| Summary: | In June 2023, Prof. Andrea A. Davis (York University) was invited to hold the sixth Vienna Lecture in Canadian Studies at the University of Vienna. In her lecture, Andrea A. Davis returns to the trope of the sea, pivotal to the thinking in her book Horizon, Sea, Sound: Caribbean & African Women's Cultural Critiques of Nation (2022), to trace the contours of Caribbean women's crossings from West Africa to the Caribbean, Canada and Europe through the archive of the ships that connected enslaved Africans and indentured Indians with the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Turning to the work of Camille Turner, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Ramabai Espinet—Caribbean artists writing from Canada—Davis re-narrates the white settler state as a Black diasporic space, linking Canada not only to the Caribbean but also to West Africa. She considers how these artists cross physical, imaginative and spiritual borders to articulate the terms of their being in place . Davis theorizes this raced and gendered understanding of Caribbean women's diasporic journeys in four movements through a series of overlapping journeys that extend from Newfoundland, Canada to Gorée Island in Senegal; Gold Coast in present day Ghana to Black River, Jamaica; St. Helena off the coast of southwestern Africa to Trinidad and Tobago; and Guyana back to Canada. These multiple and sometimes unexpected movements help to illustrate the deep imbrications of Black people's interconnected journeys.
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