Halifax’s former Poet Laureate Afua Cooper and photographer Wilfried Raussert collaborate in this book of poems and photographs focused on everyday Black experiences. The result is a jambalaya — a dialogue between image and text. Cooper translates Raussert’s photos into poetry, painting a profound image of what disembodied historical facts might look like when they are embodied in contemporary characters. This visual and textual conversation honours the multiple layers of Blackness in the African diaspora around North America and Europe. The result is a work that amplifies black beauty and offers audible resistance.

Dr. Afua Cooper is an award-winning historian, author, and poet. She is professor of Black studies in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Dalhousie University where she holds a Killam Research Chair. Afua has mobilized Black studies in Canada through her scholarly work, and artistic endeavours—this within the academy and beyond. She established the Black Studies program at Dalhousie, first as a minor, and later as part of the leadership team that launched the Bachelor of Arts in Black and African Diaspora Studies. This is the first such program in Canada. Dr. Cooper also founded the Black Canadian Studies Association. She was awarded the Royal Society of Canada’s J.B. Tyrrell Historical medal for her outstanding contribution to Canadian history. Afua is the Principal Investigator for A Black People’s History of Canada project.

Afua Cooper's profile page

Dr. Wilfried Raussert is a multidisciplinary artist and scholar. He works across the boundaries of music, literature, photography, art, and literary criticism. He is Chair of North American and Inter-American Studies at Bielefeld University, Germany. He is director of the International Association of InterAmerican Studies, author and editor of 20 scholarly books, including Art Begins in Streets Art Lives in Streets, Cultural Memory and Multiple Identities, and Traveling Sounds: Music, Migration and Identity in the U.S. and Beyond.

Wilfried Raussert's profile page

• Commended, Alcuin Society for Excellence in Book Design
• Short-listed, APMA Best Atlantic-Published Book Award
• Winner, J.M. Abraham Poetry Award
• Long-listed, Pat Lowther Memorial Award
• Winner, Portia White Prize

“This artful text is the emphatic means by which Afua Cooper and Wilfried Raussert arrive at this historical moment. Crafted on an anvil of brilliant collaboration in the wild and overlapping histories of the modern world, the marks of Black life are revealed everywhere. This far-seeing work is a beautiful visual object that imagines us beyond the narrow spaces of coloniality. Black Matters intervenes at every turn.”

Canisia Lubrin, author of The Dyzgraphxst and Voodoo Hypothesis

“How fortunate we are to have the record of this collaborative generosity and what a potent and timely conversation to be having. This is the agility of art: extending back into history with the vitality of a future fortified by dignity while remaining firmly rooted in the present. What combusts is inspiration — the sustainability of art in practice and how it makes sense of this time we’ve been brought together in. I’m so grateful for the contribution this book will make, the poignant energy it is composing for the living archive we’re making as we go.”

Sue Goyette, Halifax Poet Laureate and author of Ocean

“If Black lives matter, what sort of matter is Blackness? To address this question, Afua Cooper and Wilfried Raussert bring vision and text together. In this beautifully sculpted book they stretch the skein of Blackness around grief, love, strength, persistence and revelation.”

Robbie Shilliam, author of Decolonizing Politics and The Black Pacific