Making Myself Up: Re-Membering Black Life

Making Myself Up: Re-Membering Black Life: A Lunchtime Table Talk by Darcy Ballantyne Tuesday, March 19 from noon to 1 PM. Narrating a life often involves making oneself up. As Layla D. Brown-Vincent argues, “[e]very choice to write … a particular history … allows us to situate ourselves … in ways that help us understand and shape [our pasts] our presents and our futures” (2019). Making Myself Up: Re-Membering Black Life interrupts the multiple shifting narratives of origin fabricated in the rush to explain the unlikely appearance of a Black child in a large, poor, white family on the ideologically conservative, rural landscape of my youth. My project follows a decolonial methodology and uses personal and official archival documents.

Darcy Ballantyne’s research interests include Black Canadian literatures and cultures, literatures of the Americas, critical mixed-race theory, autoethnography and memoir, and city literatures. She is currently collaborating on a special issue journal (TBD) on Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes. Her articles have appeared in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies Journal; TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies; MaComère Journal; and The Walrus Magazine. Her current research project is an autoethnography.