Jamaican Diasporic Counter-Archives: Performative Archival Imaginings In Ontario, Canada

Abstract

The colonial foundation of institutional archives in this place called Canada preserved records that narrated the nation as White, patriarchal, and capitalist. In this context, scribal and audiovisual records made by the elite were prioritized. The marginalization of Indigenous peoples, Black peoples, and other racialized peoples in society is well documented by the absence of governmental records, diaries, newspaper clippings, and analogue and digital media made by people from these communities. What documents do exist overwhelmingly preserve and reinforce harmful accounts from this colonial perspective. The central inquiry in this dissertation is how archival practices might challenge colonial frameworks and architectures. Drawing parallels between Indigenous definitions of “archives” and their methods of historical preservation, and the methods used by Jamaicans who descend primarily from indigenous peoples in Africa, this research-creation project asks an ontological question: What are archives (the records) in the Jamaican diaspora in Canada? Noting the performative nature of the community’s records, I ask further: What is an archives (repository) of the Jamaican diaspora—its architecture and its functional role? Anchored by critical archival frameworks and a Black feminist lens, I engage in Caribbean-inflected participatory research-creation to develop a counter-archive of Jamaican Canadians in Ontario, Canada. The research creation methodology integrates traditional archival research, interviews informed by Caribbean “liming and ole talk” and “groundings” practices, and the (re)use of audiovisual media through remediation and process cinema.

The resulting archive includes both material and embodied forms of knowledge—stories, gestures, songs, and other expressions of cultural memory, all of which were digitized and made accessible through a media sculpture, NansiRoachy, which functions as the architectural support and organizational repository for these records. The artistic treatment of these media archives underscores the importance of incorporating art and aesthetics within the Jamaican/Black Caribbean embodied archive since it fosters a restorative, healing process. This research advances a Black archival practice that acknowledges the performative, embodied, mobile, community-oriented, and digital nature of these records, attributes which shape the repository that supports them. Finally, I advocate for the unsettling of colonial concepts of property and geographically fixed institutions by designing an adaptable, mobile, and vernacular architecture that can travel to different community locations to facilitate the sharing and augmentation of these records within the spaces of the communities they represent.