Austin Clarke, Black Studies, & Black Diasporic Memory

In late September I was lucky enough to be able to attend both days of a conference dedicated to thinking anew about Austin Clarke’s literary legacy, his work as a public intellectual, and his contributions to Black studies in the United States. Throughout the 1960s Clarke was a visiting Professor at Duke, the University of Texas, and other American universities where he taught some of the first Black literature courses. Indeed, Henry Louis Gates received a B as a student in one of Clarke’s classes. Likely a generous grade.

Clarke comments on the ‘rass’ sent to him by Duke’s Dean, Harold Lewis.

The conference was organized by Ronald Cummings, Darcy Ballantyne, Linzey Corridon, and Suad Alad; they did a fabulous job bringing together a great group of academics, writers, public intellectuals, and others interested in Clarke’s life and writing. They allowed us time to visit Clarke archives at McMaster (thanks to Myron Groover for his excellent introduction to Clarke’s archival material) and the conference was energizing and intellectually stimulating.

I heard fabulous presentations from Darcy Ballantyne, Rinaldo Walcott, Patrick Crean, Huda Hassan, Michael Bucknor, Matthew Monrose, Hyancinth Simpson, and others. These were great papers that wrestled with the complexity of Clarke’s writing and his contributions to Canadian and Black literatures as well as public memory within and beyond Canada.

For my part, I presented a paper on Clarke’s unpublished piece, Tranno! in which he recalls his experience going to Harlem and attempting to interview James Baldwin. Baldwin was in Greece so Clarke had to settle for a lengthy interview with Malcolm X. One of the interesting things about the piece is that Clarke moves between his complex feelings towards Canada, and its outlawing of Blackness, and his equally complex feelings towards the US with its particular form of Blackness and its stereotypical framing of Black radicalism. Tranno! uses Baldwin’s work as an intertext to indicate the ways in which home, for Clarke, inheres more in letters and the imagination than in any solid concept of nation or place.

I even got to present with two of the most important literary scholars working in Canada today, and two of my favourite people, Michael Bucknor and Daniel Coleman.