Celebrating African unity

Highly acclaimed author, scholar Carolyn Cooper will be visiting Dalhousie this week, delivering a lecture titled “Mek We Talk Bout De Bottom Of De Sea.” The recently-retired professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies will celebrate the submarine unity that connects Africans in the Diaspora with each other and their ancestral homelands, through discussion of submerged narratives in Caribbean literature and popular culture.

Dr. Cooper, of Jamaican descent, will be discussing stories of freedom and heroism within African culture in relation to pervasive Eurocentric accounts of “discovery” and “conversion” of so-called “savage peoples.” She says these stories “inspire us to act fearlessly in the present to fight against systems of oppression that continue to diminish the lives of so many Africans in the Diaspora.”

Dr. Cooper is a descendant of Maroons in Jamaica whose communities across the Americas refused to submit to enslavement and heroically fought to maintain freedom. Her talk promises to be a thoughtful and compelling lecture that celebrates life and African unity through reflection and some humour in the face of a traumatic history.

“Proverbial wisdom in Jamaica acknowledges the complexity of our response to trauma,” she says. “Therapeutic laughter enables survival.”

This free lecture is part of Dr. Afua Cooper’s James Robinson Johnston Distinguished Lecture Series and is taking place at the MacMechan Auditorium in the Dalhousie Killam Library on Friday, October 28, at 7 p.m.