The Breaks: Julietta Singh in Conversation with Natalie Diaz
A recording of the event is now available on the Bonham Centre’s Youtube Channel.
Julietta Singh is Associate Professor at the University of Richmond, whose work engages the enduring global effects of colonization through attention to ecology, inheritance, race, gender and sexuality. She works and teaches across the fields of decolonial studies, queer studies, the ecological humanities, and creative nonfictions. She is the author of three books: Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (Duke UP, 2018), No Archive Will Restore You (Punctum Books, 2018), and her newest work, The Breaks (Coffee House Press 2021) in which Singh pens a long letter to her young daughter about race, inheritance, and queer mothering at the end of the world. Please join us for the launch of The Breaks and its celebration of queer family-making, communal living, and Brown girlhood.
Date: March 25th 2022
Time: 4:00pm – 5:30pm Eastern Time
Register for Zoom link here.
This event will be moderated by Naisargi N. Dave. Live captioning will be provided. Please contact sexual.diversity@utoronto.ca with any access requests.
Natalie Diaz is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press, and her second book, Postcolonial Love Poem, was published by Graywolf Press in March 2020 for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2021. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a Lannan Literary Fellow, a United States Artists Ford Fellow, and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. Diaz is Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona.
Julietta Singh is a decolonial scholar and nonfiction writer whose work engages the enduring global effects of colonization through attention to ecology, inheritance, race, gender and sexuality. She works and teaches across the fields of postcolonial and decolonial studies, queer studies, the ecological humanities, experimental feminisms, and creative nonfictions. Her academic work has been published in South Atlantic Quarterly, Women & Performance, Social Text, Cultural Critique, and Studies in Gender and Sexuality, among others. She is the recent recipient of the American Council for Learned Societies Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship (held at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender), and delivers keynotes, lectures, and creative workshops internationally.
Her first academic book, Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements (Duke UP, 2018), has emerged as a vital theoretical touchstone for global scholars and artists grappling with the politics of mastery that drive our professional, political, and personal pursuits. Her second book, No Archive Will Restore You (Punctum Books, 2018), turns theory into creative praxis through an experimental meditation on the body as a plural and porous archive. In her newest work, The Breaks, Singh pens a long letter to her young daughter about race, inheritance, and queer mothering at the end of the world. It has recently been hailed as a best nonfiction book of the year by entities such as the New York Public Library, Book Riot, and the Seminary Co-op Bookstore.
Singh is currently at work on The Nest, a feature-length documentary film collaboration with Chase Joynt about radical maternities, interracial alliances, and anticolonial histories across 140 years of Canadian history told through the story of a single house. Taking a majestic home located in the center of Canada as its focus, the documentary looks to architecture as a portal through which to tell unexpected counter-histories of Westward expansion, Indigenous uprising, ecopolitical activism, domestic violence, and the racialization of a nation. The project is currently in development with the National Film Board of Canada, produced by Justine Pimlott.