Part I: Canisia Lubrin & Danai Muposta
Part II: Christina Sharpe & Canisia Lubrin
On the 28th of January 2023, Race:Gender:Class and the Practicing Refusal Collective presented a curated offering of sonic, performative and poetic responses, as part of the Joburg convening of Think from Black: a Lexicon. Hosted by the Johannesburg Art Gallery and @occupation.jag, the programme featured readings and art activations by Canisia Lubrin, Gabrielle Goliath, Danai Mupotsa, Christina Sharpe and Nelisiwe Xaba. The readings performed in Parts I & II above presented the opening and closing statements of this unique gathering.
Canisia Lubrin is a writer, editor, and critic. Her books include Voodoo Hypothesis, The Dyzgraphxst, and Code Noir. Lubrin is the recipient of the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize, the Derek Walcott Prize, the Windham Campbell Prize, and other honors. Lubrin is an assistant professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph, Canada, where she completed her MFA in Creative Writing.
Danai Mupotsa is a Senior Lecturer in African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. She holds a BA in Africana Studies and Women’s Studies (Luther College), a B. Soc. Sc. (Hons, First Class, UCT) in Gender and Transformation, an M. Soc. Sci in Gender Studies (UCT), and a PhD in African Literature and Cultural Studies (PhD). She specialises in gender and sexualities, black intellectual traditions and histories, intimacy and affect and feminist pedagogies. Danai is a member of the editorial collective of Agenda Feminist Media, and recently co-edited the Agenda special issue “Covid-19: The Intimacies of Pandemics” (2021) with Moshibudi Motimele. Danai has edited several other volumes, including a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies titled “Time Out of Joint: The Queer and the Customary in Africa” with Neville Hoad and Kirk Fiereck. In 2018, she published her first collection of poetry entitled feeling and ugly. The Portuguese translation, feio e ugly was published in 2020 by Editora Trinta Zero (Maputo). Danai is a Senior Fellow of the Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equality.
Christina Sharpe is a writer, Professor, and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto. She is also a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC) at the University of Johannesburg and a Matakyev Research Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at the Arizona State University. She is the author of: In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016) - named by the Guardian and The Walrus as one of the best books of 2016 and a nonfiction finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award - and Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Duke University Press, 2010). Her third book Ordinary Notes, will be published in 2022 (Knopf/FSG/Daunt). She is also working on a monograph called Black. Still. Life.
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