The Blackhurst Project: Inhabitants of the Deep

The Blackhurst Project, a new monthly literary series from Blackhurst Cultural Centre, launches with Jonathan Howard in conversation with I. Augustus Durham.

Jonathan Howard, Assistant Professor of English and Black Studies at Yale University and author of Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness, joins I. Augustus Durham, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto and author of Stay Black and Die: On Melancholy and Genius, for an evening of Black literature, scholarship and conversation.

In Inhabitants of the Deep, Howard undertakes a Black ecocritical study of the “deep”, encompassing oceans, rivers, lakes and the notion of depth itself, and its place within African American literature and expressive culture. Drawing on figures ranging from Olaudah Equiano and Herman Melville to Otis Redding and August Wilson, Howard traces Black relationships to water, ecology and the histories of the Middle Passage, ultimately considering the deep as a site not only of displacement and exclusion, but of Black ecological life.

Join Howard and Durham for a thought-provoking conversation exploring Black literature, history, culture and intellectual life.

Thursday, October 8, 2026 | 6:00–8:00 p.m. Blackhurst Cultural Centre | 777–779 Bathurst Street, Toronto

Admission is free. Registration is required.