wynter, 356). McKittrick identifies demonic grounds as, “black geographies” … “as the terrain of political struggle itself”, or “where the imperative of a perspective of struggle takes place” (McKittrick, 6). ThIs year's RGC GBSS asks: What does it mean to take space? To make place? Sometimes as acts of resistance or repair? What is the nature of a “demonic” politics of and for Black lives and experiences, that operates from the assumption of a radical yet quotidian practice of care? 

Ever mindful of the question of “from where?”, we come together in Johannesburg, but also online (as a broader community of global Blackness), to engage these and other questions for Black spacemaking, along with invited scholars and artists, Tina Campt, Thandi Loewenson, Keguro Macharia, Mpho Matsipa and Deborah Thomas

The visual texture of this year’s programme is richly informed by Whisper Network Intelsat 502, a multimedia video work by RGC Black Digital South Artist-in-residence Thandi Loewenson.

- - -

Programme