Kelann Currie-Williams
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.
To my co-collaborators and interviewees Nancy Oliver-MacKenzie, Enid Dixon, Margot Blackman, Leon Llewellyn, and Dr. Dorothy Williams, this work is for you. The time you have all shared with me over the last two years has been an incredible gift. You brought me into a world filled with the beauty of Black life and I cannot begin to describe how thankful and grateful I am to you all. Your photographs have brightened my life in a thousand different ways.
As a student in the Individualized Program, I was fortunate to be able to work closely with a supervisory committee of three wonderful professors. To Erin Manning, my primary supervisor, you have believed in this project from the first time we met in 2017 and have been relentless in your support and encouragement and carrying since then. As you have reminded me time and time again: we don’t do this work alone, and it has meant the world to be able to have done it with you. Deepest thanks also to Steven High’s for his constant enthusiasm, care, and to introducing me to oral history and to archiving (it feels like your “Telling Stories” course never ended!) and to Monika Gagnon for her unwavering support, patience, attentiveness, and close-reading of this thesis. I am so grateful to all of you for your belief in this project.
To Ellen Gressling and Alexandra Mills, two brilliant archivists at Concordia’s Special Collections, the care you have given to the Negro Community Centre/Charles H. Este Cultural Centre fonds along with the other archival fonds centred on Black life in Quebec has continued to move me and bring me to tears. Thank you taking me through these archives and sharing in my passion of this project.
I would also like to extend a heartfelt thanks to my primary and secondary school teachers Carmyn Penner, Rod Oickle, and Sylvain Boudreault who were guiding forces for me in the first part of my life and fostered in me a love of writing and history and stories. Thanks also to Dr. Rachel Berger and Darlene Dubiel (of the Individualized Program), Dr. Rachel Zellars, Dr, Stephen Ross, Dr. Nathalie Batraville, Dr. Laura Madokoro, Dr. Jeffrey Levitt, as well as a number of people from the Communication Studies department who have encouraged me since I was an undergraduate student: Dr. Matt Soar, Dr. Sandra Gabriele, Dr. Christiana Abraham, Dr. Dayna McLeod, Doug Hollingworth, Anastasia (Stasi) Argiropoulos; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), Concordia University School of Graduate Studies, and the Individualized Program (INDI) whose generous funding supported this thesis research.
Thanks to Lauren LaFramboise and Mara Rodríguez, my incredible “Thesis Support Group”: without our weekly meetings over the last two years, I doubt I would have been able to finish the thesis in this lifetime! Keeping each other accountable and on task, the morality boosts, the cries and sharing of good news with each other—I could not have finished this thesis without you both.
Thanks to Senselab creatures that have helped me build a body that is always more-than one and helped to make living feel possible: mts, hh, mm, lp, em, svvi, dd, A, aaa, and many others. To Piyusha Chatterjee, Graham Latham, Fred Burrill, Lisa Ndejuru, Laurence Hamel-Roy, Eliot Perrin and the rest of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS) community for inviting me in and always reassuring me that we all, as interviewers, sound insufferable on audio recordings!
And of course to my Circle of Care for your kindness and enthusiasm of this project: Rowena Tam (our friendship means so much to me and I am blessed to have you in my life), Joyce Turner and David Frost, Désirée Rochat (for the needed long talks and walks), Nora Fulton, Joshua Wiebe, Lisa Litwack, Ann MacDonald, Ivana Radman-Livaja, Melinda Caputo, and Jack Hopkins. Living together in Montreal or apart in different cities, your check-in texts and perfectly-timed memes that you sent over the last two years have meant so much.
The biggest hugs and endless thanks to my beautiful family: Samuel Doug Cleare, Daphne and Lambert Campbell, Carroll Doyley, David Forth (Grandpa), Kennedy Williams (Uncle Steve), Deonne Williams-Morgan, Cynthia Edwards, Samuel Williams, Elaine Stephens (Auntie Rose), Cecil Francis, Stephen (Uncle Wenty) and Gloria Currie, Clive Lloyd, Karen and Elvis Scantlebury, Juliet Robinson, and the rest of my family for always sending loving encouragement and never forgetting to ask how my studies are going.
To my mum, Stephanie Currie, who is my most fervent cheerleader, my rock, and my biggest inspiration. You gave and continue to give me life every day, every time we speak and laugh and cry together. Love you long time (and forever).
And finally, to Harris Frost: for your love, endless support, and for holding me together when I thought I would completely fall apart. Thank you for being my partner. I love you with all my heart, to the moon and back.