Panels: Presence & Protest: The Second Biennial Black Midwest Symposium

To kick-off this year’s symposium, Columbus, Ohio-bred poet, essayist, and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib will share his work before joining in conversation with writers Aaron Foley, originally of Detroit, Michigan, and Tamara Winfrey-Harris, originally of Gary, Indiana. Together, these three dynamic authors who are helping to develop the landscape for regional Black writing will discuss how Blackness is variously conceived within midwestern contexts and how their work has been shaped by their experiences as Black Midwesterners.

The funkiness of Dayton and the Minneapolis Sound. The poetic beauty of Gwendolyn Brooks and the literary genius of Toni Morrison. The choreographic brilliance of Katherine Dunham and the visual acumen of Gordon Parks. The innovative artistry of Black Midwesterners is, and always has been, indispensable to shaping the U.S. cultural landscape. This panel considers how contemporary cultural producers are building upon what came before to imagine and enact liberatory futures for Black Midwesterners.

Is resting a form of rebellion? The past several years have brought high levels of loss to the Black Midwest. From the increase in hate group and hate crime activity to voter suppression, police murders, COVID, and more, Black folks have barely had time to rest. How can we in the Black Midwest find space and time for rest, rejuvenation, and joy as we continue working for justice? How might frameworks such as intergenerational trauma and reparations help us find new pathways away from burnout and towards respite and reclamation of our health? How can we find and embrace communal, culturally specific ways of healing that will attend not only to our physical needs but also to our spiritual and emotional needs? If we consider rest as part of resistance, what does it spark as we imagine our futures in the Black Midwest?

While narratives of the Great Migration of Black southerners to the industrial cities of the North and tales of francophone Black Canadians migrating to the Great Lakes are vitally important to Black midwestern history, there are other Black midwestern migratory patterns that also deserve greater attention. For example, Columbus, Ohio and the Twin Cities of Minnesota are home to the largest Somali diaspora populations within the United States, and substantial Caribbean communities are thriving within cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh. This panel explores the Midwest as a site of global connection for African diasporic people with attention to issues of immigration, political struggle, and cultural, religious, and language diversity.

Representations of Black midwestern communities are replete with images of shuttered factories, dilapidated buildings, and contaminated waterways. We are continuously besieged with the rhetoric of decline, insolvency, and reversal. Yet Black Midwesterners throughout the region continue to model new and innovative ways of solving old and evolving problems. This panel focuses on the important work Black Michiganders are doing in ethical urban planning and community revitalization, in developing urban agriculture and fighting for food sovereignty, and, ultimately, toward building more just and sustainable environments.

Since our founding, BMI has been committed to the idea that struggling toward Black liberation mandates that we work across disciplinary and institutional boundaries and alongside the communities that have helped to sustain us. While we see the university as a critical site of intervention in this endeavor, also central to our belief is the idea that education occurs as much outside of academic institutions as it does within them, and that art and community-based organizational work are just as critical to transforming the larger social world. To this end, this panel attends to the idea of “Black study,” what we conceptualize as an ongoing process of deep coalitional thinking and struggle rather than a formalized academic field, that is meant to privilege ways of knowing that are informed by people whose artistic practices and training beyond the university expand our capacity for freedom dreaming.