There Is Always More than What We Perceive
Cited Authors:
- Alexander, Bryant Keith - Fading, Twisting,and Weaving: An Interpretive Ethnography of the Black Barbershop as Cultural Space
- Adusei-Poku, Nana - The Multiplicity of Multiplicities-Post Black Art and Its Intricacies
- Bailey, David A. and Hall, Stuart - The Vertigo of Displacement
- Cheng, Anne Anlin - Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface
- Davis, Kathy - Intersectionality as a Buzzword: a Sociology of Science Perspective on What Makes a Feminist Theory Successful
- Dollimore, Jonathan - Desire and Difference
- Fortier, Anne-Marie - Queer Diaspora
- hooks, bell - In Our Glory
- Jones, Amelia - Concluding thoughts to Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts
- McKittrick, Katherine - Plantation Futures
- Ongiri, Amy Abugos - We Are Family: Black Nationalism, Black Masculinity, and the Black Gay Cultural Imagination
- Rugoff, Ralph - You Talking to Me? On Curating Group Shows that Give You a Chance to Join the Group
- Strong, Lester - Josephine Baker’s Hungry Heart
- Taylor, Paul C. - Post-Black, Old Black
- Touré - Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It Means to Be Black
- Van Hoven, Bettina and Horschelmann, Kathrin - Introduction to Spaces of Masculinites
- Vokins, Mike - Inside Out Film Fest: Eyes on Toronto
- Walcott, Rinaldo - Caribbean Pop Culture in Canada: Or, the impossibility of Belonging to the Nation
- Walcott, Rinaldo - Somewhere Out There: The New Black Queer Theory
- Walcott, Rinaldo - Outside in Black Studies: Reading from a Queer Place in the Diaspora
- Winks, Robin W. - The Blacks in Canada; A History
- Wright, Michelle M. and Schumann, Antje - Becoming Black; Creating Identity in the African Diaspora
- Wright, Michelle M. and Schumann, Antje - Introduction in Blackness and Sexualities
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.
Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank my thesis advisor, Professor Andrea Fatona, my secondary Professor Rosemary Donegan, and my readers Professor Jennifer Ruder and Professor Christina Sharpe, for their professional assistance and critical commentaries. I also want to thank my mother, my partner, and friends for their unconditional support for my work, especially in moments of doubt.
Finally I wish to extend my gratitude to the artists who took part in my thesis exhibition and the formulation of my thesis. Without them, There Is Always More than We Perceive would not have been possible.