Black Histories & Futures Month 2025

February 9 | Soundtrack to a Coup D’Etat

Time: 1PM

Location: The Screening Room, 120 Princess St.

https://screeningroomkingston.com/movies/soundtrack-to-a-coup-detat/

Please make sure to present your Eventbrite ticket at the door.

United Nations, 1960: the Global South ignites a political earthquake, jazz musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach crash the Security Council, Nikita Khrushchev bangs his shoe, and the U.S. State Department swings into action, sending jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong to Congo to deflect attention from the CIA-backed coup. Director Johan Grimonprez captures the moment when African politics and American jazz collided in this magnificent essay film, a riveting historical rollercoaster that illuminates the political machinations behind the 1961 assassination of Congo’s leader Patrice Lumumba. Richly illustrated by eyewitness accounts, official government memos, testimonies from mercenaries and CIA operatives, speeches from Lumumba himself, and a veritable canon of jazz icons, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat interrogates colonial history to tell an urgent and timely story of precedent that resonates more than ever in today’s geopolitical climate.

February 12 | We, the Kindling Book Launch

Time: 6:30PM

Location: Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts, 390 King St W.

Join Queen’s University’s Department of English and the Black Studies program to celebrate the launch of Assistant Professor Juliane Okot Bitek’s — a spare, luminous novel centred around the unforgettable voices of schoolgirls in Uganda who survive capture by the Lord's Resistance Army.

February 25 | Resistance in a Hostile Environment: Subnormal with Chichi Ayalogu

Time: 1PM

Location: KFPL Central Branch, 130 Johnson St.

In the 1960s, while young black adults were getting to grips with the struggle for black power and a long fightback against police abuse was starting, the majority of West Indian migrants in Britain were keeping their heads down. They were working hard and counting on providing better opportunities and education for their children. However, in a white-dominated country, where the politics were becoming increasingly racialised, there was a question of how society, and its teachers, saw these young black children. Before having a chance to develop intellectually, they were labelled as stupid, difficult and disruptive. This documentary reveals how black children in the 1960s and 70s were sent to schools for the subnormal, and how parents, activists and teachers came together to fight this injustice.

A screening of this documentary for school groups will be followed by a discussion with Black Studies Predoctoral Fellow Chichi Ayalogu whose dissertation “Diasporic Witnessing: Crises and the Aesthetics of the Nigerian Migratory Intelligentsia” was awarded a SSHRC doctoral fellowship.

February 27 | Momodou Taal & Zubairu Wai: The Malcolm Effect

Time: 6:30PM

Location: Miller 105, 36 Union St. (across from Smith Engineering)

Momodou Taal, host of the The Malcolm Effect podcast, author of the forthcoming and a British-Gambian PhD student at Cornell University joins Zubairu Wai, Associate Professor of Political Science and Global Development Studies at the University of Toronto, author of and editor of , to discuss the legacy of Malcolm X’s life and reflect on the role of Pan Africanism, Black Internationalism and Marxism in building the future X envisioned.

Host or Publisher Department of Gender Studies