Media
Hyacinth Podcast, February 22, 2020Radio/Podcast
URL: https://www.hyacinthpodcast.com/episodes
"There’s a box under my basement stairs that I haven’t opened for ten years. I thought I knew what was inside. But when I finally get the courage to open it, I encounter a mystery that goes beyond my own family archive and leads me to ask: what does “the archive” mean and who gets to decide “what remains” there?
To find out, I follow archivist Heather Home into a vault at the Queen's University Archives and speak with Dr. Kristin Moriah and Dr. Mark Campbell, whose research confronts important issues around what is missing in institutional archives and why. Plus, we learn how black studies and the culture and artistic practice of hiphop could reshape traditional archival processes."
How anti-Black racism on Canadian university campuses robs us all
Black Voice, Red Record: An Interview with Kristin Moriah
‘Teaching is activism’: Professors & TAs of colour discuss race in academia
Art is integral to Black Lives Matter: a conversation with Dr. Kristin Moriah
Where Are the Black Angels?
Published by PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art
September 3, 2019
In an oblique nod to the privileged roots of public galleries, visitors to Mickalene Thomas: Femmes Noires, a major solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), were invited to sit down and stay for a while. Patrons were not only presented with an array of visual art, including the funked-up and bedazzled takes on classic European paintings like Édouard Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe( Le déjeuner sur l'herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires, 2010) for which the artist is known, but to bright patchwork upholstered armchairs and side tables piled high with books written by women from across the black diaspora, including Canadian writers like Esi Edugyan and Dionne Brand. But the domestic spaces that artist Mickalene Thomas wrought could not have been more different from those that have defined the AGO's distant past and near present. Deeply informed by the artist's positionality, her rooms provided a space to linger and consider the complexity and intimacies of black femininity and black women's art.
“A Greater Compass of Voice”: Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield and Mary Ann Shadd Cary Navigate Black Performance
by Kristin Moriah
Published by Theatre Research in Canada
June 30, 2020
The work of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield and Mary Ann Shadd Cary demonstrates how racial solidarity between Black Canadians and African Americans was created through performance and surpassed national boundaries during the nineteenth century. Taylor Greenfield’s connection to Mary Ann Shadd Cary, the prominent feminist abolitionist, and the first Black woman to publish a newspaper in North America, reveals the centrality of peripatetic Black performance, and Black feminism, to the formation of Black Canada’s burgeoning community. Her reception in the Black press and her performance work shows how Taylor Greenfield’s performances knit together various ideas about race, gender, and nationhood of mid-nineteenth century Black North Americans. Although Taylor Greenfield has rarely been recognized for her role in discourses around race and citizenship in Canada during the mid-nineteenth century, she was an immensely influential figure for both abolitionists in the United States and Blacks in Canada. Taylor Greenfield’s performance at an event for Mary Ann Shadd Cary’s benefit testifies to the longstanding porosity of the Canadian/ US border for nineteenth-century Black North Americans and their politicized use of Black women’s voices.
URL: https://tricrtac.ca/en/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/02_tric_41.1_a_greater_compass.pdf
A Rude Sound: Notes on Suck Teeth Composition
by Kristin Moriah
Published by Canadian Theatre Review
October 1, 2020
What does Black Canada sound like, and how has this sound been perceived? What does performance and art have to do with it? This article examines the use of sound in performative critiques of anti-Blackness and suggests that sounding and listening are vital strategies in the struggle for racial justice in Canada. I draw on Black feminist cultural criticism and art, linguistics, and sound studies to reveal the how sucking teeth defines Black Canadian sound and culture in a way that is clearly related to, yet distinct from, the Black culture of the United States and the wider Black diaspora. I focus on the soundscape of Toronto because it remains so sharply defined by Afro-Caribbean migration. This phenomenon is particularly evident when we examine Artist Michèle Pearson Clarke’s Suck Teeth Compositions (After Rashaad Newsome) (2018).
Biography
Dr. Kristin Moriah is an Assistant Professor of English at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She completed her Ph.D. in African American Culture and English literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is currently a Colored Conventions Project (CCP) Teaching Fellow and Penn State University Center for Black Digital Research Partner. Her academic work can be found in American Quarterly, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches théâtrales au Canada and Canadian Theatre Review. Her research interests include Sound Studies and Black feminist performance, particularly the circulation of African American performance within the Black diaspora and its influence on the formation of national identity. Moriah's work has been supported by fellowships from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada, the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, and the Harry Ransom Center.
Additional Titles and Affiliations
Center for Black Digital Research
The Center for Black Digital Research, #DigBlk, is a collaboration between the College of Liberal Arts and the University Libraries at the Pennsylvania State University and works closely with The Eberly Family Special Collections Library and Research Informatics and Publishing. #DigBlk is a public-facing, digital research center that engages public and scholarly audiences in innovative, community-based research that brings the buried and scattered histories of Black organizing to digital life. #DigBlk is home to the award-winning Colored Conventions Project and Douglass Day.
Research Grants
Connection Grant
Organization: SSHRCDate: January 15, 2021
Details:
The Black Studies Summer Seminar is a comprehensive one-week research-intensive designed to produce generative and fruitful academic debates and professional development for Ph.D. candidates, Postdoctoral Fellows and pre-tenure faculty. The goals of BSSS include the support and preparation of pre-tenure faculty and the advancement of the field of Black Studies in Canada. As Black scholarship, through its radical interdisciplinarity, and cultural production always already disrupt traditional disciplinary boundaries and the limits of institutionality, this summer seminar intensive aims to honour these interruptions by centring collaboration, intellectual and creative exchange and necessitating alternative modalities of knowledge production and the intramural.