Lehrende/r: Dr. Sabine Kim
Veranstaltungsart: Übung
Anzeige im Stundenplan: Cultural Studies IV
Semesterwochenstunden: 2
Unterrichtssprache: Englisch
Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl: - | 25
Anmeldegruppe: CS IV - American Studies
Prioritätsschema: Senatsrichtlinie Zulassung gemäß Richtlinie über den Zugang zu teilnahmebeschränkten Lehrveranstaltungen vom 07. März 2007. Nähere Informationen hierzu entnehmen Sie bitte www.info.jogustine.uni-mainz.de/senatsrichtlinie
Voraussetzungen / Organisatorisches: Black Like Who? Black Histories in/of Canada, 1600s to the Present In 2004, Wayde Compton created a photo essay of Canada’s third-largest city, Vancouver, in which Compton (together with Robert Sherrin) staged “lost-found landmarks” of an earlier Black community whose buildings had been bulldozed in the 1970s to make way for a planned commuter freeway. The doorways and entrances which Compton features look very unassuming: The black and white pictures of modest, slightly worse-for-wear buildings don’t reveal much architectural detail and the tight focus of the lens means that the height of the buildings can only be guessed at. There are no people, either, to suggest who or what happens here. Only the signs such as the “Strathcona Coloured People’s Benevolent Society” would appear to offer some clues. Yet the documentary nature of Compton’s project is deliberately ambiguous. The buildings are real, but the signs—along with the organisations and businesses they seem to reference—are in fact invented by Compton for his photographic elegy. In this doubling of history layered by imagination, Compton suggests the complex ways in which Black lives and histories are negotiated in Canada. On the one hand, in the popular imaginary, Canada stands for the “true North strong and free,” a traditional refuge for enslaved Blacks fleeing the U.S. Fugitive Slave Law. On the other hand, the long history of Black Canadians, which goes back to the early days of colonization, is often erased in popular memory by assumptions that Black Canadians are “fresh off the boat” or, even more problematic, that slavery never existed in Canada. Neither of these assumptions is true, since Blacks have been enslaved in Canada alongside Aboriginal persons since the 17th century. In either case, the fact of Black lives and histories in/of Canada becomes destabilised—and this is what Compton’s fake historic sites seem to point to—so that the events and people seem to be constantly open to being reframed and put into new contexts of meaning, for better or for worse. Compton is of course critical of the constant erasure of Black presence—by a national narrative that portrays Canada as benevolent rather than slave-owning, and as a land of EuroCanadians who share their nation with newer Others. Drawing on Wayde Compton and others, this course will look at the ways in which Blackness in Canada is and has been constructed since the 1600s.
Empfohlene Literatur: Reading material will be available through ReaderPlus at the beginning of the course.
