Unsilencing the Past: Staging Black Atlantic Memory in Canada and Beyond

Simple item page
dc.contributor.advisorFord-Smith, Honor
dc.contributor.authorTurner, Camille Joy
dc.date.accessioned2022-09-14T20:17:07Z
dc.date.available2022-09-14T20:17:07Z
dc.date.copyright2022-02-10
dc.date.issued2022-08-08
dc.date.updated2022-09-14T20:17:07Z
dc.degree.disciplineEnvironmental Studies
dc.degree.levelDoctoral
dc.degree.namePhD - Doctor of Philosophy
dc.description.abstractMy project probes the silences of Newfoundland’s 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.
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10315/39696
dc.languageen
dc.rightsAuthor owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests.
dc.subjectBlack studies
dc.subjectArt education
dc.subjectCanadian studies
dc.subject.keywordsArt
dc.subject.keywordsMedia art
dc.subject.keywordsArts based research
dc.subject.keywordsArts based methodology
dc.subject.keywordsEmbodied methods
dc.subject.keywordsBlack feminism
dc.subject.keywordsHauntology
dc.subject.keywordsNewfoundland
dc.subject.keywordsCanadian studies
dc.subject.keywordsWalking
dc.subject.keywordsTransatlantic slavery
dc.subject.keywordsColonial Canada
dc.subject.keywordsAfrofuturism
dc.subject.keywordsBlack geography
dc.subject.keywordsBlack Atlantic
dc.subject.keywordsBlack Studies
dc.subject.keywordsMiddle Passage Memory
dc.titleUnsilencing the Past: Staging Black Atlantic Memory in Canada and Beyond
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation

Files

Original bundle
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
Thumbnail Image
Name:
Turner_Camille_J_2022_PhD_Supplementary.pdf
Size:
20 KB
Format:
Adobe Portable Document Format
Download
Thumbnail Image
Name:
Turner_Camille_J_2022_PhD.pdf
Size:
3.99 MB
Format:
Adobe Portable Document Format
Description:
Download
License bundle
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
No Thumbnail Available
Name:
license.txt
Size:
1.87 KB
Format:
Plain Text
Description:
Download
No Thumbnail Available
Name:
YorkU_ETDlicense.txt
Size:
3.39 KB
Format:
Plain Text
Description:
Download

Collections

Environmental Studies

All items in the YorkSpace institutional repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved except where explicitly noted.