As I took it upon myself to gain an education on the history of Carnival in different islands and the origins of Caribana vs Trini Carnival vs Crop Over vs SpiceMas, I was able to appreciate my culture and how it has evolved and how my people celebrate and remember our ancestry.
Power is Knowledge:
Dr Chika Ezeanya Esiobu on the relationship between ideas and power.
Ideas stick not because they are always technically sound, but because they are normalized by institutions. From measurements of time, how we organize calendars, to what names we call ourselves, how we organize markets, technology, agriculture, and societies, what ideas become normalized, are often expression of the will of a dominant class.
Love Letter to Sudan
Love Letter to Sudan is a digital collage using dated and modern photographs of my family in Sudan.
Africa is a Continent and other stories.:
Why we need new maps, new words, and old ideas.
Africa is not a country. Neither is it a continent. Not really—not in a true sense. Continents are more a social idea than a true science. The continental frame you and I learn about in elementary school you know, Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America are not entirely made up, but they are imperfect intellectual constructs. …
Tradition:
What should we do with our cultural past ?
There is very little that is traditional about tradition or modern about modernity. Both categories are deeply related to each other. Societies that are characterized as traditional inherit ideas, beliefs, and institutions from their past and are never culturally static.
How to Survive A revolution
We have attended so many funerals for people whose lives we did not know, but death we all witnessed. And in seeing breath pass from their bodies, a part of us dies as well. Our formidable Black cracks, knowing even in the quietest and most sacred moments, you can lay in bed to sleep, and wake up as a hashtag.
# Black Lives Matter – A Thread
Wherever there is injustice in this world, we will show it our Black skin and it will bend.
Love letter to the ASA’s
Looking back on my time in university, I am extremely grateful and glad that I was able to belong to a community that I could unapologetically be myself in. So much of what I am today I owe to the ASA. So often we’d face difficulties accessing funding for our initiatives, support from our university, and even backlash and microaggressions for being unapologetically Black.
On-one with Matthew Green MP
To the 20-somethings out there, I understand that the hustle is real, the grind is real. The deck is stacked against you until we can reshuffle the cards.
Celina Caesar-Chavannes on power, politics and Black womanhood in Canada
My uncle pointed out to me on the day I was swearing-in, that the audacity of this little Black girl of Grenada to be sworn into the 42nd Parliament is insane. When I thought about it in those initial moments, I thought, ‘Who the hell do I think I am?’
