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ABSTRACT
In a Montreal neighbourhood in the fall of 2013, a community mural celebrating ‘diversity, adversity and solidarity’ was vandalized: the image of a Black woman was spray-painted white. In this paper, I take the events and discourses surrounding this incident and my personal responses to them as a starting point for examining the racialized politics of visual representation. Using critical race-class analysis informed by contemporary theories of Black visuality, I consider dynamics of Black invisibility and visibility in Canada and consider the role visual texts play in reinforcing, reproducing, and resisting racialized social relations. I argue for caution regarding politics of representation, and consider Black and Indigenous art practices for the creative forms of resistance to colonial-capitalist ideology and visual logics they offer.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Rosalind Hampton is an educator and activist from Montreal who now works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto. Her areas of research and teaching include Black radical thinkers and artists, Black Studies in Canada, racialized social relations and anticolonialism in Canadian higher education, and critical ethnographic and arts informed methods of inquiry.
Notes
1. Many images of the mural are available on the collective’s website: http://lecollectifaupieddumur.tumblr.com/
2. All statements by Silvestro have been translated from French to English by the author.
3. This linear, left-to-right reading is reinforced by signifiers of Indigenous peoples that appear at the far left, where three figures stand on a turtle’s back and face right, across the water in the direction of industrial factories.
4. This is a reference to the first Black community of the city in the Saint Antoine district, which was a mecca for jazz musicians from the 1920s to 1950s.
5. Regarding police violence targeting Black communities in Canada, see Maynard (Citation2017). See also, the longstanding Montreal-based Collective Against Police Brutality (https://www.cobp.resist.ca/). Black Lives Matter Canada was founded with the establishment of the Toronto chapter in the fall of 2014 (http://janayakhan.com/black-lives-matter/).
6. À qui La Pointe? was an information and mobilization campaign related to housing and real estate development in PSC, organized by community consultation group Action-Gardien and le Regroupement Information Logement (RIL), a non-profit organization committed to improving housing conditions in PSC (http://actiongardien.org/node/1758).
7. Robinson (Citation2000) describes a modern system of ‘racial capitalism’ that emerged out of the European feudal order wherein racialization was already ‘very much a colonial process involving invasion, settlement, expropriation and racial hierarchy’ (Kelley Citation2017, para. 5).
8. For example, see recent discussions regarding a painting depicting the body of Emmett Till by white artist Dana Schutz (Eloise Citation2017)
9. See Wilder (Citation2013).
10. Regarding such histories in Canada see Cooper (Citation2006).
11. See www.trc.ca/
12. Regarding ongoing and increasing white supremacist and Right wing extremist organizing in Canada see, for example, Scrivens and Perry Citation2017; Zhou Citation2017; and a series of reports by CBC News titled Inside the far-right in Québec (CBC News, Citationn.d.).