In a little-known chapter of World War II, people of African descent in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe were subjected to a variety of forms of persecution, including imprisonment in internment and concentration camps.

Paradoxically, this hypervisible victim group has remained largely invisible in the memory of World War II and the Holocaust. In the absence of public commemoration, African diaspora artists and writers have preserved and imaginatively reconstructed the stories of these forgotten victims of the Third Reich. Probing the boundaries of Holocaust memory and representation, this book talk draws attention to a largely unrecognized artistic corpus that challenges the erasure of Black wartime history.

Sarah Phillips Casteel will present her book Black Lives Under Nazism, published in Columbia University Press’ new Black Lives in the Diaspora: Past / Present / Future series.

The book can be purchased in the NGC Boutique and is available online at . The author will be available to sign copies following the event.

In English, with simultaneous French-language translation.

This event is organized by the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis in partnership with the National Gallery of Canada.

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We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture, and the Department of English Literature and Language at �Ӱ�ԭ�� University.

�Ӱ�ԭ�� the Author & Guests

Sarah Phillips Casteel is Professor of English at �Ӱ�ԭ�� University, where she is cross-appointed to the Institute of African Studies and the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture. Her books include Black Lives Under Nazism: Making History Visible in Literature and Art (Columbia University Press, 2024), Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination (Columbia University Press, 2016), and the co-edited volume Caribbean Jewish Crossings: Literary History and Creative Practice (University of Virginia Press, 2019). The recipient of a Canadian Jewish Literary Award and a Polanyi Prize, she is a member of the Academic Council of the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University. She has held visiting fellowships at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Zentrum Jüdische Studien Berlin-Brandenburg and visiting professorships at the University of Vienna and the University of Potsdam.

Aboubakar Sanogo is an Associate Professor in Film Studies at �Ӱ�ԭ�� University in Ottawa, Canada. He is cross appointed with the Institute of African Studies (IAS), the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture (ICSLAC) and the Curatorial Studies Program. His research interests include African cinema, Afro-diasporic cinema, documentary film and media, transnational and world cinema, film archiving and film heritage, colonial cinema, postcolonialism, race and cinema and the relationship between film form, history and theory. His writings have appeared in Cinema Journal, Framework, Moving Image Review & Art Journal, Rethinking History, Journal of Film Preservation, Film Quarterly, Sight and Sound and Film Comment and the Journal of African Cinemas. He is currently completing two manuscripts on the history of documentary in Africa and on the cinema of Med Hondo and an anthology on the legendary director. Sanogo has also curated film programs at the Smithsonian Institution, The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), the Il Cinema Ritrovato Film Festival in Bologna, and the Pan African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO). He is the founder of the African Film Festival of Ottawa (AFFO), presented in partnership with the Canadian Film Institute (CFI).  As the North American Regional Secretary for the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI), he initiated and oversees the FEPACI Archival Project. In that capacity, he was instrumental in establishing African Film Heritage Project (AFHP), a major film preservation and restoration initiative in partnership with Martin’s Scorsese’s The Film Foundation and UNESCO in collaboration with the Cineteca di Bologna.

Ming Tiampo is Professor of Art History, and co-director of the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis at �Ӱ�ԭ�� University. She is interested in transnational and transcultural models and histories that provide new structures for critically reimagining global narratives. Tiampo’s book Gutai: Decentering Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 2011) received an honorable mention for the Robert Motherwell Book award. In 2013, she was co-curator of the AICA award-winning Gutai: Splendid Playground at the Guggenheim Museum in NY, and co-edited Art and War in Japan and its Empire: 1931-1960 (Brill Academic Press). Her latest book, Jin-me Yoon, was published with Art Canada Institute in 2023. Her current book projects include Mobile Subjects: Contrapuntal Modernisms, a monograph and digital humanities project that examines post-Imperial histories of migration with an emphasis on artists from Asia, Africa, and Latin America from the former French and British Empires, as well as Intersecting Modernisms, a co-edited sourcebook on global modernisms. Her research collaborations include Asia Forum, the Canadian BIPOC Artists Rolodex, and Worlding Public Cultures, for which she is the co-lead. Tiampo serves on the boards of ici Berlin, the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

Queer World Making: Contemporary Middle Eastern Diasporic Art interrogates the performances of queerness, Arabness, and their intersections by reflecting on modern sexual identity, its relationship to colonialism, and how contemporary queer visual artists disrupt linear identity narratives.

Dr. Gayed will give a short talk about the book, followed by a discussion with respondents, Dr. Ming Tiampo (Art History) and Dr. Carolyn Ramzy (Sociology and Anthropology). A Q&A will close the event.

The event will take place from 6:30 pm – 8pm with doors open at 6pm.

Books will be available for sale at the event courtesy of Octopus Books.

�Ӱ�ԭ�� the Author

Dr. Andrew Gayed is Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at OCAD University where he teaches courses on global contemporary art. An Egyptian-Canadian art historian, Dr. Gayed has an academic background in diasporic art, queer visual culture, and Middle Eastern art histories. Before joining OCADU, Dr. Gayed was the Visiting Scholar at NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. Gayed holds a PhD in Art History and Visual Culture from York University, an M.A. in Art History from �Ӱ�ԭ�� University, and a B.F.A. in Visual Arts from the University of Ottawa. Dr. Gayed’s scholarship has appeared in books, including the Routledge Handbook of Middle Eastern Diasporas, and Unsettling Canadian Art History, and peer-reviewed journals including Journal for Studies in Art Education.

�Ӱ�ԭ�� the Respondents

Dr. Ming Tiampo is Full Professor of Art History, co-director of the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis, and cross-appointed to the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture. She is a specialist of transnational modernisms, with a particular interest in worlding, global microhistories, circulation, and comparative diasporas. She has published on Japanese modernism, global modernisms, contemporary diasporic art in Canada, the connections between Inuit and Japanese prints, and post-imperial histories of the UK and France.

Dr. Carolyn Ramzy is an ethnomusicologist who focuses on Egyptian Christian popular music in Egypt and a growing diaspora in the U.S. and Canada. Specifically, Dr. Ramzy examines how Orthodox music culture shapes the Coptic community’s gendered subjectivities, and the use of virtual technologies to challenge traditional understanding of (holy) belonging, sexuality, and faith. This work builds on Dr. Ramzy’s dissertation, “The Politics of (Dis)Engagement: Coptic Christian Revival and the Performative Politics of Song” (2014) that followed a powerful religious revival that used popular song to combat, and at times, comply with structural marginalization as well as sectarian conflict in Egypt and abroad. Dr. Ramzy also traces how these song and hymns, now translated for the diaspora, facilitate important conversations about Coptic experiences of racialization, assimilation, and belonging in an American and Canadian diaspora.

Susan Stanford Friedman is Hilldale Professor and Virginia Woolf Professor Emerita of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her most recent books are “Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time” (Columbia UP, 2015) and the edited volumes “Contemporary Revolutions: Turning Back to the Future in 21st-Century Literature and Art” (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2018) and “Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013), co-edited with Rita Felski. She has published widely in modernist studies, narrative theory, feminist theory, women’s writing, migration and diaspora, world literature, religious studies, archipelagic studies, and psychoanalysis. For more information please visit her website: .

In her lecture Professor Friedman will examine the questions: why do studies of contemporary art and literature often take for granted a linear periodization of history, which presumes an “arrow of time” from past to present and future How viable are notions of the “contemporary” as distinct from the “modern” or “pre-modern” To what extent do such assumptions embed an unacknowledged Euroamerican-centrism and inhibit comparison, especially transnational and transhistorical comparison? Is the attempt at planetary comparison inherently imperial or liberating? While recent texts, such as Amelia Groom’s “Time: Documents of Contemporary Art” (2013) and “Time: A Vocabulary of the Present,” edited by Joel Burges and Amy J. Elias (2016), theorize the conceptualization of contemporaneity by challenging conventional notions of linear time, Friedman’s lecture will propose transhistorical and transnational approaches, which promote a wider archive and a more complex notion of contemporaneity. Drawing on the implications for comparison of global examples explored in her edited volume, “Contemporary Revolutions: Turning Back to the Future in 21st-Century Literature and Art” (2018), Friedman will address a variety of phenomena, including the work of Swedish artist Hilma of Klint, whose recent rediscovery is transforming the history of abstract art. These and other examples will demonstrate ways in which artists and writers have anticipated recent ideas about contemporaneity, time, and planetary space. In the context of theoretical debates about comparison, Friedman will reflect upon these questions by reviewing defenses of and challenges to periodization and by offering alternatives to temporal linearity.

This event is co-hosted by the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture (ICSLAC), the �Ӱ�ԭ�� Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS), the �Ӱ�ԭ�� School for Studies in Art and Culture (SSAC), and the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis (CTCA).

Full abstract PDF

On comparison and restitution: two approaches to the politics of representation in contemporary art and ethnology in a global context

Global entanglements and a rising awareness of problematic Western understandings of art have led to a new situation at art institutions in Europe: museums and collections are increasingly being opened up for artworks from global perspectives. But does this revision, or rather reformatting, of the modern canon in the so-called West also imply the overcoming of its established Eurocentric institutional hierarchies and decade-old mechanisms of power?

Rather than examining the historiography of comparison in art history, this lecture engages with the concern of comparison in art and ethnology against the backdrop of the increasing culturalization of politics. The talk will deep-dive into two recent exhibition and publication projects by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin) and its partners, (2017-20) and (2019-20), that try to develop new perspectives on this problematic field by realizing academic and artistic research on the epistemologies and politics of representation in (post-)colonial contexts.

This event is co-hosted by the �Ӱ�ԭ�� School for Studies in Art and Culture (SSAC), the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis (CTCA), and the �Ӱ�ԭ�� University Art Gallery (CUAG).

Poster PDF

International Academy
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

November 8-10, 2019

The �Ӱ�ԭ�� University Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis, in partnership with the institutional members of TrACE (Transnational and Transcultural Art and Culture Exchange), is proud to present Worlding the Global: The Arts in the Age of Decolonization, an international academy designed to collaboratively re-imagine and pluralize the ‘global’ from multiple geocultural perspectives. Working in collaboration with , the International Indigenous Art Exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, the academy takes as its ethical starting point its situation on unceded Algonquin territory as well as the city of Ottawa’s entangled settler colonial, migrant, diasporic, and other transnational and transcultural histories. Bringing together local, national, and international scholars, artists, activists, and curators, the academy will facilitate a multi-pronged dialogue on the global in the arts and culture, proposing to understand our global world as a temporally constituted and open-ended process of lived interrelations and interconnections (Glissant 1997; Cheah 2016; Shih 2012).

Please see our full program here.

Gordon King, Rally for redress, Parliament Hill, Ottawa, 14 April 1988,
black and white photograph (detail), collection of the Ottawa Japanese Community Association, reproduced with permission of the artist.

Inheriting Redress: The Ottawa Japanese Community Association Archive

Curated by Emily Putnam and Rebecca Dolgoy in partnership with the Ottawa Japanese Community Association

15 September 2019 – 26 January 2020

Opening party
Sunday 15 September, 2:00 – 4:30 p.m.
Remarks at 3:00 p.m. by Benoit-Antoine Bacon, President of �Ӱ�ԭ�� University (with ASL interpretation).
Collaborative performance by Bear Nation Drummers and Oto-Wa Taiko

CUAG is an accessible space, with barrier-free washrooms and elevator.

Open daily except Monday / Free admission / Paid parking in Lot P18

Norman Takeuchi, A Measured Act – Angler, 2006, acrylic, Conté crayon,
oil pastel and photocopy transfers on paper (detail).
Beaverbrook Collection of Canadian War Art, Canadian War Museum,
photo courtesy Canadian War Museum.

Sites of Memory: Legacies of the Japanese Canadian Internment
Cindy Mochizuki, Emma Nishimura,Norman Takeuchi

Curated by Emily Putnam
15 September 2019 – 26 January 2020

Opening party
Sunday 15 September, 2:00 – 4:30 p.m.
Remarks at 3:00 p.m. by Benoit-Antoine Bacon, President of �Ӱ�ԭ�� University (with ASL interpretation).
Collaborative performance by Bear Nation Drummers and Oto-Wa Taiko

CUAG is an accessible space, with barrier-free washrooms and elevator.

Open daily except Monday / Free admission / Paid parking in Lot P18

It will take place at the Dominion Chalmers Centre in Woodside Hall on Friday, April 5 from 5:30 to 7:30 pm.

Participants include Dylan Robinson, a Stó:lō scholar who holds the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University; Parmela Attariwala, an ethnomusicologist, and violinist who recently authored a policy document on diversity for Orchestras Canada; and Ellen Waterman, inaugural Helmut Kallmann Chair for Music in Canada at �Ӱ�ԭ�� University.

Over the past five years, there has been an increasing national conversation about diversity and decolonization in the arts, with numerous conferences and the creation of policy documents. What now?  How do we turn discussion into action? What systemic changes do artists and arts organizations need to make in order to create more just conditions for music in Canada?

Join us for a stimulating discussion.  Better yet, come early and hear �Ӱ�ԭ�� University Music Students perform onstage at Dominion Chalmers between 3 and 5 pm!

Dominion Chalmers Centre is at 355 Cooper St.  Admission is free and the venue is accessible.

Poster

Paul Gladston

What sort of dialogue do contemporary Chinese artists have with western art and the art of the Chinese diaspora? How do they respond to China’s five-thousand-year history and civilization? In this talk the award-winning cultural historian and critic, Paul Gladston will respond to these and other questions by discussing contemporary Chinese art from differing international and localized Chinese perspectives.

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