Rinaldo Walcott - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Rinaldo Walcott is a Black Canadian

Black Canadian

'Black Canadians is a designation used for people of Black African descent, who are citizens or permanent residents of Canada. The term specifically refers to Canadians with Sub-Saharan African ancestry. The majority of Black Canadians are of Caribbean origin...

academic and writer, currently employed as an associate professor at OISE

Oise

Oise is a department in the north of France. It is named after the river Oise.-History:Oise is one of the original 83 departments created during the French Revolution on March 4, 1790...

/University of Toronto

University of Toronto

The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada...

in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education. He was previously an assistant professor in the Division of Humanities

Humanities

The humanities are academic disciplines that study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytical, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences....

at York University

York University

York University is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is Canada's third-largest university, Ontario's second-largest graduate school, and Canada's leading interdisciplinary university....

(2000). Walcott's work focuses on Black Studies, Canadian Studies

Canadian Studies

Canadian Studies is a Collegiate study of Canadian culture, Canadian languages, literature, Quebec, agriculture, history, and their government and politics. Most universities recommend that students take a double major and French, if not included in the course...

, Cultural Studies

Cultural studies

Cultural studies is an academic field grounded in critical theory and literary criticism. It generally concerns the political nature of contemporary culture, as well as its historical foundations, conflicts, and defining traits. It is, to this extent, largely distinguished from cultural...

, Queer Theory

Queer theory

Queer theory is a field of critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of the fields of LGBT studies and feminist studies. Queer theory includes both queer readings of texts and the theorisation of 'queerness' itself...

and Gender Theory

Gender studies

Gender studies is a field of interdisciplinary study which analyses race, ethnicity, sexuality and location.Gender study has many different forms. One view exposed by the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir said: "One is not born a woman, one becomes one"...

, and Diaspora Studies

Diaspora studies

Diaspora studies is an academic field established in the late twentieth century to study dispersed ethnic populations, which are often termed diaspora peoples...

. He is currently the Canada Research Chair of Social Justice and Cultural Studies.

Rinaldo Walcott's work recognizes that "articulating Canadian blackness is difficult not because of the small number of us trying to take the tentative steps towards writing it, but rather because of the ways in which so many of us are nearly always preoccupied with elsewhere and very seldom with here". In this comment, Walcott highlights the dearth of Black Canadians writing about Black Canadian experiences and expressions, and points to his further assertion that a belief that "something important happens here [in Canada]" is a necessary precursor to increasing the scholarly engagement with Black Canadian experiences and expressions. Walcott's explicit engagement with Blackness in Canada and Canadian experiences of Black themes therefore represent foundational work in these areas. The uniqueness of Walcott's scholarship is also connected to his analysis of popular culture as it relates to issues of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality.

Rinaldo Walcott has published several books and articles spanning many issues concerning Blackness in Canada. His work draws on a variety of sources in order to address these issues including the poetry of Dionne Brand

Dionne Brand

Dionne Brand is a Canadian poet, novelist, essayist and documentarian. She was named Toronto's third Poet Laureate in September 2009.-Biography:...

, George Elliot Clarke, and M. Nourbese Philip

M. NourbeSe Philip

Marlene Nourbese Philip , usually credited as M. NourbeSe Philip, is a Canadian poet, novelist, playwright, essayist and short story writer.-Life and Works:...

; the rap of Maestro Fresh Wes

Maestro

Maestro is a title of extreme respect given to a master musician. The term is most commonly used in the context of Western classical music and opera. This is associated with the ubiquitous use of Italian vocabulary for classical music terms...

, Devon

Devon (rapper)

Devon Martin, better known as Devon, is a Canadian rapper.He released his first solo album, It's My Nature in 1992. He won the Juno Award for Best Rap Recording in 1993....

, and the Dream Warriors

Dream Warriors

Dream Warriors were a Canadian hip hop duo from Toronto, Ontario, comprising King Lou and Capital Q. Described as "a pair of deft, intelligent rappers" by Allmusic, they were major contributors to the jazz rap movement of the early 1990s. Their 1991 debut album, And Now the Legacy Begins, is...

; films such as Clement Virgo

Clement Virgo

Clément Virgo is a Canadian filmmaker of international acclaim. His latest feature, the boxing drama Poor Boy's Game, stars Danny Glover and Rossif Sutherland...

's Rude and Stephen Williams

Stephen Williams (director)

Stephen Williams is a Canadian film and television director. Williams has directed several modern day television programs including work as a regular director on the ABC drama series Lost, where he was also a co-executive producer...

' Soul Survivor and Michael Moore

Michael Moore

Michael Francis Moore is an American filmmaker, author, social critic and activist. He is the director and producer of Fahrenheit 9/11, which is the highest-grossing documentary of all time. His films Bowling for Columbine and Sicko also place in the top ten highest-grossing documentaries...

's Bowling for Columbine
Bowling for Columbine
Bowling for Columbine is a 2002 documentary film written, directed, produced, and narrated by Michael Moore. The film explores what Michael Moore suggests are the causes for the Columbine High School massacre and other acts of violence with guns...

; and other aspects of popular culture including critical attention paid to the opening theme for the television show Fresh Prince of Belair.

Work

Rinaldo Walcott published Black Like Who?
Black Like Who?
Black Like Who? is Rinaldo Walcott's first book. It was published in 1997 by Insomniac Press in Toronto.This book came out of Walcott's PhD research which focused on rap music and culture. The essays in Black Like Who? demonstrate Walcott's expanded interest concerning the theorizing of Black...

in 1997, coming out of research related to his PhD studies which focused on, in Walcott's own words, "questions of popular culture and exploring how rap

Rapping

Rapping refers to "spoken or chanted rhyming lyrics". The art form can be broken down into different components, as in the book How to Rap where it is separated into “content”, “flow” , and “delivery”...

music in the early 1990s was emerging as an important social and political force across North America". The collection of essays in Black Like Who? expand this inquiry into areas such as poetry

Poetry

Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...

, literature

Literature

Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...

, diasporic studies, film criticism

Film criticism

Film criticism is the analysis and evaluation of films, individually and collectively. In general, this can be divided into journalistic criticism that appears regularly in newspapers, and other popular, mass-media outlets and academic criticism by film scholars that is informed by film theory and...

and other discussions central to issues surrounding Black space, place, and landscape in Canada. This text gained notoriety in both academic and mainstream communities.

In 2000 Rinaldo Walcott edited a compilation of essays under the title Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism. In his Introduction to this text, Walcott calls these essays "rebellious" and "insubordinate," explaining that they seek to "complicate and push the boundaries of racial designation, but also the boundaries of the academic responses to Blackness within Canada". Walcott further explains that the insubordination of these essays is directed at the "official narrative discourses of the nation-state of Canada". This type of nation-state challenging work is characteristic of Walcott's academic presence, which typically emphasizes boundary crossings (metaphorical and literal) in both form and content.

In addition to these two texts, Rinaldo Walcott has several books awaiting publication, has provided many chapters in books and has published articles in a variety of sources. Sources for a selection of these articles and chapters, as well as information about forthcoming publications can be found in the "Selected Sources" section below. Additionally, Rinaldo Walcott has appeared on the TVO programs The Agenda and Flying Solo (links below) and has an interview and a conference presentation available for viewing on Youtube

YouTube

YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....

(links below).

In his own words, Rinaldo Walcott's work "insist[s] that the rhizomatic black cultures of Canada have much to teach us, especially about national policies like multiculturalism, which support identity politics and limit political imaginings and possibilities". Walcott's work is therefore important in its engagement with Black Canadian identity, but also in its insistence on the transnational, border-crossing, nature of many Black identities.

Border crossing is also essential to Walcott's work as he does not limit himself in terms of subject matter, theories, or areas of study. Walcott has engaged with film and music critique, official political narratives and legislative policies (such as Multiculturalism), queer and gender studies (particularly examining the tensions surrounding Black masculinities, and queer Black identities), poetry and literature analysis, and historical biographies. Despite the breadth of his work, concepts of Blackness, culture, and nationhood are constants in his analysis, though the ways in which these are examined are far from static.

Rinaldo Walcott has also written about hood films and the Third Cinema

Third Cinema

Third Cinema is a Latin American film movement that started in the 1960s-70s which decries neocolonialism, the capitalist system, and the Hollywood model of cinema as mere entertainment to make money...

suggesting that neither genre has "emerged in the Canadian Cinematic scene".

Rinaldo Walcott's work has been cited, extended and critically engaged by scholars such as Eva Mackey, in her book The House of Difference, Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley in the article Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage published in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
GLQ: The Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies is an academic journal based published by Duke University Press. It was co-founded by David M. Halperin and Carolyn Dinshaw. The current editors are Ann Cvetkovich, University of Texas in Austin and Annamarie Jagose, University of Auckland.-External...

, (Volume 14, Number 2-3, 2008), Surbhi Malik in "UK is Finished; India's too Corrupt; Anyone can become Amrikan": Interrogating Itineraries of Power in Bend It Like Beckham and Prejudice Bride in the Journal of Creative Communications (2007; 2; 79), Brian Wilson and Robert Sparkes' Impacts of Black Athlete Media Portrayals on Canadian Youth in the Canadian Journal of Communication (Vol 24, No 4, 1999), and Linda Peake and Brian Ray's Racializing the Canadian landscape: whiteness, uneven geographies and social justice in the Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe Canadien (Volume 45 Issue 1).

Selected publications

Books

Surviving the Crossing: Studies in the Work of Austin C. Clarke. Toronto: Guernica Press (Contract negotiated, manuscript under preparation).
Forthcoming, Walcott, R., Disturbing the Peace: The Impossible Dream of Black Canadian Studies. Toronto: UT Press (Contract under negotiation, manuscript finished).
Forthcoming, ReCrossings: Languages of the Middle Passage. Missouri: University of Missouri Press (Contract under negotiation, manuscript partially completed).
Forthcoming, Black Queer Diaspora: Reading from a Queer Place in Diaspora (still under discussion with two different publishers, manuscript still in preparation).
2003, Black Like Who?: Writing Black Canada (Toronto: Insomniac Press). [Second Revised Edition]
2000, Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism [Editor]. (Toronto: Insomniac Press).
1997, Black Like Who?: Writing Black Canada (Toronto: Insomniac Press).

Chapters in Books

Forthcoming, “The Sight of Sound: The Last Angel of History.” In S. Lord and J. Marchessault (Ed.). Fluid Screens: Digital Time and Cinema. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Forthcoming, “Rhetorics of Blackness, Rhetorics of Belonging: The Politics of Representation in Black Expressive Culture in Canada”. In D. Chariandy, J, Harris and R. Almonte (Ed.), Writing Thru Blackness: Critical Essays on Black Literatures in English Canada. [Reprinted from Canadian Review of American Studies, 29, 2, p. 1-24.] (Contract being negotiated).
In press, “Caribbean Pop Culture in Canada; Or the Impossibility of Belonging to the Nation”. In J. Mannette (Ed.), The Presence of Absence: Reconceptualizing the Canadian Nation. Nova Scotia: Fernwood Press. [Reprinted from Small Axe: A Journal of Caribbean Criticism.]
In press, "Outside in Black Studies: Reading from a Queer Place in Diaspora". In P. Johnson and M. Henderson (Ed.). Black Queer Studies in the New Millennium. Duke University Press.
(2004), “’A Tough Geography’: Towards A poetics of Black Space(s) in Canada”. In C. Sugars (Ed.). Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press.
(2004), “Beyond the ‘nation thing’: Black Studies, Cultural Studies and Diaspora Discourse (Or the Post-Black Studies Moment)”. In C. Boyce Davies and M. Gadsby (Ed.). African New-World Studies: Diaspora Theory Decolonizing the Academy in the 21st Century. African World Press.
(2003), “’but I don’t want to talk about that’: Postcolonial and Black Diaspora Histories in Video Art”. In U. Biemann (Ed.). Stuff It: The Video Essay in the Digital Age. Zurich and New York: Edition Voldemeer and Springer Wien New York.
2003, “The Struggle for Happiness: Commodified Black Masculinities and Vernacular Cultures”. In P. Trifonas (Ed.), Pedagogies of Difference: Rethinking Education for Social Justice. New York: RoutledgeFalmer.
2002, "'It's My Nature': The Discourse of Experience and Black Canadian Music". In J. Sloniowski and J. Nicks (Ed.) Slippery Pastimes: A Canadian Popular Culture Reader. Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Articles in refereed journals

(Forthcoming), “Dramatic Instabilities: Diasporic Aesthetics as a Question for and about Nation”. Canadian Theatre Review.
(2001), “Caribbean Pop Culture in Canada; Or the Impossibility of Belonging to the Nation”. Small Axe: A Journal of Caribbean Criticism. 9, p. 123-139.
(2000), “At The Full and Change of Canlit: An Interview with Dionne Brand”.Canadian Women’s Studies. 20, 2, p. 22-26.
(2000), "'Who is she and what is she to you?': Mary Anne Shadd Cary and the Impossibility of Black/Canadian Studies". Atlantis: A Women's Studies Journal. 24, 2, p. 137-146.
(1999), “Rhetorics of Blackness, Rhetorics of Belonging: The Politics of Representation in Black Expressive Culture in Canada”. Canadian Review of American Studies, 29, 2, p. 1-24.
(1998), "Deceived: The Unreadability of the O.J. Simpson Case". Review Essay of Birth of a Nation 'Hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case. Canadian Review of American Studies, 28, 2, p. 177-188.
(1997), "'A Tough Geography': Towards a Poetics of Black Space(s) in Canada." North: New African Canadian Writing, WestCoast Line, 22, 31, 1, p. 38-51.
(1997), "Songs/Sounds of Postmodern Blackness: Histories. Cultures. Youth." Educational Researcher, 26, 2, p. 35-38.
(1995), "'Out of the Kumbla': Toni Morrison's Jazz and Pedagogical Answerability." Cultural Studies, 9, 2, p. 312-331.
(1994), "Pedagogical Desire and the Crisis of Knowledge." Discourse: The Australian Journal of Educational Studies, 15,1, October, p. 64-74.
(1992), "Theorizing Anti-Racist Education: Decentering White Supremacy in Education." In S.P. Sharma, ed., The Western Canadian Anthropologist, 7, 1,2, p. 109-120.

External links

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