Fulbright Canada 30th Anniversary Speaker Series
The Homelands of Black Diaspora:
What the Life of Mary Ann Shadd Tells about the United States and Canada
Sarah Mason-Case, Adjunct Professor, University of Toronto Faculty of Law
There are resurgent efforts across universities to recover histories of the transatlantic slave trade to better understand, and to disrupt, the fact that Black people currently live the ‘afterlives’ of slavery: ‘skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment’.* Slavery was abolished in the US and across British colonies, including the colonies that would become Canada, during the lifetime of Mary Ann Shadd. This Black abolitionist and lawyer laboured for emancipation across territorial boundaries. To do so, she crossed the Great Lakes region to build a homeland for Black community.
This talk describes Mary Ann Shadd’s life from the perspective of Black diaspora and, specifically, that of the Black radical imaginary, which has for centuries fostered the desire for a homeland for Black people due to profound dispossession and displacement across the Atlantic as much as our/their self-assuredness. In foregrounding Black diasporic presence and thinking, the speaker will bring the audience into the present by discussing her experiences as a Black legal scholar, walking and photographing the lands where Shadd lived.
Sarah Mason-Case is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, where she teaches Critical Race Theory and the Law. She herself moved between the US and Canada as a Fulbright visiting researcher at Harvard Law School, hosted by the Institute for Global Law and Policy. She is a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation and an SSHRC scholar. She was previously a special advisor to the UN Independent Expert on Human Rights and International Solidarity, and a visitor to Melbourne Law School. She is co-developing a cross-Canada collective on critical race theory.
*Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007), p.6.
A Q&A session will follow.
Fulbright Canada wants to thank Sarah Mason-Case for taking the time to share her knowledge. We encourage you to share this public event with members of your network, either directly or via social media.
If you have any questions about the event, please contact Patrick Burke, Acting Director of Public Affairs, at (613) 688-5514 or pburke@fulbright.ca.
Fulbright Canada is pleased to be presenting a speaker series focused on the post-COVID world. In bringing Fulbright Canada subject-matter experts to our broader community, our goal is to create opportunities for thoughtful discussion on a range of critical issues such as supporting social cohesion and inclusion, enhancing public health and wellbeing, and contributing to digital transformation and economic recovery. Stay tuned for upcoming events!