In Canada, as in other countries, there are hegemonic ideologies that erase from its national imaginary the experiences of peoples that have both suffered the consequences of discriminating policies and also contributed to its history in significant ways without acknowledgement. Building up from this notion of symbolic violence, my paper will examine how contemporary artwork by Black artists challenges entrenched ideas of Canadas colonial past imagined as a utopia. I will analyze specific examples that attempt to question and reshape mainstream utopic conceptions present in Canadian cultural memory.Some contemporary writers and visual artists make alterations on texts and images that represent white and non-white peoples within the context of a predominant Eurocentric legacy. These alterations have the potential to make (imaginary) amendments to the ways in which societies, geographies and histories have traditionally been expressed through nationalistic lenses, an expression that is usually coded within the utopic/dystopic polarity. A dialogue is created through this intersection of anxieties, and this conversation creates original visual and poetic spaces that faithfully render present-day racial dynamics and radically counteract a naturalized definition of history as a straight line of progress. I will look at how feelings of oppression and desires of liberation of Black peoples are embodied in several art installations and poems that affirm agency by transforming stereotyped bodies, books, photographs, colors, textures, or sounds, and, by extension, museums and touristic sights. I will especially focus on some visual artists that contributed to the exhibition HERE WE ARE HERE: Black Canadian Contemporary Art (2018) and on poets such as Afua Cooper and M. NourbeSe Philip. The iconic significations that utopia and dystopia lend to the decolonizing processes explored in these works enable insights into a received imagery of freedom, exoticism, and dreams, and also one of exploitation, isolation and imposed silences
