The Lake is History: Photographic Archives and the Black Atlantic in Essex County

This dissertation situates Lake Erie and its environs as part of the Black Atlantic. Specifically, it maps the complex portrait of those environs as they emerge within the photographic archive of the Alvin D. McCurdy fonds. This dissertation follows the flow of vernacular photographs across Lake Erie to map transnational networks of kinship and highlight the affective labour that sustained these bonds. I argue that during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Essex County was a microcosm of global colonial power relationships structured with racial and gender-based hierarchies. I therefore extend Paul Gilroy’s (1993) Black Atlantic paradigm to the world of marine fluidity that is the Great Lakes. I propose that attention to this particular site allows us to unsteady tidy national histories of Black struggle refreshing and transforming our understanding of notions of kinship and resistance speaking to the circulatory and hybrid nature of ideas, activists, and the movement of key cultural and political artifacts. I demonstrate both the richness of cultural struggle in relation to ideas about race and nation, and also the dimensions of oppositional practice which are not reducible to narrow ideas about resistance. I position the work of performing, producing, and displaying vernacular photographs as a form of gendered labour and care work that created practices of affiliation and opposition against the enclosures brought on by the formation of racialized space. Threaded through each chapter is an exploration of what a transnational vision might offer our understanding of the relationship between labour and cultural production. The narratives disclosed by the photographs within the McCurdy fonds recover some of the lost history of communities that were essential to the formation of a global system of racial capital, and the reproduction of its oppositional cultures.