Abstract: After the fall of the Berlin wall and the reunification of Germany, the former UFA film studios in Potsdam-Babelsberg were sold by the government to a French conglomerate, and a number of its oldest studios were either demolished or repurposed. In 1994, Canadian artist Stan Douglas produced the two-channel black and white film installation Der Sandmann in one of these old studios. Douglas’s film utilizes an early cinematic special-effect called the “doppelgänger trick”: a simple double-exposure which allows one actor to play opposite himself or herself on the film screen. This technique was first used in the German Expressionist silent film The Student of Prague (1913), and again in the second film version (1926), which was, not coincidentally, shot on the same UFA film lot as Der Sandmann. By imitating not only the aesthetic, but some of the technical limitations of The Student of Prague, Douglas engages in what film critic Marc Le Sueur might have recognized as “deliberate archaism”: a specific way of making nostalgia films that productively exploits both formal and technical features of films from the past. At the same time, Der Sandmann resists what Marxist cultural theorist Fredric Jameson reproaches as the ahistorical aesthetic of “pastness” that is produced and perpetuated by the nostalgia film. While Douglas directs us to the past, he does so for contemporary ends; he recodes the history of Expressionist cinema in order to explore the aftereffects of reunification on the former East Germany.

Abstract: Towards a Poetics of Bafflement asserts that blackness baffles—confuses and frustrates—the order of knowledge that deems black subjectivities as pathological. This dissertation argues for the importance of the psychic and affective spaces that emerge in the work of contemporary black women and queer artists. A poetics of bafflement is foregrounded by racial slavery and diaspora formations that inform contemporary racial antagonisms. The visual work of Deana Lawson, Zanele Muholi, and Mickalene Thomas, if read through a poetics of bafflement, engages blackness differently and conceptualizes new possibilities for world making. Black artists have long since occupied spaces of creative and critical thinking about aesthetics, race, and the politics of vision, which inform contemporary social, historical, and cultural climates. Multiculturalism and subsequent post-race concepts are inadequate in thinking about alternative possibilities of world making as they suggest racism and anti-black sentiment are somehow no longer prevalent. Multiculturalism’s claim of diversity negates the continued logics of anti-black sentiment, whereas post-racial suggests a time and place in history where race no longer informs political, economic, and socio-cultural experiences. Black cultural production continues to be at the crossroads of these debates. The complex interplay between race anxieties and the politics of contemporary visual culture remains opaque, even as it proliferates. Deana Lawson, Zanele Muholi, and Mickalene Thomas are among a generation of artists who have gained a certain level of North American and European recognition. Common to many of these artists is a concern with the limits of form and genre, particularly in relation to the photographic image, the queer body and the undoing of gender, and ruminations on desire and the erotic. Towards a Poetics of Bafflement responds to the absence of affect studies in addressing racial slavery—and, specifically, bafflement’s imprint on the present.

Abstract: Over the years I have learned that occupying a female black body in contemporary Canada produces a relationship of suspicion with the world, one that constantly queries the premise of each interaction in an attempt to parse apart the extent to which sex and/or race have defined its parameters and outcomes. The particularities of Canada's politics of sex and race are generally referred to as exemplary by disseminators of dominant discourse, and divisive by those without access to dominant epistemological modes. The central objective of this dissertation, (Re)Positioning Myself: Female and Black in Canada, is to pursue the following under-examined line of inquiry: What do substantive contemplations of public and private performances of female blackness in Canada reveal about sex, race and nation? This dissertation asserts that those of us who inhabit bodies viewed by dominant culture as female and black constantly perform someone else's fantasies and/or our own in the public and private spaces that constitute our everyday lives. The conditions that necessitate this way of being are what I theorize in my dissertation as perpetual performance. I map this interplay of query, assertion and theory through my body and my experiences of female blackness, which makes me not only the writer of this dissertation, but also its primary subject. This dissertation draws from performance, feminist and critical race studies, political science, literary criticism, as well as my creative writing, personal experience and lived experience. In particular it considers the artistic and intellectual insights of: Antony Anghie, Gloria Anzaldua, Gerald Belvett, Mae Belvett, Dionne Brand, Patricia Hill Collins, Andrea Davis, Harry J. Elam Jr., Frantz Fanon, Donna P. Hope, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, D. Soyini Madison, Anne McClintock, Jose Esteban Munoz, Samuel West, Patricia J. Williams and Sylvia Wynter. My central contention is that a deeply imaginative space is revealed when those of us read as female and black in Canada (re)position our relationship with our bodies to this is who I perform from this is who I am.

Abstract: Using visual and performance art, music and photography, Art Routes: Locating Second-Generation Black Caribbean Canadian Women’s Perspectives centers a specifically second-generation discourse using the artwork and lived experiences of second-generation Black women artists—Kamilah Apong, Sandra Brewster, Shaunasea Brown, Anique Jordan, Brianna Roye, Camille Turner and Shi Wisdom. By attending to the contours of Black life in the complex geographies of Toronto and beyond, Art Routes acknowledges and articulates how Black women artists provide blueprints for how Black people can create their own kinds of freedom. Through the nuanced position of second-generation be(long)ing, Art Routes captures the struggle of second-generation Black women artists to engage in new forms of world-making that reevaluate ideas about gender, sexuality, and citizenship, posit new radical strategies of care, and re/define how Black people live within and despite contexts of death and dying. With the understanding that the ability to create is a matter of life and death for Black people, Art Routes offers creative ways to think about Black being in Canada while identifying how Black Canadian women artists imagine and construct more inhabitable environments for themselves and their communities.

Abstract: Despite centuries of black settlement and cultural production in Canada's Atlantic provinces, only one black Nova Scotian folk artist, Harold Cromwell, is represented in the collection of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. In spite of this institutional recognition, however, no scholarly inquiry into Cromwell's practice has yet been published and no exhibition dedicated exclusively to his work has been mounted to date. Working within a cultural studies framework this thesis presents the first sustained scholarly examination of Harold Cromwell's distinctive drawing practice, or what I have termed his 'nervous line.' This project details his personal history, the emergence of his unique aesthetic, his position within Nova Scotian folk art and the political implications of his practice, in order to introduce Cromwell as an important and prolific folk artist within Canadian art scholarship, and thus recuperate Africadian artistic production within Nova Scotia's folk art tradition.

Abstract: This thesis interprets the work of five contemporary artists who combine technologically reproduced sound with visual elements in their production. Installations by Joseph Beuys, Stan Douglas, Joey Morgan, Bill Viola and Michèle Waquant are analyzed. The relationship between art and technology is discussed in the context of the historical avant-garde's attempts to popularize art through technology in the beginning of the twentieth century. Arguments are made to suggest that the multi-media nature of technological art allows its viewers to experience it sensorially. A hypothesis is made stating that this experience is similar to the pre-technological experience of art posited by Walter Benjamin.

Abstract: This thesis examines contemporary public discourse concerning issues related to the politics of representation, cultural appropriation (the depiction of the members of one socially defined group by the members of another), interpretation and authenticity with a focus upon the example provided by the public controversy that surrounded Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum exhibition Into the Heart of Africa in 1989. This exhibition displayed artifacts from African cultures collected by Victorian Canadian missionaries and soldiers along with the collectors artifacts, photographs and commentaries. The exhibit appeared critical of colonialism and racism, yet protestors claimed that it was racist and presented a misrepresentative image of Africans and African history. In order to solve what was regarded as a problem of racism and inauthenticity in the exhibition, it was argued that the exhibit, (which was curated by a white anthropologist), ought to have been produced by a member of the black community. Similar arguments suggesting that members of distinct cultural groups ought to control the authenticity of images of their cultures, histories and identities through self-representation have emerged in relation to representation in a number of other disciplines including visual art and literature. The perceived need for "control" over the authenticity of cultural images through self-representation as a "solution" to the problem of misrepresentation and racism is treated as the central problematic to be explored. Drawing primarily upon the works of H.G. Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Alisdair Maclntyre, Charles Taylor and Friedrich Nietzsche, this thesis examines the implications of the argument against cultural appropriation and the call for authenticity for a) the grounds for cultural understanding and reading, b) the relationship of individuals and groups to historical and cultural representation, and c) the achievement of cultural identity, knowledge and membership. Chapter One provides an outline of the general issues arising out of the public debate concerning representation and appropriation, and addresses the role of the theorist. The approach taken toward the discourse is what may be called a "social hermeneutics", serving as a basis for both methodology and argument. In Chapter Two, a discussion of Arendt's notions of the public sphere, human action and plurality, and Maclntyre's view of a narrative self-hood provides a theoretical framework through which to address the cultural usage concerning appropriation and to reformulate the concept of authenticity. In relation to this theoretical background, Chapter Three examines the understandings of identity, membership, voice, interpretation and cultural knowledge that are implied by the grounds for the argument against appropriation. Chapter Four reframes the concept of appropriation through Gadamer's hermeneutics and Nietzsche's criticism of historicism in order to suggest an alternative view of cultural and historical understanding. As a point of departure for possible further reflection upon cultural appropriation and the politics of representation, the conclusion provides a brief consideration of the moral- practical or political implications of tact, friendship and civility.

Abstract: My 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.

Abstract: My study of radical practices in sixties conceptual art and civil rights movements documents changes in the relationship of art to racial politics over five years from 1965 to 1970 through a single case study. The case at the centre of this thesis is Halifax, Nova Scotia, where the civil rights movement, through the Nova Scotia Project (NSP) was closely aligned with the radical southern United States organization the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). At the same time the conceptual art experiments at the Nova Scotia College of Art (NSCAD) gained international recognition. I argue that in the early sixties the relationship between the avant-garde, including conceptual art, and civil rights movements was characterized by mutually reflected absences. The overdetermination of race and the absence of art in one movement’s history are matched only by the overdetermination of art and the absence of race in the other. However, over the five years covered by this study, the nature of that pattern of familiar visibilities and absences changed. By the beginning of the seventies there was strong evidence of convergence. Given this change, the question driving my enquiry is: What was going on in those preceding five years? Rather than accept that these two movements had nothing to do with one another, my intention in this dissertation is to make the substance of the spaces between them representable. I will argue that the vocabularies available of the disciplines best equipped to speak for art and civil rights, the disciplines of Art History and Sociology, and the multidisciplinary field of Black Studies, are inadequate. It is this inadequacy that this dissertation seeks to expose and redress. One of my contributions is to develop conceptual and methodological tools for thinking differently about representability. Artifacts from each of the movements comprise an archive made up of documentary, ethnographic, popular, and fine art texts. Concept metaphors, such as visibility and representability, and the historical avant-garde’s practice of bricolage allow me to read the histories of sixties race-based activism and conceptual art productively together.

Abstract: The work of Canadian contemporary photographer Michael Chambers is used in this study as a lens through which the experiences and views of a black, male art producer can be examined in the construction of the black male body in art. The text draws on the primary source of Chambers' black and white photographs, and the imagery constructed around black males from Europe and North America, which isolates the black body within particular stereotypes. A theory concerning the repetition of the "documentary body" is developed throughout the thesis whereby the black body continually functions as a symbol of violence, sexuality and strength in the visual and media arts. This thesis will examine Chambers’ efforts to undermine the current cultural dialogue within Western culture that maintains the documentary body by using the very tools and imagery employed to create and sustain that body. Three aspects of the documentary body—savagery, restraint, and violence—within the artist’s work are argued as intrinsic to the struggle to reassess and reconstruct the black documentary body within western visual culture.

Abstract: This paper offers a discussion of the Justin and Elisabeth Lang Collection of African Art in Kingston, Ontario, in terms of the complex history of individuals and events that influenced its formation and its position within broader themes of African art collecting in the West. Its donation to the Agnes Etherington Art Centre and the implications and challenges of the gift for this particular museum are also explored. I argue that the Lang Collection of African Art is a product of the Modernist Primitive ‘taste culture’ that formed during the mid-twentieth century in Canada; its specific character can be linked to the social and familial education of the Langs and fits within broader trends of African art collecting in the West. The collection’s presence at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre is attributable to the aesthetic preferences members of the Art Centre staff shared with Justin and Elisabeth Lang.

Abstract: This thesis explores the paradox of what it means to live Blackness within a world founded upon its destruction through a critical art historical analysis of Jamaican-Canadian artist Tau Lewis’ exhibition Triumphant Alliance of the Ubiquitous Blossoms of Incarnate Souls (T.A.U.B.I.S.) (2020). Adopting a Black feminist framework rooted in methods of opacity, I interrogate the racist visual, cultural, and social economies that have continuously objectified and dehumanized Black people since the transatlantic slave trade. In doing so, I illuminate how Lewis’ work navigates structures of anti-Black violence and reimagines Black diasporic life beyond white supremacist capitalist patriarchal impositions of negation. Drawing from Black studies scholar Saidiya Hartman’s notion of the afterlife of slavery, I establish Lewis’ work within a larger legacy of Black diasporic practices of Black refusal, care, relation, and radical imagination that grapples towards liberatory ends. At the same time, I consider how T.A.U.B.I.S.’ interdisciplinary nature—which includes poetry, speculative fiction, and hand-sewn textile sculptures which represent imagined Black motherly ancestors—emerges as an expansive site of Black diasporic possibility that transcends reductivist constructs of biological determinism. Ultimately, this thesis argues that with T.A.U.B.I.S., Lewis not only tends to present-day Black diasporic subjectivities, but further prompts vital strategies for knowing and living Blackness otherwise in the still unfolding aftermaths of slavery.

Abstract: This project looks at what centering intimacy in learning can bring to racial justice and decolonial practices. The site of study is the shared colonial histories and knowledges between the Caribbean and Canada. It asks: can an intimate pedagogy help us transgress divisionary boundaries to produce transformative outcomes of accountability to ourselves, each other, and the planet? To explore this question, I draw on Caribbean and Black feminisms, with elements of queer theory beginning with the work of Ian Barnard (2004) and Sharon Patricia Holland (2012), and decolonial feminist scholarship, including Indigenous feminism and ecofeminist critique. Audre Lorde’s (1984) theory of the erotic is a foundational pillar in defining what intimacy can do inside a pedagogical practice. Using visual methods, I look at the work of visual artists to study the intangible matters of intimacy that escape language in how we understand learning and knowledge. Through three case studies, that include interviews with three artists―Michèle Pearson Clarke (Toronto), Annalee Davis (Barbados), and Nadia Huggins (St. Vincent)―and autoethnographic narratives and photographs, I consider how theory, the visual and sensorial, and embodiments of knowledge impact how we learn together and create change. Through the work of Davis I explore how ghostly colonial matters held in the land can teach us about reparative learning in post/decolonial life. I then offer a queer Caribbean reading of the sea as a space of instability through the work of Huggins to find examples of transformative healing and learning. Finally, questioning my own body as a white researcher, I look at the potential learning offered through resistance and refusals of intimacy through the work of Clarke. I conclude with a summary of the forms of intimate learning that emerged through the research and an interrogation of the human/non-human divide to argue for a relational framing to social justice and race work. The principal contribution of this research is the introduction of the concept of intimate pedagogy. I define intimate pedagogy as the learning that happens with others in intimate moments, but also the learning that comes from the relationship we have with ourselves and the intimacy we create with knowledge. Intimate pedagogy prioritizes the understanding of relational life and opens sites for different transformative possibilities with others. It offers a tool to transcend hard disciplinary and interpersonal boundaries in studies of race and decoloniality. Keywords: intimate, pedagogy, erotic, race, decolonial, feminism

Abstract: The mid-to-late-2010s involved radical responses to gentrification, surveillance and police violence toward Black diasporic communities in Toronto. My thesis research examines these realities and conditions of Black life in the city, engaging with the following areas of inquiry: The geographies in which Black community organizing and Black art practice take place in Toronto; How Black community organizers, artists and cultural workers relate to and support one another’s work, and how their work responds to historically and contemporarily absented issues concerning Black people in Toronto. Contextualized through theoretic engagement with Black geographies, Black Canadian studies and Black radical thought, this project offers critical insight through a focus group of local Black artists, organizers and community members in Toronto who refuse notions of belonging within a state founded on Black enslavement and Indigenous dispossession. Instead, they theorize tensions and possibilities for Black radical creative practice to generate livable geographies rooted in care. Keywords: Black geography, activism, Black radical traditions, creative practice, Toronto

Abstract: Where Outreach Meets Outrage: Racial Equity at the Canada Council for the Arts (1989 -1999), examines the early formation of racial equity policies at The Canada Council for the Arts. In this research project, I am primarily interested in understanding the ways in which 'culture' is employed by the state, the Canada Council for the Arts and by black artists to articulate and communicate complex issues that pertain to notions of art, citizenship, solidarity, justice, multiculturalism, belonging and nationhood. The research places culture and cultural production centrally within claims and calls by racialized artists for the ethical redistribution of societal resources and participation in societal structures. I look at questions of how community is produced and struggled over in relation to claims for cultural resources. This thesis employs an interdisciplinary approach drawn from the disciplines of sociology, anthropology and critical cultural studies to allow the complex relationships between activities of the Canadian state, racial equity policy making at the Canada Council, and grass roots social activism to emerge. I argue that state practices of management are elastic and that racial equity policies at the Canada Council emerged out of a confluence of transformational activities simultaneously taking place at the state/institutional and grassroots levels. The significance of this research project is that it fuses contemporary cultural production and art within contemporary social justice paradigms that seek to understand the processes and practices within liberalism that produce oppressions and resistance through an exclusionary politics of representation. This dissertation study will have both applied and theoretical implications in the Canadian context both within and outside of the academy in the fields of the arts, cultural policy and education.

Abstract: This thesis focuses on landscape as artistic genre and site in relation to African Canadian cultural belonging and agency as fine artists and Canadian citizens at the turn of the twentieth century. Attending to aspects of racialization in Canadian art in which landscape is considered both as geopolitical territory and as the hallmark subject matter, it specifically examines how African Canadian artists navigated racialized spaces – landscapes of psychic and lived Black violence – when African Canadians were systematically positioned outside the imagined and physical constructs of the nation. The period covered is from 1760 until 1910 when a shift occurred artistically and ideologically in Black culture, underscored by a desire for African Unity and greater access and participation in North American economic, cultural, and political society. Historical records have long relegated African Canadians to an underclass, representing them as non-actors or non-participants in Canadian art history. This thesis compares and contrasts the lives and work of two African Canadian landscape artists, George Henry McCarthy (1860-1906; Shelburne, NS) and Edith Hester McDonald-Brown (ca.1880-1954; Africville, Halifax, NS) to examine and document their artistic contributions to early Canadian art history. Section One provides a historiography of Canadian landscape as art and territory between 1760 and 1900, focusing on its psychic and physical aspects. It situates the lived experiences of African Canadians within the geographical territory known as Canada, exploring how land (and freedom) was wielded as a weapon of disenfranchisement against African Canadians. Section Two presents the first of the two case studies: the life and work of George Henry McCarthy. This section examines how, if at all, McCarthy’s African and White mixed race heritage influenced his art making and lived experience in Canada. Section Three presents the second case study on the life and work of Edith Hester McDonald (later Brown) to provide a historical point-of-departure to examine Black women’s access to professionalization in the visual arts in early Canada. I propose McCarthy as the earliest known African Canadian male artist, and McDonald as the first known African Canadian woman artist in art history. The thesis concludes by summarizing the correlation between place, belonging and the representation of African Canadian as artists, in the teaching and display of Canadian art.

Abstract: This dissertation examines urban walking in Canada as it deviates from a largely male peripatetic tradition associated with the flâneur. This new incarnation of the walker — differentiated by gender, race, class, and/or sexual orientation — reshapes the urban imaginary and shifts the act of walking from what is generally theorized as an individualistic or simply transgressive act to a relational and transformative practice. While the walkers in this study are diverse, the majority of them are women: writers Dionne Brand, Daphne Marlatt, Régine Robin, Gail Scott, and Lisa Robertson and performance artists Kinga Araya, Stephanie Marshall, and Camille Turner all challenge the dualism inscribed by the dominant (masculine) gaze under the project of modernity that abstracts and objectifies the other. Yet, although sexual difference is often the first step toward rethinking identities and relationships to others and the city, it is not the last. I argue that poet Bud Osborn, the play The Postman, the projects Ogimaa Mikana, [murmur] and Walking With Our Sisters, and community initiatives such as Jane’s Walk, also invite all readers and pedestrians to question the equality, official history and inhabitability of Canadian cities. As these peripatetic works emphasize, how, where and why we choose to walk is a significant commentary on the nature of public space and democracy in contemporary urban Canada. This interdisciplinary study focuses on Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, cities where there has been not only some of the greatest social and economic change in Canada under neoliberalism but also the greatest concentration of affective, peripatetic practices that react to these changes. The nineteenth-century flâneur’s pursuit of knowledge is no longer adequate to approach the everyday reality of the local and contingent effects of global capitalism. As these walkers reject an oversimplified and romanticized notion of belonging to a city or nation based on normative identity categories, they recognize the vulnerability of others and demand that cities be more than locations of precarity and economic growth. This dissertation critically engages diverse Canadian peripatetic perspectives notably absent in theories of urban walking and extends them in new directions. Although the topic of walking suggests an anthropocentrism that contradicts the turn to posthumanism in literary and cultural studies, the walkers in this study open the peripatetic up to non-anthropocentric notions as the autonomous subject of liberal individualism often associated with the male urban walking tradition is displaced by a new focus on the interdependent, affective relation of self and city and on attending to others, to the care of and responsibility for others and the city.

Abstract: In recent years, revisionism in Canadian museums has created a space for the development of different ways of classifying and representing non-Western visual and material culture. Despite these changes, many mainstream or authoritative museums and other cultural institutions still operate largely as separate from the constituent communities to which the non-Western collections in their possession are directly related. This thesis investigates the complex relationship between three different types of collections of African visual and material culture in Canada, the institutions in which they reside, and the relationship to the constituent communities that have a stake in the reception of these collections. These collections include the ethnographic collection of African artifacts at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, the Lang Collection of African Art at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s University in Kingston, and the African cultural collection at the North American Black Historical Museum and Cultural Centre in Amherstburg. As this thesis makes clear, the very nature of incorporating, classifying and displaying African visual and material culture in Western museums, which are a direct product of the colonial era, is fraught with contentions. In light of this, the growth in cultural centres in Canada in recent years has the potential to inform mainstream museums, offering new ways of approaching and engaging with not only non-Western objects, but also their diverse constituent communities. By focusing on the discourse of museum representation in relation to African collections in Canada, this thesis posits that these collections can be understood as crucial sites for the promotion of cross-cultural negotiations between African and non-African Canadian communities.

Abstract: This thesis explores the use of museum spaces in disrupting settler notions of Canadian identity. By identifying the ways in which multiculturalism is written into historical narratives of Canada, these chapters address how the inclusion of a multicultural presence helps curate a Canadian national identity. Drawing on discourses of multiculturalism, race theory, nation-building and some aspects of visual culture, this thesis identifies the ways in which museologies allow for these narratives to be constructed and reconstructed through specific examples within museums. Through the identification of various tropes in the construction of a Canadian national identity – relationship to land and territory, immigration, the nation’s colonial past/present – these chapters focus on Indigeneity, whiteness, and anti-Blackness in Canada as a means of addressing the emergence of these tropes, and how these themes are represented within museum spaces.

Abstract: In her 1992 publication Atget’s Seven Albums, Molly Nesbit opens with an introduction subtitled The Document. She compellingly defines the document by situating its relationship to photography, the archive, and visual art. Nesbit’s tremendously important identification of the intersection between art and the archive is where I will situate the focus of this paper. Through this intersection, I will demonstrate a rereading of the status of the document by considering the extended relationship between art and the archive. In particular, I will look at the status of the document as artwork and the ways in which contemporary art of the 21st century comes to stand in for the document. I will establish this point by examining the ready-made subject of archival structures as well as the overlapping spheres of the document and art. I will perform a rereading of the status of the document by tracing its trajectory from the discourse of empirical facticity to a more complex dimension of mnemonic production. This rereading will consider the document and memory as resources available for extraction and activation. Throughout, I will set specific limits for this research by positioning previous scholarship in relation to a selection of films and performances by artists Deanna Bowen, Felix Kalmenson, Divya Mehra, Krista Belle Stewart, and Casey Wei. Within these limits, I will examine the politics of these artists’ works with attention to formalism and historicity.

Abstract: My thesis situates recent black visual arts practices in the context of exhibition practices and art history. I undertake a content analysis of 10 years of black visual arts reviews in FUSE Magazine and perform a close read of Tau Lewis’ 2017 exhibition cyphers, tissues, blizzards, exile. Through the FUSE content analysis, I am able to explore how an artist’s gender and race influence if and how black arts are discussed in a Canadian context. In my exploration of Lewis, I find that in the exhibition, she—a black woman artist—uses opacity as an aesthetic strategy to avoid presenting her work in a traditional, consumable way. In both of these chapters, the ongoing absented presence of blackness in Canada frames my approach to the case studies.

Abstract: This dissertation on the “Beckett effect” explores the continuing impact of Samuel Beckett’s literary and dramatic texts on contemporary art practices. Since the 1960s, visual artists working in a variety of media have turned to Beckett’s literary productions as sources. I propose that the mediating function of Beckett’s texts extends beyond influence to produce a plurality of functions in the visual arts, which I have identified as the “Beckett effect.” By setting influence aside, I am able to ask: what is the art historical and theoretical significance of the frequency of the use of Beckett’s texts within contemporary art practices? How have these texts dispersed across North American and European contemporary art practices? Exactly what do Beckett’s writings offer contemporary visual artists? More specifically, this dissertation focuses on the effect of Beckett's interventions into the works of three artists: Stan Douglas (b. 1960), Paul Chan (b. 1973), and Tania Bruguera (b. 1968). I first explore Beckett’s reverberations in the visual arts with particular attention to the dispersal of his texts among key artists beginning in the sixties. From there, I argue that Beckett’s oeuvre constitutes a critical intervention into our understanding of contemporary modes of being subjects. Using Beckett’s texts, Douglas, Chan and Bruguera made films, videos, multi-media installations, and theatrical adaptations that allow the viewer to experience the work of art as an immersion in both the historical sense of time and their own present predicament(s). As such, Beckett’s texts serve the visual artist as the means to negotiate between a socially engaged practice and the specific, political or social issue they seek to address. When these artists use Beckett, the work of art moves away from the primacy of vision so that the viewer’s contemporary political and social contexts may be considered.

Abstract: The Patterned Imagination examines certain visual repeat patterns in order to better understand their unique role in the production of cultural meanings. The specific focus of the study is on a constellation of patterns that emerge from magic squares, especially on West African textiles in an Islamic context. Magic squares are represented in patterns on many Islamic West African textiles as talismans with the power to effect protection and healing for the wearer. A pattern is also a blueprint, a guide for making something, and it is in this sense of the word that I contend the magic square acts as a "pattern engine" in West African visual cultures. The textiles examined are in the collections of the Textile Museum of Canada, the British Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The study analyzes how the meaning of their patterns has changed through their move from their originating space into an institutional space.

Abstract: This thesis examines the entry of Black women artists into the Canadian art scene during the late eighties by focusing on the exhibition Black Wimmin: When and Where We Enter which was the first in Canada to feature exclusively the work of Black women artists. It will discuss the social and cultural contexts from which the project originated providing a literature review of Black Canadian art history and an examination of anti-racist activism in the arts and Black feminist thought in Canada. Using post-colonial theory to analyze the exhibition Black Wimmin: When and Where We Enter as a "creative" text attempting to effect agency for Black women artists in Canada, this study ultimately functions as critical analysis and art historical documentation of the exhibition Black Wimmin: When and Where We Enter, its artists and their work.

Abstract: This study focuses on a single work within the oeuvre of the Canadian artist Stan Douglas, the two-channel video installation Win, Place or Show (1998). This piece is constructed as an infinitely-looping counterfactual narrative, set in a modernist social-housing unit in late-1960s Vancouver that was never in fact built. Two dockworkers inhabiting a cramped one-bedroom unit in this imaginary setting repeatedly argue, fight and reconcile, while our view of this action – filmed from twelve different camera angles – is randomized by a computer in real time as the story unfolds and repeats. My study will consider this work within a twofold problematic; firstly, the themes and strategies that form the work's conceptual basis will be examined and situated within an art-historical context, with respect to their correspondences within the whole of Douglas’s body of work and the broader context of Vancouver-based photo-conceptual practices over the past several decades. Subsequently, the work will be analyzed within a range of theories respecting the concepts of space, time and their relation to the construction of narrative and visual culture, and by extension, to the production of everyday consciousness.

Abstract: This thesis takes as its focus Black Montreal’s history of image-making and image preservation. Engaging primarily with snapshot and vernacular images taken between the 1940s-1980s, this research charts how photography has functioned as an integral force in the formation and production of selfhood, community, and a sense of belonging as well as a practice of resistance and of affirming visibility for Black Montrealers. Guided by the question of whether photography and oral history could be used in tandem to come into encounter with the minor histories and everyday stories of Montreal’s Black communities, this thesis comprised of conducting oral history photo-interviews with Black Montrealers and studying several personal collections, Black community-oriented and institutional photographic archives. The interdisciplinary approach of blending of visual culture and oral history speaks directly to the interwovenness and inseparability of photography and orality which is made most evident through the photographs that are included within this research. Moreover, the process of looking, touching, and talking about served to further contextualize the photographs within personal and archival collections, share information regarding practices of vernacular image-making and preservation in black communities in Montreal, as well as highlight the dynamic relationship that exists between memory, photography, orality, and affect.

Abstract: There Is Always More than What We Perceive explored the ways in which contemporary black queer artists in Toronto engage issues of identity, race, sexuality, gender, and space. The selected artists —Michèle Pearson Clarke, Abdi Osman, and Natalie Wood — challenged the monolingual voice of black studies set by patriarchal and heteronormative ideologies. Their representations of black queer diasporic subjects present identities that exist in the interstices between normalized social categories. This exhibition project contributed to the decentralization of monolithic blackness and LGBTQ identity by asking: “Whose blackness? Whose queerness?” These queries were twofold; first they acknowledged the need to recognize the plurality of the black experience across geographical locations, and secondly, they cautioned viewers against black or queer universalism. The exhibition There Is Always More than What We Perceive rendered visible multiple intersections of personhood in order to enrich and expand discussions about blackness in Canada.

Abstract: “Oleaginous duppy: alternate paths of connection through immaterial to material making” is a support paper that explores the multiplicity and multi-dimensionality embedded in Black diasporic identity through ontological Caribbean folk being, duppy, who was transmitted to me through my father. As an individual who belongs to two different groups — Jamaican and Australian — while occupying in Canada, I explore how duppy’s corporal nature becomes an inspiration to hybrid, liminal sensibilities. I weave personal anecdotes with Caribbean scholars Stuart Hall and Edouard Glissant’s literary works to unpack the ambivalent relations associated with duppy. This autoethnographic approach locates myself into these histories and connections that are necessary to reveal duppy as an embodiment, tethered to forbidden realms of “Other,” a non-essentialist and spiritually ‘taboo.’ Scholars Charmaine A. Nelson, Macarena Gomez-Barris, Kathrine McKittrick, Ralina L. Joseph, and Montré Aza Missouri and authors Dionne Brand, Erna Brodber, all contribute to this unpacking. Transitioning from immaterial legacies to material relations, I refer to culturally informed cooking and grooming practices as ways of making that induce cultural sustenance as emergent potentials to manifest duppy. I connect this process to scholar Christina Sharpe’s concept of ‘wake work’ as an evocative reflection of how cultural rituals sustain memories and connect us with our ancestors. By incorporating my personal experiences in cooking with my father and personal grooming, I employ these relational practices as methodical steps toward creative ritualistic making. By recognizing that consideration for the Land and beings is deeply ingrained in Jamaican customs, the artistic production with Indigo and wood is discussed as more than material mediums, but as material beings, who I collaborate with. To imbue wood with Indigo transfigures their surface as more than a singular entity. The thesis exhibition and the support paper are what I see as an heirloom of these discourses and concepts.

Abstract: This practice-based dissertation project engages large-scale portraiture to confront and resist the fungibility of Blackness. The project comprises a selection of twenty drawings and an exegesis in which I analyze my aesthetic process in order to shed light on theoretical problems and gaps in Trans, Disability, Black studies and activisms. This collection of writing also discusses and presents activist struggle, white supremacy in the arts, abolitionist organizing and speculative futures. These theoretical explorations are supported by reflections on the collaborative creation process and the ways in which the portraits have been received. To this end, I have included interviews I conducted with the portrait subjects and through textual analysis of ways in which the portraits have been taken up in art and activist contexts. I argue that studying and supporting Black disabled activist practice can inform ways forward for disability arts in the Canadian milieu.