We Do Not Have to Live This Way: The Salience of Black Life and Resistance to Understanding the World (As We Know it) and Bringing an End to It

In In My Words Will Be There, Black feminist poet and theorist Audre Lorde considers how "social protest is to say that we do not have to live this way." This talk will explore what Lorde is saying protest is to say and what protest does in saying so, focusing on the significance of this statement and what it allows us to say about the modern world—namely, anti-Blackness as an organising principle of modernity and constitutive of capitalist logics.

Through reference to various forms of political mobilizing protest and rebellion, community organising, creative expression, and even in (the conveyance of) the everyday of living while Black, this talk attempts to draw connections across the long and intersecting histories of Black resistance to explore Lorde's consideration as a salient Black feminist intervention. This talk will explore how at the crux of the resonance of the phrase across this discussion of racial capitalism and anti-Blackness is what it proposes: the end of the world.

Note: This talk will include imagery that refers to contemporary and historical instances of structural and systematised anti-Blackness and Indigenous genocide; however, explicit, graphic or gratuitous depictions of violence against BIPOC will not be shown.

Lindsey Nkem is currently pursuing a PhD in Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia. An alumna of both the University of Edinburgh and King's College London, Lindsey has focused her research on the nuances of identity and being important to Black womanhood and the possibilities for decoloniality in international development work. Currently she looking to further explore how Black communities orient themselves in ways that speak to the importance of envisioning to achieving liberation.