Launch of Karina Vernon and Winfried Siemerling's CALL AND RESPONSE-ABILITY
About this Event
“Sound demands a listener, text requires a reader, and performance necessitates that others be present for the experience. Without those presences, the circuit isn’t complete, the charge will not travel through, the work will not become active in the world.”
These words by Kaie Kellough articulate the central idea explored in Call and Response-ability: that Black Canadian works of art cannot be understood apart from the foundational concerns of audience and reception. A richly collaborative assemblage of artist statements, scholarly essays, critical analyses, and reflections, these writings explore what happens when Black Canadian cultural productions and interventions enter the realms of public, institutional, and pedagogical reception. Part 1 foregrounds the voices of word, sound, and visual artists, who reflect on audience during and after the creative process. Part 2, anchored by M. NourbeSe Philip’s signature essay “Who’s Listening? Artists, Audience & Language,” gathers fourteen critical inquiries into writing, theatre, visual art, and sonic practice. Part 3 turns to pedagogy, with reflections on the field and narrated syllabi that can inspire readers, discussion groups, and practitioners alike. A coda considers the ethics of relation, the practice of communal research, and the limits of the archive. This book is an indispensable resource for anyone working with Black Canadian literature, music, visual art, and theatre. Its blend of personal reflection, critical insight, and pedagogical practice also makes it valuable to general readers and community-based audiences seeking to understand how Black Canadian art speaks – and how we might learn to listen.
Call and Response-ability Companion Website at
is an associate professor and Chair of English at the University of Toronto Scarborough, where she researches and teaches in the areas of Canadian and Black Canadian literature, early Black Canadian archives, critical pedagogy, and Black-Indigenous solidarities. She edited The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology (2020) and the forthcoming companion volume, Critical Readings in the Black Prairie Archives, and she frequently disseminates her research through public media and community engagement. In 2025, she was elected to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists.
FRSC is a University Research Chair and a professor of English at the University of Waterloo. He won the Gabrielle-Roy Prize for The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: Black Canadian Writing, Cultural History, and the Presence of the Past (2015, French trans. 2022). Earlier books include Canada and Its Americas: Transnational Navigations (co-ed. with Sarah Phillips Casteel, 2010) and the monographs The New North American Studies (2005) and Discoveries of the Other (1994, reissued 2018). He also contributed chapters to The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative (ed. John Ernest, 2014), The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature (ed. Ato Quayson, 2012), and African American Literature in Transition, vol. 4, 1850–65 (ed. Teresa Zackodnik, 2021).
grew up in Singapore and lives on the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. She is an associate professor at Simon Fraser University and the Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Transnational and Decolonial Digital Humanities. Her published articles include work on Southeast Asian, Asian Canadian, and Black Canadian literary texts and films. Her monograph Counter-Cartographies: Reading Singapore Otherwise (2024) theorizes the relationship between cultural dissidence and urban planning in Singapore. She is also the author of the poetry collection Seas Move Away (2022) and of the critical-creative nonfiction book Exhumations: Inside the Body of the Petrostate (2026).
is a professor of creative writing at Ontario College of Art and Design University and the City of Toronto’s seventh Poet Laureate. Her albums of music with poetry include Revolutionary Tea Party (1986), Conditions Critical (1988), Freedom & Dance (1999), ANXIETY (2012), and Muttertongue: What Is a Word in Utter Space (with Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts, 2025). Dr Allen has also published numerous books of poetry, including Rhythm An’ Hardtimes (1983), Nothing but a Hero: Poetry for Children and Young People (1992), Women Do This Every Day (1993), Psychic Unrest (1999), Make the World New: The Poetry of Lillian Allen (2021), and Muttertongue: What Is a Word in Utter Space (with Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts, 2025).
is a writer and critic. Author of the novels Soucouyant and Brother, and the epistolary memoir I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You: A Letter To My Daughter, his books have been translated into a dozen languages. He is a member of the editorial board of Brick and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Division of Arts.
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