Faculty Research Fellow
Karina Vernon researches and teaches in the areas of Canadian and Black Canadian literature, archives, critical pedagogy, and Black-Indigenous relations. She is editor of The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology (WLUP 2020) and a companion volume, Critical Readings in the Black Prairie Archives, which is forthcoming. She is the co-editor, with Winfried Siemerling (UWaterloo) of Call and Response-ability: Black Canadian Works of Art and the Politics of Relation (McGill-Queens, forthcoming), which offers a Black Canadian theory of reception and relation.
Fellowship Project: Black Noise: Wayward Listening in the Black Prairies’ Sonic Archives
In “Black Noise: Wayward Listening in the Black Prairies’ Sonic Archives” I follow the reverberations of Black noise and music emerging from what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call the undercommons—the fugitive spaces where Black lives have so often been lived in the contexts of anti-Black social orders—to locate unruly, unarchivable sonic and embodied materials that exist in the shadow of dominant archives. Specifically, this project develops a method of “wayward listening,” or, listening relationally, to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century repertoire of Black voyageurs and cowboys, to produce an uncommon sonic prairie archive.