- September 30, 2020
- 1:30pm – 3:00pm PST
- Online Event
Please join us for the virtual launch of Devi Dee Mucina’s Ubuntu Relational Love: Decolonizing Black Masculinities. Devi will be joined by guests Simone Blais and Joy Ngenda.
A Q&A will follow the presentation.
Register here! Send questions or comments to [email protected]
About the Book
Ubuntu is a Bantu term meaning humanity. It is also a philosophical and ethical system of thought, from which definitions of humanness, togetherness, and social politics of difference arise. Devi Dee Mucina is a Black Indigenous Ubuntu man. In Ubuntu Relational Love, he uses Ubuntu oratures as tools to address the impacts of Euro-colonialism while regenerating relational Ubuntu governance structures.
Called “millet granaries” to reflect the nourishing and sustaining nature of Indigenous knowledges, and written as letters addressed to his mother, father, and children, Mucina’s oratures take up questions of geopolitics, social justice, and resistance. Working through personal and historical legacies of dispossession and oppression, he challenges the fragmentation of Indigenous families and cultures and decolonizes impositions of white supremacy and masculinity.
Drawing on anti-racist, African feminist, and Ubuntu theories and critically influenced by Indigenous masculinities scholarship in Canada, Ubuntu Relational Love is a powerful and engaging book.
About the Presenters
Simone Blais is a dancer, writer and aspiring midwife of afro-Trinidadian and Metis descent. She is a recent UVic Gender Studies grad whose work focuses on decolonizing the dance community and reproductive justice for marginalized communities. In the past 5 years, she has worked with the Nesting Doula Collective, and the Native Youth Sexual Health Network, delivering workshops about reproductive justice. She is also the director and producer of the documentary Dance Like Everybody’s Watching, which highlights the experiences of Black dancers in ‘Victoria’ (premiere August 2020).
Joy Ngenda is a queer West African transplant who has been living on unceded Lekwungen lands for the last 4 years. Their background is in community care, event planning, organizing and coffee. Joy is a multi-disciplinary artist and sometimes student, with a passion for ethical organizing and community justice.
Dr. Devi Mucina is an associate Professor and the Director of the Indigenous Governance Program at the University of Victoria. His scholarship on Black Indigenous masculinities researches how Gule Wamukulu (performative spiritual mask dancing) and the Ngoni Ngoma function as tools of reviving Black Indigenous governance in the service of communal health and wellness. His other research explores the impact of parental and familial members’ incarceration on their children and questions the risk factors this creates for their future incarceration from an Indigenous intersectional theoretical framework.
