Camille Turner
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.
I am grateful to everyone who has walked with me throughout this dissertation journey. I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Honor Ford-Smith, for believing in me, advocating for me, and pushing me to do what feels impossible. Thank you, Dr. Jin Haritaworn, for your encouragement and your enthusiastic engagement with my work. Thank you, Dr. Warren Crichlow, for your insightful critiques and the inspiring information that you shared with me throughout this process. Thank you, wonderful community of artists. Bushra Junaid, thank you for opening up critical and generative space for the work of reckoning with this history. Your generosity brought me into an awareness of the ships and Newfoundland’s connections to the Caribbean. Nadine Valcin, your work and our conversations about these histories continue to feed and inspire me. Many thanks to my husband, Winston James. I am grateful for your love, support, and endless late-night readings of my evolving texts. By accompanying me to Newfoundland, you brought me into an awareness of silence that became a crucial element in this dissertation. Thank you, colleagues, and friends, at York University. Patrice Allen, so blessed to walk with you.
To my parents Lloyd and Nina Turner, my sister Karen Turner, and my brother Lee Turner, thank you for your support, love and care. Thank you to my brilliant team of artistic partners – Emilie Jabouin, Esery Mondesir, Ravi Naimpally, Chris Wiseman, Cody Westman, Roxanne Fernandes and Alvin Luong. I can’t thank you enough, Naomi de Szegheo-Lang, for your expertise as my editor and coach. I value your calmness, patience and sage advice in the face of panic.
I appreciate the support of the Slave Voyages team, in particular Gregory O’Malley of University of California, Santa Cruz. My thanks to David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, the Trinity Historical Society, the Maritime History Archives at Memorial University, and Professors Paul Lovejoy, David Richardson and Neil Kennedy, as well as Myung-Sun Kim. I want to acknowledge the vital support I received from the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship-Doctoral (SSHRC), Ontario Graduate Scholarship, and the Paavo and Aino Lukkari Fellowship from York University’s Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC).
Above all, thank you to my ancestors. Your guidance was crucial and nurturing. Without you, I would not exist. This work is dedicated to you.