What does it mean in the era of Black Lives Matter to continue to ignore and deny the violence that is the foundation of the Canadian nation state? BlackLife discloses the ongoing destruction of Black people as enacted not simply by state structures, but beneath them in the foundational modernist ideology that underlies thinking around migration and movement, as Black erasure and death are unveiled as horrifically acceptable throughout western culture. With exactitude and celerity, Idil Abdillahi and Rinaldo Walcott pull from local history, literature, theory, music, and public policy around everything from arts funding, to crime and mental health—presenting a convincing call to challenge pervasive thought on dominant culture's conception of Black personhood. They argue that artists, theorists, activists, and scholars offer us the opportunity to rethink and expose flawed thought, providing us new avenues into potential new lives and a more livable reality of BlackLife.
About the Author
Professor Rinaldo Walcott is the Director of the Women & Gender Studies Institute. Rinaldo's research is founded in a philosophical orientation that is concerned with the ways in which coloniality shapes human relations across social and cultural time and focuses on Black cultural politics; histories of colonialism in the Americas, multiculturalism, citizenship, and diaspora; gender and sexuality; and social, cultural and public policy. Idil Abdillahi is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at Ryerson University. As a critical interdisciplinary scholar, she has published on a wide array of topics such as: mental health, policing, poverty, HIV/AIDS, organizational development, and several other key policy areas at the intersection of BlackLife and state interruption. Most notably, Idil's cutting-edge research on Blackened madness and anti-Black sanism has informed the current debates on fatal police shootings of Black mad identified people.
