1. CESA 2015 TORONTO CONFERENCE PANEL Complicating Black Feminism in Canada
Sovereignties and Colonialisms: Resisting Racism,
Extraction and Dispossession at York University in
Toronto, CA
Complicating Black Feminism in Canada
HODAN AHMED, TINA GARNETT, MOSA NESHAMÁMCNEILLY, HAWA Y. MIRE
Presenter #1: Tina Garnett
The Intersecting Reality of African Diasporic/Black Women
ABSTRACT: The Intersectionality of race provokes a two-tiered oppression
and vulnerability for Indigenous and Black women. It is, in fact, because of their
race, that Indigenous and Black women are more susceptible to gender-
based violence, including sexual violence. Looking at the differing responses
by legal, medical and social supports that exist for ‘victims of violence’, it is
easy to identify the disparity between them. There are no memorials for the
hundreds of missing and murdered Indigenous women, like we have for the
Montreal massacre memorial; there’s only denial that it is because of their
race that Aboriginal women are more vulnerable to male violence. Race
analysis provokes awareness and sensitivity about the social construction of
race being utilized as an oppressive tool by mainstream services and
institutions; while simultaneously denying the fact that the Canadian
institutions are racist. It is these subliminal racial micro-aggressions that leave
racialized women who have experienced sexual violence, feeling like they are
crazy for internalizing the unexpressed racist feelings or undertones that exist
in their therapy sessions.
Presenter #2: Hawa Y. Mire
From Geedi Shambow to Mingus:
Somali Folktales as a Site of Knowledge Production
ABSTRACT: Storytelling and orality have deeply impacted the trajectory of the
Somali community. How and what we remember gives us an increased ability
to resist and subvert ideas of who we are and more powerfully, who it is we
want to become. It is the concept of “double consciousness” (DuBois, 1903)
that allows us to explore further a kind of diasporic consciousness. Double

2. CESA 2015 TORONTO CONFERENCE PANEL Complicating Black Feminism in Canada
consciousness refers to the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the
eyes of others” (DuBois, 1903, p. 8). More specifically as an internal
negotiation between “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two
warring ideals” (DuBois, 1903, p. 8-9). As a result of displacement, young
Somali diasporic women are in fact engaging in a triple consciousness. They
are looking at themselves through three lenses, a dominant nationalistic
narrative of their host community; a traditional cultural narrative; and an
exploration of the identity of self. There are three places of constant
negotiation. What then are the impacts of this triple consciousness on
memories of a home, a place of belonging and conceptualizations of
Blackness? Somali young women of the diaspora, often live in host
communities that consider their Africanness, and Blackness in particular ways.
How can storytelling help us understand: how young diasporic Somali women
hold memory? how they subvert and resist? and how they want to subvert
and resist? And perhaps of equal import, as an underlying methodology, how
can these stories be documented and archived for the primary purpose of
Somali communities? Through the history of Somali oral literature in scholarly
discourse and the contemporary Somali diaspora, Black/African feminist artist
scholarship, and the conceptualization and creation of a global sense of place,
Hawa Y. Mire will explore the role of storytelling as a space for radical
subversion.
Presenter #3: Mosa NeshamáMcNeilly
Reimagining the Black Female Body:
Decolonial Spaces of Beauty, Vision and the Erotic
ABSTRACT: Centring her paper on Tiffany King’s dissertation, “In The Clearing:
Black Female Bodies, Space and Settler Colonial Landscapes”, Mosa
considers the premise of the fungibility of the Black female body in the
contemporary western neocolonial landscape. Interested in countering how
this shapes the lives of diasporic African woman in Canada, she embarks on
the palimpsestic project of rewriting of Black female ontology. Her inquiry is
propelled by the question: How can we live and articulate a life-affirming
diasporic African feminist epistemology of self-making that is centred in
cultural production and autopoiesis? Mosa draws from King’s analysis of Julie
Dash’s epic film “Daughters of the Dust” (Dash, 1992). Dash’s cinematic eye,
distinct in its lush and loving gaze upon the Black female body, decolonizes

3. CESA 2015 TORONTO CONFERENCE PANEL Complicating Black Feminism in Canada
sight (King, 2013:31), showing us, like Audre Lorde’s embodied erotic, how to
gaze upon the beauty of Blackness, upon ourselves and each other as Black
women, in life-affirming ways. Lorde tells us that the practices of recovery
from subjugation must be infused with the erotic. Lorde decolonizes and
revalorizes the erotic as a site of emancipatory embodiment “the knowledge
and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history our
dancing, our living our work our lives” (Lorde, 1984:55). Through theorizing a
performative work based on “In the Clearing” entitled Refusing the Imaginary
of Fungibility: The Black Female Body in Flux (McNeilly, Lurch, 2014), and
weaving through the inquiry with self-reflexive poetry, Mosa explores
decolonial spaces of beauty, vision and the erotic.
Presenter #4: Hodan Ahmed
Title: Race, Space & Knowledge Production - Diaspora Somali
Community Experience with Racial and Social Stratification
ABSTRACT: Immigration policies are the institutional model of immigration
discourse. Therefore, these policies play a key factor in shaping the identity of
minorities in Canada. The concept of who is Canadian is racially shaped in the
law, literature and articulated in the media and mainstream society, creating
exclusionary spatial conditions for non-white communities. Its from this
juncture of racialized immigrant communities, I’m interested in examining how
contemporary black immigrants, particularly Somalis, experience racial identity
formation and its impact on their learning and sense of belonging in Canada.
Identifying race, space and the law within the context of citizenship is
significant because literature and language dominance is learned by
dispossession. For example, the immigration reform rhetoric towards the
Somali community since the 1990s have combined economic discourse (they
drain our resources), with citizenship discourse (citizens' rights are imperiled
by the newcomers) and cultural discourse (their culture is different from ours)
to construct the "Other" against whom the normative citizen is defined. The
main question I would like to seek answers to is: How do Somalis who came
from war torn societies that do not historically and culturally employ color-
based racial categories negotiate identities in Canada where racial
classification are the primary source of social stratification and national
identity?”