Middle Passage: In the Absence of Detail, Presenting and Representing a Historical Void

What might it mean to imagine the Middle Passage? What work does imagining the Middle Passage do? Despite its centrality in invocations of transatlantic slavery, representations of the Middle Passage are few. By representations of the Middle Passage, I mean artistic representations across literature, film, music, and visual art that seek to offer imaginative insights into its horrors. M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 long poem, Zong! not only documents the murder of some 150 Africans aboard the slave ship from which the poem takes its name, it does something more. The poetics of Zong! enacts those that have gone missing, and thus emerges into a void to place into evidence that which we assumed we had lost. The work of imagination in the poem replaces that which we might think had gone missing prior to its poetic representation. Through reworking and reordering the legal decision in the 1783 court case, Gregson v. Gilbert,1 Philip’s poem recounts the story of the slave ship Zong. The poem re-presents the evidence of the mass murder in the voice of those we might otherwise not hear in such legal documents, in this instance that of Setaey Adamu Boateng.Philip shares authorship of Zong! with Setaey Adamu Boateng, who she tells us guided her and aided her in the recovery and creation the story of the Zong. In this case then, Zong! also exceeds the poem as a form and genre, and even as an event in the proper use of that term. To do so, Philip must break language and break with language. The very page, the architecture of each page of the poem spatialises the break with language, and its representation on the page, as one of voids and or missingness, and simultaneously fills those gaps with knowledge, with untold history, with people and lives that would otherwise remain unknown. Philip’s Zong! is a poem that is a sort of return, but a return, too, brings with it the problem of the missing, the problem of the void. It is a poem that requires us to think the Atlantic Ocean differently and anew

Making Mas: TruDynasty Carnival Takes Josephine Baker to the Caribbean Carnival

Jacqueline Taucar, in conversation with Thea and Dario Jackson, investigates the sculptural qualities of the Josephine Baker Mas for the Scotiabank Caribbean Carnival Festival in 2011. This article traces the conception, construction, and complexities of choreography for this carnivalesque reimagining of Baker in Paris of the twenties for a contemporary Canadian ambulant expression. This Queen Mas talks back to the objectification by Parisians and embodying Queen Mas as an instance of female empowerment

"The Book of Negroes’ illustrated edition: circulating African-Canadian history through the Middlebrow"

This article examines the 2009 deluxe illustrated edition of Lawrence Hill’s Commonwealth Writers’ Prize– and Canada Reads–winning novel The Book of Negroes, originally published in 2007. It relates the story of Aminata, a West African girl kidnapped and sold into slavery, and her experiences on an indigo plantation in the American south, followed by further displacements to Charleston, Nova Scotia, Sierra Leone, and London. In New York, as the Revolutionary War comes to a close, Aminata becomes the scribe for the Book of Negroes, documenting the Black Loyalists, as well as the slaves and indentured servants of white Loyalists, granted passage by the British to Canada. Hill has commented that the Book of Negroes is an important document about which Canadians are largely ignorant. This desire to circulate knowledge about African-Canadian history through the novel is particularly manifest in the illustrated edition of 2009, where a photograph of the Book of Negroes features prominently, along with countless other images and captions which supplement and interrupt Hill’s narrative. This article considers the significance and implications of this “keepsake” or “souvenir” edition, particularly its circulation of knowledge about African-Canadian history through visual pleasure

Desire Lines : Access to Print

"This network shows us how the absences, or received lack, in one publishing project generates desire for new ones. These panelists will share their personal memories of scenes and magazines as sites of discursive community, reflecting on how one magazine can emerge as a response to another. For instance, the poststructuralism and cultural theory of Border/Lines can be read as a response to the materialist politics of FUSE. Despite these formal differences, Border/Lines and Fuse emerge as two parallel discursive spaces where the language and practice of queer identity and cultural race politics were developed in the 1980s and 1990s. Further, the absence of a certain form of content creates desire for new forms that can hold new content, as these two magazines acted as points of consolidation for discourses that resonated into other socio-cultural contexts and prompted the creation of even more publishing spaces, such as Topia." -- Publisher's website

Contribution

Rinaldo Walcott, Contribution to the panel ‘On Arrangement’, part of the symposium The Ontology of the Couple, ICI Berlin, 9–10 June 2016, video recording, mp4, 28:46 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e160609_18

In Relation: Indigenous and Black Excursions on Our Now

The relation of Idle No More to Black Lives Matter as movements and organiza¬tions is undeniable. In each case women are credited with starting the organizations and significantly impacting the larger social movements of which the organizations are a major element and powerful driving force. Jessica Gordon, Sheelah McLean, Sylvia McAdam and Nina Wilson, the founders of Idle No More, and Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi and Patrisse Cullors of Black Lives Matter represent a new moment in social movement organizing in which people identifying as women, queer and trans have taken the public leadership roles in direct action and grass roots organizing in a fashion not so clearly witnessed before. Their collective actions have brought significant attention to Indigenous and Black lives in North America in a dramatic political fashion that has reshaped our present political context. In this issue of TOPIA Indigenous lives and Black Lives live close up to each other on our pages. </jats:p