Unsilencing the Past: Staging Black Atlantic Memory in Canada and Beyond
My project probes the silences of Newfoundlands colonial past by making connections between faraway lands on the other side of the Atlantic that seem, on the surface, to have nothing to do with this geography, but are, in fact, socially, economically, and geologically entangled. It traverses the lan...
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ftyorkuniv:oai:yorkspace.library.yorku.ca:10315/39585 2023-05-15T17:21:35+02:00 Unsilencing the Past: Staging Black Atlantic Memory in Canada and Beyond Camille Joy Turner Honor Ford-Smith 2022-08-08T15:45:46Z application/pdf http://hdl.handle.net/10315/39585 en eng http://hdl.handle.net/10315/39585 Author owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests. art media art arts based research arts based methodology embodied methods black feminism hauntology Newfoundland Canadian studies walking transatlantic slavery colonial canada afrofuturism black geography Black Atlantic Black Studies Middle Passage Memory Electronic Thesis or Dissertation 2022 ftyorkuniv 2022-08-22T13:09:07Z My project probes the silences of Newfoundlands colonial past by making connections between faraway lands on the other side of the Atlantic that seem, on the surface, to have nothing to do with this geography, but are, in fact, socially, economically, and geologically entangled. It traverses the landscape and the seascape of the island, linking it to Europe and Africa and back again. It makes this journey by land and ship in search of what lies beneath what can be seen, in search of the deeper geologies of this eastern tip of Canada. I use a research-creation approach to critically investigate this silence a silence that shrouds a ghostly past that is still present. I draw on the idea of hauntology, which Avery Gordon (2008) theorizes as a social force manifested in unsettled feelings that occur in response to loss and violence that are systematically denied but are still present, and which Viviane Saleh Hanna (2015) explains as colonial delusions that underpin modernity. Guided by my feeling of being haunted, I lift the shroud that envelops this history. In so doing, I unmap Newfoundland, revealing its connections to the Atlantic trade in humans and defamiliarizing what appears to be an innocent landscape that has not been tampered with. The results of this unmapping are expressed by the interdisciplinary artworks Afronautic Research Lab: Newfoundland (2019), Nave (2021), and Sarah (2021), which accompany this written record of the dissertation. The written portion of this project also retraces and records the steps of my own artistic process and the journeys I have made by walking on land, travelling across the ocean in the hold of a ship through the archival records, and mapping the process of my work, the facts I encountered, and the affects these produced in my own body and which guided the choices I made about how to represent or perform them. I explore all these as they appear and evolve throughout this research-creation process. Thesis Newfoundland York University, Toronto: YorkSpace Avery ENVELOPE(-65.433,-65.433,-66.883,-66.883) Canada Faraway ENVELOPE(-28.763,-28.763,-79.200,-79.200) |
institution |
Open Polar |
collection |
York University, Toronto: YorkSpace |
op_collection_id |
ftyorkuniv |
language |
English |
topic |
art media art arts based research arts based methodology embodied methods black feminism hauntology Newfoundland Canadian studies walking transatlantic slavery colonial canada afrofuturism black geography Black Atlantic Black Studies Middle Passage Memory |
spellingShingle |
art media art arts based research arts based methodology embodied methods black feminism hauntology Newfoundland Canadian studies walking transatlantic slavery colonial canada afrofuturism black geography Black Atlantic Black Studies Middle Passage Memory Camille Joy Turner Unsilencing the Past: Staging Black Atlantic Memory in Canada and Beyond |
topic_facet |
art media art arts based research arts based methodology embodied methods black feminism hauntology Newfoundland Canadian studies walking transatlantic slavery colonial canada afrofuturism black geography Black Atlantic Black Studies Middle Passage Memory |
description |
My project probes the silences of Newfoundlands colonial past by making connections between faraway lands on the other side of the Atlantic that seem, on the surface, to have nothing to do with this geography, but are, in fact, socially, economically, and geologically entangled. It traverses the landscape and the seascape of the island, linking it to Europe and Africa and back again. It makes this journey by land and ship in search of what lies beneath what can be seen, in search of the deeper geologies of this eastern tip of Canada. I use a research-creation approach to critically investigate this silence a silence that shrouds a ghostly past that is still present. I draw on the idea of hauntology, which Avery Gordon (2008) theorizes as a social force manifested in unsettled feelings that occur in response to loss and violence that are systematically denied but are still present, and which Viviane Saleh Hanna (2015) explains as colonial delusions that underpin modernity. Guided by my feeling of being haunted, I lift the shroud that envelops this history. In so doing, I unmap Newfoundland, revealing its connections to the Atlantic trade in humans and defamiliarizing what appears to be an innocent landscape that has not been tampered with. The results of this unmapping are expressed by the interdisciplinary artworks Afronautic Research Lab: Newfoundland (2019), Nave (2021), and Sarah (2021), which accompany this written record of the dissertation. The written portion of this project also retraces and records the steps of my own artistic process and the journeys I have made by walking on land, travelling across the ocean in the hold of a ship through the archival records, and mapping the process of my work, the facts I encountered, and the affects these produced in my own body and which guided the choices I made about how to represent or perform them. I explore all these as they appear and evolve throughout this research-creation process. |
author2 |
Honor Ford-Smith |
format |
Thesis |
author |
Camille Joy Turner |
author_facet |
Camille Joy Turner |
author_sort |
Camille Joy Turner |
title |
Unsilencing the Past: Staging Black Atlantic Memory in Canada and Beyond |
title_short |
Unsilencing the Past: Staging Black Atlantic Memory in Canada and Beyond |
title_full |
Unsilencing the Past: Staging Black Atlantic Memory in Canada and Beyond |
title_fullStr |
Unsilencing the Past: Staging Black Atlantic Memory in Canada and Beyond |
title_full_unstemmed |
Unsilencing the Past: Staging Black Atlantic Memory in Canada and Beyond |
title_sort |
unsilencing the past: staging black atlantic memory in canada and beyond |
publishDate |
2022 |
url |
http://hdl.handle.net/10315/39585 |
long_lat |
ENVELOPE(-65.433,-65.433,-66.883,-66.883) ENVELOPE(-28.763,-28.763,-79.200,-79.200) |
geographic |
Avery Canada Faraway |
geographic_facet |
Avery Canada Faraway |
genre |
Newfoundland |
genre_facet |
Newfoundland |
op_relation |
http://hdl.handle.net/10315/39585 |
op_rights |
Author owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests. |
_version_ |
1766106575602188288 |