After Conversation

We invite you to attend “After Conversation,” which is the culminating event to the Afterlives JHI working group. The event will take place on April 9 at the Centre for Indigenous Studies (563 Spadina Avenue, 2nd Floor; wheelchair accessible) from 12:30-2:30. A lunch, catered by Ku-Kum Kitchen, will begin at 12:30, and then a conversation with Lee Maracle and three respondents (Jill Carter, Karen McBride, Rijuta Mehta) will start at 1 pm, addressing together the following prompt:

Lee Maracle, in My Conversations with Canadians, invites readers to her table for a conversation about Indigenous-settler relations. The book, moreover, assumes the form of an ongoing conversation. In conversation with Lee Maracle, we seek to further converse about the formal, political, and methodological possibilities of conversation. The language of conversation and dialogue, however, is central to liberal conceptions of what constitutes the political—a move that often presumes all voices will be granted equal intelligibility at the table. “Conversations,” Sara Ahmed reminds us, “are also flows. They are saturated. We hear this saturation as atmosphere.” How might we listen to one another anew, then, while attuning ourselves to the atmospheric and socially differentiated valences of conversation? Recently, the Humanities Pedagogy Confronting Colonization workshop subverted the “chair of Knowing and Authority” to enact a conversational poetics in “a physical and conceptual circle” that brought participants in “equidistant proximity to each other.” Echoing the recent efforts of this workshop, we ask: in what ways can conversations—when uncoupled from liberal notions of free speech—enable us to listen otherwise from within the ongoing afterlives of loss that are amassing in the present? Consequently, how can such conversations change the current formation of Indigenous-settler relations?

RSVP by email to afterconversation@gmail.com

Visit the event website at humanities.utoronto.ca/events/after-conversation