What happens when we begin to consider stories, and lives, at the margins of society? How does that complicate what we think we know about who we are — as individuals, as nations, as human beings? Through visual art, literature and film, as well as her own personal experience, award-winning novelist Esi Edugyan’s 2021 CBC Massey Lectures Out of the Sun: On Race and Storytelling illuminates the Black experience in global culture and history.
All episodes will be available on the dates indicated below, through the CBC Listen streaming platform, here.
Monday, January 24
MASSEY LECTURE 1: EUROPE AND THE ART OF SEEING
Black subjects in European art are generally marginal figures, but even as such, they tell a rich tale about cultural assumptions. In the art of our own time, Black artists such as Harmonia Rosales and Kehinde Wiley have been re-imagining visual art, putting Black lives squarely in the centre. “To look at a portrait”, Esi Edugyan says “is to be forced to build a human life out of our own imaginations.” Art can both freeze a narrative and remove ambiguity, but it can also suggest layers of perhaps unintended meaning.
Tuesday, January 25
MASSEY LECTURE 2: CANADA AND THE ART OF GHOSTS
“The stories we tell about the dead” Esi Edugyan argues, “act as clarifying narratives to explain what has shaped us, and what continues to make us who we are.” However, she asks “If ghost stories reflect to us our histories, our yearning for a connection across time, who is being forgotten, and why?” When some histories are forgotten, we all lose. What is remembered becomes the only history we have, the only framework for who we are. Recovering our ghosts is a way of redressing the narrative.
Wednesday, January 26
MASSEY LECTURE 3: AMERICA AND THE ART OF EMPATHY: WHAT IT MEANS TO ‘PASS’
“We all construct our own identities,” Esi Edugyan says, “but we all understand, sooner or later, the limits of doing so —that there are ways in which our practical, economic, and physical realities are fixed.” Black people who pass as white — and to a lesser extent, whites who pass as Black — are a phenomenon that challenge us to think about what things are fixed in our understanding of identity. Rachel Dolezal passed as white, and Clarence King passed as Black — to profoundly different ends.
Thursday, January 27
MASSEY LECTURE 4: AMERICA AND THE ART OF EMPATHY: THE POST-RACIAL SOCIETY
Esi Edugyan argues “To talk of transracialism instead of racial passing is, I think, to shear off its past of darkness, of illicitness.” Transracialism implies that we’ve gone beyond the limiting values of racial passing, allowing us to define for ourselves what our race is. It’s a controversial concept — for a Black person, the body may be in itself a metaphor, carrying the weight of history, not something fluid and open to interpretation. So where do our rights to define ourselves begin and end?
Friday, January 28
MASSEY LECTURE 5: AFRICAN AND THE ART OF THE FUTURE
“It is enough, I think, to say that certain Western thinkers saw technological progress as a future bound by race.” Esi Edugyan argues for alternative readings of the history of the future — we are constrained, she thinks, by a large white, Eurocentric idea of progress. African thinkers and artists might suggest other realities: the Zambian Space Program, the films Black Panther and District 9, and Nnedi Okorafor’s novel Lagoon, are all possible parables of the future.
Monday, January 31
MASSEY LECTURE 6: ASIA AND THE ART OF STORYTELLING
Esi Edugyan says “Because… both China and Japan lacked strong expansionism into pre-twentieth-century Africa, their ideas of Blackness were sometimes informed by imported stories…” shaping cultural expectations, and in turn shaping the Black history and experience in Asia. For Esi Edugyan herself, going to Asia is also a lesson in the power of storytelling and the dangers of Othering on an individual level: the assumptions go both ways.
