Literary Animisms: Re-inheriting the Commons II

Room Number: TRS 2-164

Chair: Neil Kortenaar (U Toronto)

Join the Meeting: https://ryerson.zoom.us/j/93672303406?pwd=OEFoY1RWWFRDdHNqSEgzZmdDbmVRdz09

Speakers:

Philip Dickinson (U Lancaster), “Animism and Opacity: Land of Look Behind”

Sam Durrant (U Leeds), “All of us playing together’: Inheriting Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance”

Asha Varaharajan (Queens U), “Heterodox “Animism”: Reclaiming the Commons in Helen Oyeyemi’s Fiction”

Paper Summaries:

Philip Dickinson (U Lancaster), “Animism and Opacity: Land of Look Behind”

This presentation explores Alan Greenberg’s 1982 film Land of Look Behind, notable for its striking images of postcolonial Jamaica and Rastafarian culture in the wake of Bob Marley’s death. The paper proposes an aesthetic of ‘opacity’ that diverges from the logics of enclosure and some versions of ‘new’ animist ethics.

Sam Durrant (U Leeds), “All of us playing together’: Inheriting Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance”

Scott’s narrator’s Noongar name means ‘all of us playing together’. His renarration of First Contact challenges us to reinherit the commons as a space of transperspectival possibility in which we learn each other’s dances and misrecognise each other as djanaks, ancestors from over the seas.

Asha VaraDharajan (Queens U), “Heterodox “Animism”: Reclaiming the Commons in Helen Oyeyemi’s Fiction”

This paper explores Helen Oyeyemi’s heterodox approach to “animism.” I argue that Oyeyemi’s fictions, because of their fearless and sly embrace and appropriation of multiple lineages, serve to heal colonial deracination of cultures, turning the violence of rupture into the art of reclamation and the vision of a new “commons.”