OUR SUNDAY LINKS

July 3, 2016

from Brett

Here we are, on the long weekend designated specifically for celebrating white settler colonialism. I hope you’ve managed to avoid spending your weekend waving around the ol’ red and white (or red, white, and blue). I’ve spent my weekend so far reading Octavia Butler’s Mind of My Mind (highly recommend) and imagining different possibilities for kinship systems—and let me tell you, all of them would put the Canadian nation-state into a tizzy. Now, the links:

  • Suki Kim thinks through genre as it reflects racism and sexism. She writes, “By casting my book as personal rather than professional—by marketing me as a woman on a journey of self-discovery, rather than a reporter on a groundbreaking assignment—I was effectively being stripped of my expertise on the subject I knew best.”
  • Musings on choosing family: “a scene like this one was the closest thing I knew to what I mean by the word ‘family,’ sitting around a kitchen table late at night and believing that there’s nothing in the world from which the people you’ve gathered here can’t keep you safe”
  • Toronto venues are forming an alliance to create accountable spaces with the goal of prevent sexual assault.

 

still from Lizzie Borden's film Born in Flames
still from Lizzie Borden’s film Born in Flames
  • Rufi Thorpe on mothering and writing: “I firmly believe that having children has made me smarter and better and more interesting, and fuck you to any women’s mag that doesn’t think so too. And yet, I am profoundly unfree.”
  • A judge made history in Canadian courts by acknowledging anti-black racism.
  • For your viewing pleasures, We’ve Been Around is a series of documentary shorts about trans trailblazers.
Queen Latifah, in her rap days.
  • Jamie Wilson experienced years of abuse and harassment at Toronto Fire Services, and her experience reminds us, once more, that institutionalized sexism is still here and still traumatic.
  • Austin Clarke passed away this week. As Paul Barrett writes, “Clarke is often described as Canada’s first multicultural writer, or Canada’s first immigrant writer, or Canada’s first black writer. These labels are completely inadequate: Clarke is one of our most important writers in need of no qualification, and his career does not merely predate, but should define what we think of as Canadian Literature.”

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