Cross Campus Conversations: Racism in Medicine and Humanities Workshop African Aesthetics and Body Poetics: Written and Visual Engagement of Feeling Good

This session, open to all students at any level of study, will be led by Dr Chisomo Kalinga (University of Edinburgh) and is funded by the St Andrews EDI project. The aim of the workshop series is to provide a space for Humanities, STEM and Medical students to come together to think about questions regarding race from different disciplinary perspectives.

This discussion will serve as a starting point for unpacking questions and ideas surrounding the representation of the racialised body and beauty through poetry, the short story, and a 6-minute documentary. It combines the analysis of Black African storytelling aesthetics with wider aspects of representation of race and belonging through various artistic mediums. I will look at how African artists navigate beauty as part of the process of sharing the story of what it means to be Black and African. By facilitating conversation about the various entanglements between storytelling, art and identity, the discussion welcomes to approach the various methods used by African storytellers to represent the body but to engage in the larger objective of conducting ‘memory work' in the telling African story of the body.