(Post)colonial worldbuilding, healthcare and diasporic/African repair in and around the door of (no) return

There are maps to the door of no return and there are maps to Connaught Hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone. They are not alike. The former are metaphorical and exist mainly in our Black diasporic imagination. They are maps of Black/African care (Brand, 2001; Sharpe, 2016, 2023). The others are traditional, located in an archive in Sierra Leone. Yet others, are constantly changing, depending on the care needs of the hospital, its staff, and patients. They are maps of (health)care for Black/African people. They show the hospital alongside the ‘door of return’, a memorial to the British trade in enslaved Africans. One is a map of repairing what is lost, the other one a map of the past/future of British colonialism and healthcare, the third a map of the hospital today. These maps and the spaces they denote, coexist and rarely clash.

During this event Dr Hirsch will think through the limits of mapping care for Black/African people across temporalities and methods in one place - Connaught Hospital – with and beyond Dionne Brand’s A map to the door of no return (2001). Connaught Hospital and the site that it occupies exist on multiple levels: as a place of no return, as a place of return and as a contemporary place of healthcare. Her ability to map all three is uneven as is the maps’ ability to grasp Connaught’s multiplicities. She draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Connaught Hospital, archival work in Sierra Leone and Black writing and theory to bring these places and maps into conversation with one another. This reveals the complex and contentious nature of mapping and practicing care in relation to Black/African life as well as the many instances of African/diasporic repair (Scott-Lewis, 2020) in the everyday caring for patients that compliment and exceed it.

- this session is free to attend but booking is required.