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essaysmythe.bsky.social
SA Smythe
@essaysmythe.bsky.social
580 followers 270 following 77 posts
blk critical theorist + transmedia artist. ‘black studies & the archive’ assoc. professor
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essaysmythe.bsky.social
So so proud to share the latest pub from the Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis: Sankofa Currents, vol. 2 - "Ngũgĩ’s Gourd." The issue reviews our recent collabs and future. Thrilled for what our team & community continue to build. Please read & share: bit.ly/CBPJournalF25 #BlackStudy #BlackPoiesis
The cover page of vol 2 of Sankofa Currents, Fall 2025 - the special "year-in-review" journal issue for the Collaboratory for Black Poiesis. The cover background appears like light brown construction paper, with more orange, beige, and deep blue construction paper with torn edges layered above it and glitter adorning the centre of the cover where a purple moon-shaped image rests. The upper right corner depicts a vintage stencil drawing of planetary constellations and related geometric patterns. The central text reads: The Collaboratory for Black Poiesis in white capital letters with the white CBP logo. Underneath a cursive marigold text reading Sankofa Currents (the name of the lab's journal). The footer text reads: We Make - We Study - We Remember - We Write - We Live - We Be in all caps. Part one of the table of contents for the CBP's Journal: Land Acknowledgment, Living Commitments, Tiding's (Director's Letter), Who We Are, What We're Reading, A Likkle Sankofa Archive--Echoes of Care Collective; Past Fellows & Awardees; Shared Horizons; and Calling the Conjurers Part two of the table of contents for the CBP's Journal: (Re)Groundings: Fall Open House, Collab Proposals, Continuing Initiatives, Writing in Common, New & Upcoming Programmes, Fall Calendar, Events of Interest, Reflections & Connections, Gratitude & Project Credits
October 7, 2025 at 1:57 AM
essaysmythe.bsky.social
✨The Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis is "sharpening our oyster knives," preparing our imaginations and relations, with new + ongoing programs in Black study & collective practice during the 2025–26 year. Details: linktr.ee/blackpoiesis & IG (@blackpoiesis).+ Come thru, reach out, stay tuned ✨
The multicoloured poster for The Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis: Invitation to Collaborate: Invitation for collaborators: let’s get to work! Bring us your ideas, workshops, visions to collab, co-sponsor, join, and/or spread the word! Text reads (in CBP yellow): Our multidisciplinary hub for black study and black aesthetic practice welcomes proposals for programs, gatherings, or projects by and for Afro-diasporic, Black Indigenous, African researchers, students, communities, independent culture workers and all our relations. We welcome proposals for a wide range of events, including but not limited to: Workshops • Critical Literacy Trainings • Teach-Ins • Roundtables, Lectures, Readings • Performances + Exhibitions • Study Sessions • Mutual Aid Initiatives Questions? Contact us: blackpoiesis@utoronto.ca Your Subject Line: Collab - Proposal The multicoloured poster for The Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis: magnitude + bond: a slow, multimedia reading group. This Fall with Toni Morrison’s Source of Self-Regard (Oct 2025 to Jan 2026) & @Cyrée Jarelle Johnson’s Watchnight (Oct 2025 to Jan 2026) and Winter/Spring 2026 Moten and Harney's The Undercommons (Feb to May 2026) an on-site reading & discussion group dedicated to black cultural production. featuring community-led 'maker-thinker' sessions each semester 3rd Wednesdays; 2-3:30PM (co-reading), 4-5PM (discussion) The multicoloured poster for Writing in Common: a thesis writing group hosted by The Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis: Looking for an antidote to writing in isolation and the extractive pace of academic life? A group convened by and for PhD students and postdocs across UofT and the GTA, (with consideration for Master's students in the final year of intensive thesis-writing). FRIDAYS, 1-4PM ET IN-PERSON: 10 OCT; 31 Oct; 21 Nov; 12 Dec VIRTUAL: 17 Oct; 14 Nov; 19 Dec with COVID-Conscious-only & BIPOC-only sessions available during UofT's Reading Week in Fall & Winter. check linktree for details. Description: Research Fellows in The Collaboratory for Black Poiesis are convening a space for writing in common-towards shared goals and towards work that matters to and for community. Here, we nurture sustainable writing practices for your research or creative projects, beyond the pressures of productivity, evaluation, or fixed deliverables. Together, we'll build a steady rhythm of writing grounded in Black study, freedom dreaming, and mutual care. Each session offers opening grounding practices, quiet writing time in an ambient environment, light snacks, and mindful reflection to close. We'll meet regularly in the Collaboratory space or on Zoom all year round. Come write with us Send your expression of interest to the link in our link.tree/blackpoiesis; with priority admission by September 26th and confirmations by October 1st for Fall 2025. The brown, taupe, aubergine-coloured posted of the general weekly schedule for The Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis, which shows it is closed for external public to make room for seminars, CBP workshops, retreats, and BIPOC-only gatherings on Tuesdays and Sundays with other programming updated on Instagram.com/blackpoiesis and the linker.ee/blackpoiesis pages.
September 11, 2025 at 10:54 PM
essaysmythe.bsky.social
Make the Quiet Part Loud Again 2025
a repost from YK Hong (@ykreborn on Instagram). Dark red and black background post that reads in white letters: war.gov This is now the official government site and name for what was known as the Department of Defence. The United States is a war corporation. Always. The United States manufactures wars to justify its militarism, to run its capitalist colonialism, upon which its entire foundation of oppression is based. If it was not crystal clear to you before now, the United States Empire cannot continue to exist if we want to be free. Ending Empire is the only way to liberation.
September 6, 2025 at 3:40 PM
essaysmythe.bsky.social
Limited (Extended) Call for Contributions to Transnational Black Studies (Liverpool UP) by August 15th.

Please note wide-ranging areas on p.2 & share especially to non-Anglo / non-Western Black + Afro-Indigenous scholars, writers, etc. who you admire and have a lesson or a word for future scholars.
Book abstract on a dark blue flyer. Email blackpoiesis@utoronto.ca for more info. Text (in WHITE): What do we mean when we invoke “Black Studies” across transnational, intercultural, and transhistorical contexts? How do we honour plurality, contradictions, and insurgent possibility across this terrain of dynamic traditions—especially outside or despite dominant geographies and institutional norms? Transnational Black Studies (TBS) stages a multivalent, transdisciplinary conversation on Black cultural production, blackness in the aesthetic imagination, and African/Afro-Indigenous and diasporic political life and teachings across regions, traditions, and languages. The collection draws from the ongoing lessons of Édouard Glissant, Amina Mama, Stuart Hall, Hazel Carby, Barbara Christian, Sylvia Wynter, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Robin Kelley, and many others, mobilising a Black Studies beyond nation-state logics, linguistic silos, and area studies frameworks. Scholars, artists, literary thinkers, and community-rooted culture workers share work animated by what Katherine McKittrick considers “black livingness” and the fugitive planning that Fred Moten teaches us undergirds black study. TBS refuses tokenised inclusion as a stand-in for “decolonising” syllabi or the elective “diversity” modules of higher education and cultural institutions. It offers a non-exhaustive but expansive engagement with the intellectual and political stakes of Black thought, cultural work, and radical method. Through essays, interludes, community resources, transmedia playlists and other creative-critical forms, contributors will challenge the disciplinary boundaries of modern language studies and the epistemic racism embedded in colonial notions of “modernity.” The volume affirms Afro-diasporic, African, Indigenous, fugitive, revolutionary, and anticolonial ways of knowing-learning, making, and remembering. Organised around four sections from the TML series—“Temporality,” “Language,” “Subjectivity… Limited call for contributions (cobalt flyer, beige letters). AUGUST 15 DEADLINE: bit.ly/TBSvolume2025. Our edited volume TRANSNATIONAL BLACK STUDIES (Liverpool University Press) is entering its next phase towards publication, but remains open to a limited number of additional full-length contributions (4-6.000 words) from early career researchers, academic-activists, artists, and community educators—especially those whose scholarship or practice engages the literary arts, culture, sociopolitics, pedagogy, or research methods in regions or sub-fields whose absence/limited engagement would be an oversight. We request submissions that are unpublished or in-progress, but we may consider previously published work that has been significantly adapted or revised for our intended audience of modern languages and cultural studies students, early career researchers, and community-engaged culture workers. Queries or submissions to: blackpoiesis@utoronto.ca with Subject Line: "New TBS Submissions." Please be mindful of global and intersectional positionalities when suggesting contributors or circulating this limited call. We are especially seeking perspectives rooted in the Caribbean, Pacific, Africa, the Levant, and/or claimed within global Indigenous communities and sovereign nations. Abstracts that are received by 15 August will receive primary consideration and direct response by 30 August–submissions close on this date. Final Drafts due by 15 November for works in English or already translated; untranslated works by October 30th. Abstracts and initial drafts may be submitted in English, Italian, Spanish, French, Russian, German, or Arabic for editor’s evaluation. Some translation support available for accepted full-length works not written in English. Correspondence from the Editorial Team and Liverpool University Press will primarily be in English.
July 15, 2025 at 3:16 PM
essaysmythe.bsky.social
Gaza is close to hearts & actions worldwide. Solidarity @freedomflotilla.bsky.social & others from land + air show us Gaza & Palestinian lib. are physically close, too. What might the world hold in 7 days?

Freedom flotilla comrades are exceptional. They don’t need to be the exception. #EndtheSeige
here are travel lengths departing from a few mediterranean ports to gaza, sailing an avg of 10 knots per hour in nautical miles (this is a moderate speed with favourable to typical wind conditions). let’s imagine an avg sailboat (or several) loaded with humanitarian aid going roughly 18.5kmh or ~11.5 statute mph) would take: marseilles 1589 nm 6 days 15hrs thessaloniki 777 nm 3 days 6hrs palermo 1127nm 4 days 17hrs rome fco 1283nm 5 days 8hrs venice 1379nm 5 days 18hrs valletta 1030nm 4 days 7hrs marsa al hariga 560nm 2 days 8hrs tunis 1247nm 5 days 5hrs istanbul 816nm 3 days 10hrs alexandria 290nm 1 day 5hrs barcelona 1674nm 6 days 23hrs
June 9, 2025 at 4:44 AM
essaysmythe.bsky.social
perhaps another circle for how we simply cannot fully compute the scale of lives lost, nor the toll this inability will carry on a psychic, physiological or policy level, all areas in which the West is already bereft.
grief venn diagram white background black text: L- grief R- the ankle you twisted when you were 13 overlap- “i think the pain is gone and then i do something weird and it strikes again”
May 13, 2025 at 9:43 PM
essaysmythe.bsky.social
May 13th 1985: Philly police bombed MOVE org + two city blocks. Tree (12) & Delisha (14) Africa’s remains still used in classes at UPenn & Princeton

Now: tanks, Cop Cities, ICE human traffic ops. Authoritarian violence starts w/ poor, Black, Indigenous, disabled folks—& expands if we refuse witness
black and white image of 11 members of the MOVE family in Philadelphia 1984. All brown skinned Black people from infants to adults either dreadlocks staring intently at the camera.
May 13, 2025 at 2:47 PM
essaysmythe.bsky.social
Have you read "Power" by Audre Lorde? Written June 1973, also in NYC (Queens).

5yrs & 2 days before Miller's murder by police, undercover cop Thomas Shea was acquitted by a jury of 11 whites + 1 Black woman who said “They convinced me,” after they absolved Shea of 10yr old Clifford Glover's murder.
Power BY AUDRE LORDE The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children. I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds and a dead child dragging his shattered black face off the edge of my sleep blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders is the only liquid for miles and my stomach churns at the imagined taste while my mouth splits into dry lips without loyalty or reason thirsting for the wetness of his blood as it sinks into the whiteness of the desert where I am lost without imagery or magic trying to make power out of hatred and destruction trying to heal my dying son with kisses only the sun will bleach his bones quicker. A policeman who shot down a ten year old in Queens stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood and a voice said “Die you little motherfucker” and there are tapes to prove it. At his trial this policeman said in his own defense “I didn't notice the size nor nothing else only the color”. And there are tapes to prove that, too. "Power" by Audre Lorde continues: Today that 37 year old white man with 13 years of police forcing was set free by eleven white men who said they were satisfied justice had been done and one Black Woman who said “They convinced me” meaning they had dragged her 4'10'' black Woman's frame over the hot coals of four centuries of white male approval until she let go the first real power she ever had and lined her own womb with cement to make a graveyard for our children. I have not been able to touch the destruction within me. But unless I learn to use the difference between poetry and rhetoric my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold or lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire and one day I will take my teenaged plug and connect it to the nearest socket raping an 85 year old white woman who is somebody's mother and as I beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed a greek chorus will be singing in 3/4 time “Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are.” Copyright Credit: "Power". Copyright © 1978 by Audre Lorde from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF AUDRE LORDE by Audre Lorde. Used by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Source: The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1997)
May 9, 2025 at 10:09 PM
essaysmythe.bsky.social
An ongoing labour of love with Vanessa Eileen Thompson & SA Smythe in collaboration w/Engy Mohsen (Egypt/UK) and Fred Kannemeyer (South Africa/UK) and movements needed more than ever to fight the silo of knowledges & other resources for transnational liberation struggles. Help us grow this garden 🌹✊🏾
May 6, 2025 at 4:12 PM
essaysmythe.bsky.social
🚨 Excited to launch Shared Horizons: The Politics & Poetics of Transnational Abolition, a living digital archive envisioned by @v_e_thompson & @essaysmythe. Learn & contribute to transnational groups dedicated to ongoing liberation struggles beyond borders www.sharedhorizons.org🌹💪🏾📖
May 6, 2025 at 4:02 PM
essaysmythe.bsky.social
EU’s mercenary and military externalisation to North Africa + IOF drones roaming unchecked in int’l waters + Malta ignoring yet another ship in distress just off its coast = shared project of border imperialism.

Colonialism across sea + sky. #FreedomFlotilla #FlotillaRescue bit.ly/flotillarescue
May 2, 2025 at 7:15 AM
essaysmythe.bsky.social
If you need coordinates:
(from Vessel Finder based off reported ship description):
Send rescue teams to save 30 humanitarian workers on board the ship
CONSCIENCE off E. coast of Malta flying under Palau 🇵🇼 flag
Lat: 35.94043
Longitude: 14.8419
Area: West Med.
Info from: 2 May 05:18 UTC
May 2, 2025 at 6:21 AM
essaysmythe.bsky.social
URGENT: The Gaza Freedom Flotilla carrying 30 humanitarians & vital aid attacked by drones in international waters and has issued an SOS. Stranded 14 nautical miles off Malta. PLS read, share & engage the actions below For @freedomflotilla.bsky.social & forever in solidarity w/ the people of Gaza.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DJI8lOluo8c/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== https://www.instagram.com/p/DJI8lOluo8c/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== https://www.instagram.com/p/DJI8lOluo8c/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== https://www.instagram.com/p/DJI8lOluo8c/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
May 2, 2025 at 6:11 AM
essaysmythe.bsky.social
Deportation (n): the removal from a country of an alien [i.e., foreigner] whose presence is unlawful or prejudicial.

Words mean things. How can you "deport" US citizens? The mainstream media is responsible for manufacturing consent for authoritarianism, genocide, and border imperialism.
Merriam Webster definition of deportation as 1: an act or instance of deporting; 2: the removal from a country of an alien whose presence is unlawful or prejudicial
April 29, 2025 at 5:32 PM
essaysmythe.bsky.social
Did you know face of 90s typing software, Mavis Beacon, was inspired by Renée L'Espérance, a real-life Haitian woman who vanished at the height of its fame?

TO: FREE screening Hot Docs For Viola Dec.13 SEEKING MAVIS BEACON📀 + talkback w/ filmmaker jazmin jones & more Tix: hotdocs.ca/whats-on/fil...
The poster of the SEEKING MAVIS BEACON documentary featuring brown skinned hand with red fingernails. Index finger cracks the screen of an old 90s PC as it pushes through on a background monitor where a digital hand also presses through against a deep purple midnight background. Text includes screening info and presented in partnership with the Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis at UofT Secondary for Hot Docs For Viola screening of SEEKING MAVIS BEACON with a digitised image of the character against a salmon background
December 6, 2024 at 12:30 AM