Message from Exile: Why I, a Black Studies Professor, Fled the United States
This talk explores what led me to leave a secure academic position, what it reveals about the shrinking space for dissent, and how we might relocate and preserve critical thought beyond the reach of institutional compromise and state-sponsored erasure. It draws from my forthcoming book, The End of Supplication (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), a history of Black insurgency, and from my recent essay in Al Jazeera, “Universities v Protest: A Letter from a Lesser Alumnus”, about the student protests at Columbia University.
Saturday, June 7 2025
7 pm - 9 pm
Cloverdale Community Hall (9411 97 Ave NW, Edmonton, AB T6C 4N4)
Yannick Giovanni Marshall is a faculty member at California Institute of Arts, USA. An academic and scholar of African Studies, Africana Studies, and Black Studies, he holds an MA in African American Studies and a PhD in Africana Studies from Columbia University, USA. Marshall has published two collections of poetry, regularly contributes editorials and articles to Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, and Black Perspectives, and has given numerous interviews on race, power, and policing. His writing can be found at yannickgiovannimarshall.net.
Program Outline: Message from Exile (From Yannick Giovanni Marshall)
This talk reflects on the conditions that led me to leave a secure academic post in Los Angeles and cross the border to Canada — not to take another position, but in political protest. While teaching Contemporary Black Thought at CalArts, I witnessed firsthand the escalating repression of critical scholarship and dissenting voices in the United States — particularly in Black Studies, anticolonial theory, and challenges to dominant narratives around race, policing, and power.
Drawing from my forthcoming book, The End of Supplication (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), the talk explores how radical traditions have been systematically redirected into liberal performance, institutional containment, and
forms of moral deference. It asks what becomes of oppositional thought when critique itself becomes suspect—and how we might still protect clarity, resistance, and intellectual life beyond institutional control.
Though rooted in the U.S., the talk also addresses the broader patterns of authoritarian creep in liberal democracies, including Canada, and considers what it takes to safeguard civil liberties, historical memory, the gains of past struggles for justice, and the capacity to sustain dissent under deteriorating conditions..
Themes include:
• The repression of Black Studies and oppositional speech
• The beginning: the misrepresentation of radical traditions into liberal performance
• Flight and survivor’s guilt: The border as a site of both refuge and complicity
• How to sustain thought, community, and solidarity when institutions collapse
Optional: New Hush Harbor: Companion Workshop
Named in reference to the clandestine spaces where enslaved Black people gathered to speak, remember, and resist — this workshop does not replicate the hush harbors of the past, which were necessarily closed, concealed, and held in protection. Instead, it is offered as a gesture toward their spirit: a space for thinking fugitively, tracing strategies of dissent under authoritarianism, and exploring what it means to practice freedom beyond institutional Permission.
Participants will engage questions of intellectual marronage, political flight, the Black Radical Tradition, and the limits of public discourse in so-called liberal democracies. It is a participatory session for students, educators, and organizers thinking together about how oppositional thinkers can preserve clarity, build political community, and defend public memory under conditions of Repression.
Drawing from marronage, self-organized education, and cross-community struggle, the workshop imagines collectively how to notice authoritarian creep in putatively liberal democracies — and how to respond early, rather than retreat into hope or silence.
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Format & Availability:
• Talk: 45 minutes + Q&A
• Workshop: 60–75 minutes (optional)
• Available: Summer and Fall 2025
• Format: Virtual or in-person (depending on location and support)
• Audience: Public, students, educators, community organizers, those interested
in freedom of speech and anti-colonial histories of resistance
• Language: English