72 FACULTY OF HUMANITIES ANNUAL REPORT 2021 Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi Director, Centre for the Study of Race, Gender and Class on the ways in which Pumla and Gabrille’s work feed and bleed on each other, the multimodal webinar focused on the ways in which “Blackgirls/Blackwomen, Blackqueer folk, Blackgendernonbinary folk disrupt patriarchal modes of creative and intellectual practice to reimagine the world in which freedom is present, not to-come, but rendered in the here and now.” Yet again a wealth of participants gathered for this public webinar. For this section of the GBSS, the centre planned to have a hybrid event where the small-group session was meant to be an in-person event held in Johannesburg. The session was to have a series of screenings punctuated by dialogue and workshop sessions. However, due to the on-going covid-19 conditions, this has been postponed to early 2022. The reading list for Pumla and Gabrielle’s session include: Christina Sharpe’s “Beauty is a Method”; Sharlene Khan’s “Thinking Through, Talking Back: Creative Theorisations as Sites of Praxis-Theory”; Gabrielle Goliath’s “This Song is for … Inhabiting the Scratch, Performing the Rhapsodic”; Nthabiseng Motsemme’s “The Mute Always Speak: On Women’s Silences at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission”; Pumla Gqola’s “A Playful but also very Serious Love Letter to Gabrielle Goliath” and; Pumla Gqola’s “In the Clarity of a Third Class Compartment.” (For more on RGC’s Global Blackness Summer School click here; this includes links to readings as well as session recordings.) 2022: Learnings from the Previous Year As a new centre we remain in learning mode. As we worked to establish our identity, the importance of administrative functions such as contracts, payroll, procurement and more became apparent. Further, I have also realized that it makes the most sense to have student assistants record research associates’ publication counts during the year rather than at year’s end. Ultimately, however, we have learned to lean into our networks and build slowly in order to remain sustainable. We took our time to launch our website. While that was initially nerve-wracking, it proved a smart move. Delaying our launch allowed us to build out a rich programme for the year as well as 2022 and into 2023. Looking Ahead: New Initiatives/Projects Upcoming for 2022 are two new Global Blackness reading group sessions. The first will be led by Prof Zethu Matebeni (Fort Hare) in April, May and June on “Blackness and the Queer Experience in Africa.” The second will be led by Dr Ruchi Chaturvedi and I on the “Indian-African Question: Durban, Trinidad” in the second half of the year, In September, October and November. We have also designed a transnational course on “Sighting Black Girlhood” in collaboration with Deborah Thomas, Grace Saunders and Krystal Strong at the University of Pennsylvania, Zethu Matebeni at Fort Hare as well as Vashti DuBois of the Colored Girls Museum (Philadelphia) and Deborah Antzinger of Edna Manley School (Kingston, Jamaica). This course is also part of a larger research project that will see the scholars, artists and activists involved gather together once a year over the next three years with an exhibition as well as a conference in 2024. We also have two inter-institutional partnership agreements in the works. The Center for Global Black Studies at the University of Miami (run by Donette Francis and Jafari Allen) has approached us for an interinstitutional that also includes the University of the Nile. Further, the Space for Creative Black Imagination at the Maryland Institute for Creative Arts has also asked us to partner with them. Finally, we will have the honor of hosting the 2022 Helen Joseph Memorial Lecture.
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