On the Poetics of Migration, Black Geographies, and Nervous Conditions

This conversation began in Winter 2023, at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. At the time we were collectively studying Black geographies. As faculty and students who are part of the Black diaspora yet have very different experiences of displacement, our discussions revolved around the uneasy connections between education, university life, migration, and Blackness. Inspired by the writings of Simone Browne, on January 25, 2024, the Revolutionary Demand for Happiness working group organized a conversation that revolved around the poetic possibilities of migration, mobility, immobility, borders, and boundaries. Paul Akpomuje and Aaliyah Strachan organized the event, and it was moderated by Katherine McKittrick. Akpomuje, a Nigerian poet and doctoral student in the Queen’s University Faculty of Education, read a set of his poems that discussed themes such as surveillance, visas, travel, and home. The poems were paired with community stories about displacement and belonging; we made connections between over-policing, governmentality and government papers, racial capitalism, family and kinship ties, and the difficult and onerous work of traveling as members of the Black diaspora. We also homed in on understanding the racialized underpinnings of the “international student” category at Queen’s University—a figure that is monetarily required-desired, yet is also rendered institutionally unrooted and out of place.