Wayde Compton

Primary tabs View(active tab) Track Submitted by University of A... on Fri, 02/23/2024 - 09:39 During Black History Month 2024, University of Alberta Press is publishing Canadian writer and poet Wayde Compton’s lecture, Toward an Anti-Racist Poetics , based on the 17th annual Kreisel Lecture at the U of A in March 2023. Breaking beyond the Western lens and into cultural recovery with Wayde Compton.

When I first began to think of myself as a writer, in my teenage years, I did what many artists of colour have done: I mimicked the dominant forms I encoun­tered in school. This is hardly surprising. But just as W.E.B. Du Bois describes in The Souls of Black Folk, I had an early sense of what he calls “double conscious­ness”—the sense of seeing oneself from two points of view, one from that of the dominant society and one from that of your own position.