Global Conversations: African Diaspora Movements
Courttia Newland (UK) & Dr Kelvin C. Black (USA) discuss African Diaspora Movements, from tap dance and patois to South African viral hit Jerusalema
Before African dance challenges like Azonto started to spread and appear in global music videos in 2013, there were commentators in the margins noting the DNA shared by Black diaspora dances like Krump and Boogaloo to traditional dances on the mother continent. Those connections are but small markers of a catalogue of unexplored, retained rhythms and cosmologies that inform and underpin culture in the global African diaspora, and the world at large. What happens when we acknowledge them, using them more deliberately as foundations for cultural and societal innovation? Novelist, screenwriter and playwright, Courttia Newland discusses this inheritance from Africa with Dr Kelvin C. Black, Assistant Professor of Transatlantic Studies at Hunter College, New York.
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Kelvin C. Black
Kelvin C. Black is Associate Professor of Transatlantic Studies in the English Department at Hunter College, City University of New York. His research focuses on transatlantic political discourses. He is the author of the forthcoming The Atlantic Dilemma: Reform or Revolution across the Long Nineteenth Century.
Courttia Newland
Courttia Newland has published eight works of fiction including his debut, The Scholar. His latest novel, A River Called Time, was published by Canongate in 2021. A forthcoming collection of speculative fiction stories, Cosmogramma, will also be published this year. Newland’s short stories have appeared in many anthologies, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and included in Best of British Short Stories 2017. He has been awarded the Tayner Barbers Award for science fiction writing and the Roland Rees Bursary for playwriting. He was previously associate lecturer in creative writing at the University of Westminster and is completing a PhD in creative writing. As a screenwriter he has co-written two feature length films for the Steve McQueen BBC series Small Axe, of which Lovers Rock was jury selected for Cannes, and opened New York Film Fest 2020. Small Axe won the LA Critics Circle award 2020 for Best Picture. Impact, an original feature, and The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be, a science fiction short, are currently in development with Film Four.
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Global Conversations
Curated specially for a festival that loves conversations in a time that limits face-to-face meetings, Global Conversations focuses on the conversations that some of the most creative minds of our planet have been dying to have with people who live far away from them. From the minutiae of mundane tasks to the importance of resistance, in a range of languages, but always human, this is a space to expand the mind. Take a look at more Global Conversation events:
