Fellows

Alex Callender’s practice uses methods of drawing, painting, and installation to trace and remap historical materials as a means to explore with both criticality and care, how we might disentangle the interwoven relations of race, gender, and capitalism. Callender has had solo exhibitions and projects at island gallery (NYC), ArtYard (NJ), the Center for the Arts Northeastern University, UMass Contemporary Museum of Art, NYU Gallatin Galleries, and Michigan State University’s LookOut Gallery. Alex has received artist grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Massachusetts Cultural Council and has held artist residencies + fellowships with Women’s Studio Workshop, MacDowell Colony, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The Drawing Center, Art in Embassies Program, Vermont Studio Center, Santa Fe Art Institute, Alice Yard in Trinidad, and DRAWinternational and The BAU Institute in France. Callender is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Smith College.

Project Summary: My current project, American Lawn, emerged from questions about native grasses, public ecology, and my curiosity about a 19^th French panoramic wallpaper called, The Views of North America. The 1836 Zuber Co. wallpaper depicts six idyllic American landscapes and the prosperous, mixed-race middle-class who would stroll through the grassy vignettes. In actuality, the scenes are a historical fantasy, and appear more a way to pastiche together scenes of American militarism and tourism, territorial expansion, and representations of class and economic prosperity. In this project, I am thinking about Zuber’s illustrated scenes of New England and New York as a deconstructed landscape and hybrid space that merges the plantation geography of the Caribbean as the ghostly doppelganger of the American North’s economic ascendance. While at Slavery North I will spend time drawing, visiting different colonial port city sites in MA, CT, and RI, and working at the Harvard School of Business archives, looking at various collections of colonial merchant records, the United Fruit Co., and the National City Bank of New York, to tell a visual story that explores American mythologies about land extraction, migrating plants, and our spatially ascribed borders of racial and ecological supremacy. I place plants as central characters or figures in human stories to think about the afterlife of Atlantic slavery and colonialism and connect those histories to our ecological present.

Jennifer DeClue is Associate Professor in The Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. She specializes in black feminism, chattel slavery, film studies, and the avant-garde. She earned her doctorate in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California and has been teaching at Smith College since 2015. Her book Visitation: The Conjure Work of Black Feminist Avant-Garde Cinema was published in the fall of 2022 and received the Duke UP Scholars of Color First Book Award. She is the recipient of an American Association of University Women Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture’s Scholar-in-Residence Fellowship. Her scholarship has been published in the anthologies No Tea, No Shade and Sisters in the Life and in The Black Scholar, Palimpsest, TSQ, and GLQ. She is currently writing a book about black women enslaved in New England and slavery’s afterlife there.

Project Title: Enslaved in New England: Black Women and the Afterlife of Northern Bondage

Project Summary: The history of abolition in the pioneer valley of western Massachusetts is robust and iconic. The lore of homes, still standing, that were stations along the underground railroad animate the valley’s provincial mystic. Abolition is so dominant a history that it prevails as the narrative of slavery in western Massachusetts, occluding the reality that slavery was foundational to the establishment of townships along the Connecticut River Valley, from Hartford to Northfield. Enslaved in New England: Black Women and the Afterlife of Northern Bondage intervenes in this occlusion with a book-length study that explores the history of slavery in western Massachusetts from the perspective of black women, especially those bound in the towns of Northampton and Hadley. The documented record of slavery that appears in the diaries, inventories, wills, letters, and court records of the families who first settled western Massachusetts lays the historical foundation for this book, and black feminist theory undergirds the archival approach. Enslaved in New England mobilizes The Combahee River Collective’s assertion that black women are inherently valuable by searching the archival record for evidence of black women’s lives, not as asides to studies about settler women or northern slavery, but as its central focus. This archival and theoretical framework enables me to contend with the disorienting experience of encountering slavery’s afterlife in a place where this history has been thoroughly subsumed. Though my focus is the enslavement of black women in western Massachusetts, I integrate indigenous resistance to settler colonialism into the fabric of this book.

Kathie Foley-Meyer is a mixed media artist and arts consultant who completed her Ph.D. in Visual Studies at UC Irvine in 2023. Her artwork is inspired by the history of the African Diaspora, and explores themes of interconnectedness, ocean memory, visibility and transparency. As an arts consultant she worked on a corporate social responsibility program for a company in the global finance sector, and has also provided services to local arts organizations serving Black communities in Los Angeles. She served on the board of LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) from 2011 to 2019, with the last three years as Chair. She was part of the art selection and advisory committees for Metro Art for the Los Angeles Expo Metrorail Line, and has served on grant panels for the LA County Arts Commission. From 2021-2023 she was the co-host and producer of the podcast Outside:Inside Radio, a production of the Prison Arts Collective at San Diego State University.

Project Summary: This project resumes my goal and artistic process of a witnessing and memorialization of black lives lost to the oceans of the globe from the international trade in human beings from the African continent. In Twelve Voyages, twelve abstract land and sea scape watercolor paintings with selected data were laid out against a black background with wood elements that suggested a sail. For this new project the intent is to create a three-dimensional ship structure and sails containing new interpretations of data, including information collected during research at Slavery North archives and other local sources. I will be experimenting with new abstract watercolors and utilizing other methods and media such as quilting. This project is also an exploration of the concept of ocean memory, which I have been exploring in my art practice since 2016, and addressed in my dissertation project through the work of artists Ellen Gallagher, Jason DeCaires Taylor and Lorna Simpson. Contained within the exploration of ocean memory are ruminations on the territoriality and temporality of blackness and the residence time presence of black bodies in the Atlantic and the Pacific following the voyages of the slave trade.

Chris J. Gismondi is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of New Brunswick and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada awarded art history scholar and curator. His research focuses on the visual and material culture of slavery in Upper Canada, the American north, metropolitan Britain, and enslaved women’s and families resistances navigating laws of gradual emancipation. Chris is queer, white-settler of Scottish and Italian descent from Dish with One Spoon, Head of the Lake Treaty no. 14 (1806), Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg territory.

Project Title: Gender, Family, and Gradual Abolition in Upper Canada and Northern Slavery, 1760-1833

Project Summary: My research project explores the uniqueness, practices, and challenges to slavery in Upper Canada working comparatively across northern slavery sites. Unlike Lower Canada or the Maritimes, Upper Canada is a unique site in Canadian slavery being both non-Atlantic and non-Maritime which were prevalent geographic features for Transatlantic Slavery. As well, the rolling frontiers of settler-colonialism were complicated with Indigenous bondage and Indigenous enslavers. Lieutenant Governor Simcoe amended slavery in the colony through a gradual abolition passed in 1793. Legislation that sought to prevent further trafficking of enslaved labourers after the American Revolution, but also encouraged new investments in “natural increase” since children born to enslaved women served mandatory indentures until the age of 25. I seek to demonstrate that the institution of northern slavery was not benevolent, but gender and family were exploited throughout northern slavery and the age of abolition via gradual emancipation laws, but quotidian resistances are recuperable from print or material culture sources to compliment a limited archive. This is an attempt to assert the continued presence and exploitation of the enslaved as a slave-minority demographic population in the settler colony, whereby resistance in northern slavery, slave-minority demographic spaces look different to other sites within the slavery historiography canon. These amendments to the institution of northern slavery emphasized the reproductive capacity of enslaved women and families within the process of slow abolition and continued Black labour exploitation. I examine enslaved people’s family making and preservation as possible strategies of resistance where generations of scholars had dismissively cast-off children and pregnancy as unwanted “drains” to the estate and labour outputs of temperate, small-scale enslavers.

Julia Jorati is Professor of Philosophy at UMass Amherst. Her research focuses on philosophical debates about slavery in Europe and the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She received an MA from the University of Göttingen (Germany) in 2008 and a PhD from Yale in 2013. In her most recent books Slavery and Race: Philosophical Debates in the Eighteenth Century and Slavery and Race: Philosophical Debates in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Oxford University Press 2024), Jorati surveys the philosophically most central portions of antislavery and proslavery texts composed between 1500 and 1800 in Europe and the Americas, with a focus on the role of race. In doing so, she explores the association between Blackness and slavery during this period and examines how common it was for White people to view Black people as naturally destined for slavery.

Project Title: Enslaved within the Bowels of a Free Country: Black Antislavery Authors in Massachusetts, 1773–1783

Project Summary: Slavery was legal in Massachusetts until 1783, when the Supreme Judicial Court declared it unconstitutional. During the ten years before this decision, there were intense debates about slavery in Massachusetts—not just among politicians, but in public forums such as newspapers, pamphlets, and churches. These debates were often fueled by the same philosophical ideas as the American Revolution, which unfolded concurrently. My project analyzes the philosophical arguments employed by Black antislavery authors in these debates. I focus on essays and letters published by Black authors in Massachusetts newspapers, an unpublished antislavery treatise by a Black preacher from Western Massachusetts, as well as petitions by Black Massachusetts residents demanding abolition and, in some cases, reparations. These texts are important for several reasons. First, they show that Black opponents of slavery in Massachusetts were enormously well organized during this period and employed highly sophisticated strategies. Second, this antislavery network included activists not just from Boston but from towns throughout Massachusetts. Third, these authors opted mainly to use the philosophical frameworks employed by White proponents of American independence, such as the natural law framework that ascribes inalienable rights to all humans. In adapting this framework for antislavery arguments, they made important original contributions to it. Finally, these texts are crucial for uncovering the neglected history of slavery in Massachusetts and scrutinizing its legacy. These authors’ voices and experiences deserve a much larger role in our collective memory and in our understanding of the history of New England.

David Montero is an investigative journalist and author. Formerly a documentary producer for PBS FRONTLINE, his work has twice been nominated for an Emmy-award. Montero has written for Time, The New York Times, and The Nation, among others. His most recent book is The Stolen Wealth of Slavery: A Case for Reparations, published by LegacyLit/Hachette Books in February 2024.

Project Title: Merchants of Misery: the hidden history of how Boston bankers financed and expanded Southern slavery, and how the profits of Southern slavery helped build Boston

Project Summary: My project seeks to show how, contrary to popular belief, the sprawling slave labor camps of the South could never have reaped such epic wealth, nor sown such epic misery, without the Boston region, and that Boston could never have prospered without leeching onto this blood-soaked wealth.

My project is driven by an investigative methodology of following the money: I will use early historical texts and 19th century newspapers to pinpoint Boston bank directors and merchants who, critical to the sustenance and expansion of slavery, financed not only plantations in the South, but the shipping and marketing of slavery’s bane harvests to the North; I will use archival databases and corporate documents to show how those same Northern white men, the leading corporate directors of their day, directed their slavery profits into lasting institutional, infrastructural, and industrial wealth, the very basis of American prosperity; and I will map how, through a process of historical and commercial evolution, the same entities created by those men, with seed capital steeped in Black people’s bondage, morphed into the pillars of Boston’s regional economy – pillars that still exist.

My project will show that wealth reaped from slavery is now the banks and insurance industries of the Boston area; it is the bridges we drive over, the very streets we walk down, their names still valorizing historic injustices from which Black people continue to suffer to this day.

Emily Draicchio (she/her/elle) is a white settler and first generation Canadian of Italian and German descent. She was born and raised in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal and attended McGill University for her undergraduate Degree in Joint Honours Art History and Anthropology. She is currently a graduate student at the University of New Brunswick pursuing a Master’s Degree in History under the supervision of Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson and Dr. Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy.

Her Master’s research is focused on locating slave quarters in New Brunswick and Quebec and is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Emily has professional experience working at the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and with the Maski Archaeological Research Project in India. Her research interests include the African Diaspora, historical archaeology, Canadian Slavery history, community archaeology, and story mapping.

Project title: Excavating Archives: Searching for Sites of Black Enslavement in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Canada

Project Summary: Emily’s research project aims to bridge her interests in archaeology and Canadian Slavery history to dismantle a piece of the myth of Canada as inclusive, racism-free, and without a colonial history by locating, documenting, and analysing sites of Black enslavement such as slave quarters in Québec and New Brunswick (c.1700s-1800’s). This problematic narrative of Canadian exceptionalism is founded upon a national history that romanticizes the Underground Railroad, while neglecting Canada’s direct participation in the enslavement of Black and Indigenous peoples.

She will approach her research through the examination of archival materials, oral history, and ethnographic sources generated by African Diasporic communities, as well as by completing interviews, reconnaissance surveys, and GIS site mapping with a story map component. This research will be an important contribution to new accounts of Canada’s history that emphasize the enslaved experience as a strategy of decolonization, and to recognize how the past has been mobilized to maintain exceptionalism and racism in the present.

Her research will address the following questions: 1) by working comparatively with archival, oral, and archaeological records, how will documenting, and analysing sites of Black enslavement inform us about the daily lives and living conditions of the enslaved in Canada, as well as their distinct cultural identity, community bonds, and acts of resistance?, 2) How can historical archaeology help dispel the widespread constructed narrative that Canada did not participate in the Transatlantic Slavery?, 3) What is the relevance of this research in relation to present issues of representation, power, racism, and inequality in Canadian society?, 4) How will research on the slave minority society of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Canada provide more diverse archaeological evidence that will be more inclusive and representative of histories of the African Diaspora and slavery?

Unlike the United States, Caribbean, and South America, where archaeological research on sites of Black enslavement (particularly plantations) has been well-explored, within Canada there have been only a handful of archaeological studies about the enslavement of Black populations and the African Diaspora concerning Black Loyalists and enslaved people in Nova Scotia. Emily therefore intends to use the data she collects for her Master’s thesis described above as the foundation for her future doctoral research where she will investigate these sites in Quebec and New Brunswick through community-based archaeological fieldwork with descendant participants.

Amanda Trager is an American intermedia artist who lives in the U.S. and Nova Scotia. Her research-based work situates narratives within distinct aesthetic realms. Primarily known for her work made in collaboration with her husband Erik Moskowitz, she has exhibited and screened work internationally at venues that include Centre Pompidou, Jeu de Paume (Paris); IFFR (Rotterdam); Reina Sofia, (Madrid); Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin); The Mexicali Biennial (California and Mexico); 303 Gallery and Participant Inc., NYC. This work has been supported by art residencies at the Montalvo Arts Center and Headlands Center for the Arts, both in California. She, with Moskowitz, have been the recipients of grants, including numerous ones from the New York State Council for the Arts (NYSCA) and awards, including the Short Film Grand Prize, IndieLisboa (Portugal).

Trager’s projects are often realized in different forms over timespans of several years. These forms include single-channel film, video installation, web-based and two- and three-dimensional artworks. Narrative, emerging from original scripts, individual interviews, and oral history, is fundamental to her work, which is characterized by a distinct aesthetic based in songwriting and ventriloquism, offbeat tempos, and the depiction of the natural environment at odds with the hand made.

Project title: CONTROLLED BURN

Project summary: Trager has embarked on a mid-length animated film derived from the study of the relationship between two historical figures — the Portuguese-born enslaved Black female Marie-Josèph Angélique, and the French-born white indentured servant Claude Thibault. Accused of purposely starting the great 1734 Montreal fire, the two were bound by their mutual devotion and shared quest for freedom.

Trager’s vision for her film relies upon the innovations of Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapri, and Alison Bechdel, who combined the graphic novel with the memoir form, and Richard Linklater’s Rotoscoped-style animated films. These works lend high accessibility to challenging content such as the Holocaust and the nature of consciousness. Borrowing from these artists’ use and development of the “adult comic” form, CONTROLLED BURN will recount Angélique and Thibault’s story within the context of the history of slavery in Canada, and the hemispheric scope of slavery more generally.

The theme of allyship across race and gender will also be interrogated, originating with the vulnerabilities inherent in Trager’s own positionality as a non-Canadian white settler. Interviews with historians and other experts will ground Trager’s inquiry, and be combined with re-enactment scenes from Angelique and Thibault’s lives — including their flight through the wintry Quebec forests, a “freedom” that lasted two weeks. This varied footage will become visually integrated through animation software. Production for this project will take place at the Darling Foundry in Montreal where Trager will be an artist-in-residence in 2023.

Chris J. Gismondi (he/they) is a queer, white, Qallunaak-zhaaganaash-settler, first generation “Canadian” of Scottish and Italian descent, born and raised on Nanzuhzaugewazog, Dish with One Spoon, Head of the Lake Treaty no. 14 (1806), Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg territory. Chris is a PhD Candidate at the University of New Brunswick completing his doctoral project under the guidance of Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson. His Doctoral and Master’s work have been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and he also serves on the Advisory Board for the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery. His curatorial work has spanned institutions like La Guild, Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, and Government of Ontario Art Collection. Along with Dr. Nelson and an undergraduate seminar he contributed to the grassroots “Slavery and McGill University: Bicentenary Recommendations” and three other public facing projects: Fugitive Slave Advertisements, Bills of Sale for Enslaved People: Quebec, Canada, and Slavery Tour of Montreal. His writing has been published in Canadian Art, Canadian Art Review, The English Historical Review, Esse: art + opinions, Peripheral Review, and Arcadia: Environment and Society.

Project summary: Chris’ research project examines the unique and under studied site of Upper Canada. In Canadian Slavery research the most recent contributions have focused on Québec and the Maritimes. However, as a northern, temperate, and non-maritime location the process of slavery, colonization, and gradual abolition played out in the unique context of French Empire, American Revolution, and Loyalist settlement. One main line of inquiry is how enslaved women and families navigated the gradual abolition of 1793 and if processes like flight were used to resist the reproductive violence of the slow emancipation process. Using art, archival sources, artefacts, and fugitive slave advertisements the project hopes to explore how women and families resisted or navigated the process of gradual abolition, what response was evoked from the white slaveowners, and explore the nature of slavery for in-land Canada. How were the Great Lakes and waterways used as additional “Middle Passages” or resistance? What role did free(d) families, partner, and community play for enslaved subjects and mixed servitude families? How were Indigenous nations who raided Patriot plantations implicated in the expansion of Transatlantic Slavery alongside the presence of enslaved Indigenous peoples in the records? How does the temperate settler archive challenge what histories can be known, told, or challenged?

Tyshan Wright hails from the historic Maroon Town of Accompong in St. Elizabeth, Jamaica. A “Keeper Of The Heritage” (Jamaica Gleaner) and maker of Jamaican Maroon instruments and cultural objects, his work explores intersections between traditional and contemporary craft. Working primarily with wood and natural forest products, he creates mixed media representations of Jamaican Maroon ceremonial objects. Since moving to Halifax a few years ago, Wright’s artwork has been acquired by the Nova Scotia Art Bank and presented in exhibitions and artist talks at Canadian galleries and museums including the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21.

“The Maroons’ most sacred objects include a series of traditional drums, and a carved cow’s horn called an abeng. Traditionally these instruments are used in celebration and ceremony, and for centuries they have played a central role in Maroon culture and spirituality. But when a group of Maroons from Trelawny Town were exiled to Halifax in 1796, they were denied their ceremonial instruments. And so I want to bring these sacred objects to Nova Scotia, and connect this important part of Maroon culture to the Canadian and African diasporic narratives.” —Tyshan Wright

Project title: The Trelawny Town Maroons: Between Sovereignty and Slavery

Project summary: The Trelawny Town Maroons: Between Sovereignty and Slavery examines the behaviours and cultural practices of Jamaican Maroons in colonial Nova Scotia, and the effects of colonialism and Transatlantic Slavery on the Maroons’ sovereignty.

Jamaican Maroons are descendants of Africans – largely from the Akan region of Ghana – who resisted slavery and formed their own independent, self-sustaining communities in the mountains of Jamaica during the 1600’s. In 1796, a group of them was exiled from Trelawny Town – a region of Jamaica’s remote Cockpit Country – to Halifax (Nova Scotia) after a conflict (war) with British colonials who controlled the island. In Nova Scotia, the Maroons lived in communities at Preston and Boydville, engaged in military service, farmed and sold goods at the Halifax market, and worked on fortifications at Citadel Hill. But they did not favour Nova Scotia’s cold, and so they petitioned to move to a warmer climate. Almost all of the Maroons sailed from Halifax to Sierra Leone in 1800. Even still, many of their descendants can be found in Nova Scotia today.

The Trelawny Town Maroons: Between Sovereignty and Slavery creatively considers the Maroons in Nova Scotia, and asks how the Trelawny’s navigated the complex space between sovereignty and slavery in a new society. The project’s resulting artwork will illuminate the Maroons’ struggle for autonomy in a slaveholding society, and spark new narratives about this lesser-known group of settlers to Canada’s eastern shore.

tyshanwright.com

Jason Cyrus analyzes fashion and textile history to explore questions of identity, cultural exchange, and agency. He is the 2021 Isabel Bader Fellow in Textile Conservation and Research at the Agnes Etherington Centre, Queens University. This October he will present his research in History is Rarely Black or White, an exhibition exploring Victorian cotton, slavery, and its ongoing legacies.

Cyrus has a Master’s Degree in Art History and Curatorial Studies from York University and starts his PhD in the History of Art at Warwick University in October 2021. He has held research posts at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Royal Ontario Museum. In January 2020, he curated York University’s first fashion exhibition, ReFraming Gender. Cyrus currently lives on land that has been the home of numerous Indigenous Nations, including the Wendat, Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabek, and most recently the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.

Project title: Dressing for the Resistance: Style as Amour Among Black Canadians

Project summary: “My research project will result in an exhibition proposal that will chronicle Black Canadian history from the perspective of dress, enslavement, and resistance. My research explores the ways in which the policing of Black identity, originating during enslavement, has resulted in the oppositional methodology of style as resistance by Black Canadians from the 1800’s to present.

My project examines three periods in Canadian history that together illuminate the impact of slavery on Black identity and its manifestations in Black aesthetics and sartorial choices: the 1800’s when slavery was supported by British law; the 1950-70’s that saw a large influx of Black people from the Caribbean and elsewhere; and our contemporary time that reflects the current social “awakening.”

Emergent themes: the restrictions on dress styles imposed on Black Canadians during slavery; the adoption of “respectable” dress as a means of counteracting negative perceptions of Blackness by new immigrants; and the use of “fabulous” style as armour by the Black queer community as protection against intersectional oppression. I will ground this historical overview in the stories of Black Canadians relevant to each period through a combination of archival research, dress analysis, and primary source interviews. The resulting exhibition proposal will discuss how this information can be presented in curatorial form.

Coming Soon: Listen to Jason’s CBC Radio’s Mainstreet interview about his project.

Watch Jason’s presentation from his January 18, 2022 Fellows Talk.

Tonya Paris, also known as Sam’Gwan, is an established Mi’kmaq and African Nova Scotia artist activist based in Halifax, Nova Scotia; which rests upon the unceded traditional Mi’kmaq territory. Over the past five years Sam’Gwan, has had several art exhibits and installations within the Nova Scotia community. Most notably her contributions to the Dalhousie University Architectural Building, the Nova Scotia QEII Mental Health Unit and in 2017 when she received the bronze medal for Visual Artist of the Year, from the Halifax Coast.

In 2019, she was invited to be a guest speaker at York University and The University of Miguel, for her work with the Proclaiming Our Roots, Archive Project. Her most recent projects have been her contribution to the award nominated 2020 Aboriginal Public Television Network production, Racism Lives Here Too, with Trina Roache and the production of Season 3 of DIGGSTOWN. Sam’Gwan is the Indigenous artist consultant and primary contributor for the hit television series set to be featured on the Fox and B.E.T networks in 2021-2022.

Passionate about equality and empowering others through education and art, Sam’Gwan will be a guest speaker this fall for both the Halifax Central Library and the Nova Scotia Career Development Association on the topics of anti-racism and anti-oppression. She is a regular collaborator with the Mi’kmaw Native Friendship Centre, and is known throughout the community for her commitment to seeing positive change.

Project title: Freedom Is No Game

Project summary: The installation, Freedom Is No Game is artist Sam’Gwan’s response to Canada’s legacy of Indigenous residential school systems and historic involvement with the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

In both instances Black and Indigenous communities were not seen as free people. Instead, their lives were viewed as obstacles, resources to be exploited, inventory to be to be sold, traded or trained to have better value for their owners and government. This colonial and racist mindset, inspired the Black and Brown communities to be seen as pieces to be denied freedom and equality by the players calling the shots. It is this racist history, and this narrative that has inspired the vision for Freedom Is No Game, a one-of-a-kind custom giant chess set.

Featuring an old-world aesthetic of wood, gold, and traditional dress mixed with contemporary technology, it is a celebration of the cultural heritage of African, Caribbean, and Indigenous communities impacted by the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The objective of Freedom Is No Game, is to create an installation that engages people of all ages, draws viewers in, and changes them. We know how “the game” was played. Now it is time to consider what are the positive moves, Canadians as individuals can make to continue the process of undoing the damage of the past and creating a better tomorrow? The installation, Freedom Is No Game, is one we hope can be featured and interacted with during Black History Month and National Indigenous Day for many years to come.

Coming Soon: Listen to Sam’Gwan’s CBC Radio’s Mainstreet interview about her project.

Watch Sam’Gwan’s presentation from her December 14, 2021 Fellows Talk.

Bruno R. Véras is a historian and cultural producer native of Recife, Brazil. His research interests include the African Diasporas, West African history, the transnational history of slavery, and the memory of slavery and reparations. His work also focuses and engages with public history, digital humanities art-education, and creative scholarship. He was the UNESCO consultant for African-Brazilian studies and museum exhibitions at FUNDAJ, Brazil (2014) and directed the awarded anti-racism art-educational projects in the Global South (2015). He produced and directed several documentaries, video series and podcasts in Egypt, Brazil, South Africa, Nigeria, and Canada. He also served as researcher and consultant in different experimental drawing exhibits (2016), theater plays based on biographies of enslaved Africans (2017), dancing performances (2018), and experimental fictional television series (2019). He has been contributing to the executive and advisory board of several research institutions such as The Harriet Tubman Institute (2017-2019), The Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean, CERLAC (2020-2021) and the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery (2021).

He had been awarded research funds from the Brazilian Ministry of Culture and Education (2014), UNESCO (2014), Government of Ontario, OGS (2017), York University (2018-2021), Mitacs (2020) and the Centre International de Recherches sur les Esclavages, CIRESC EHESS (2021). He has worked under the The Zdenka Volavka Art-History Research Fellowship (2020), the Paavo and Aino Lukkari Human Rights Award (2020, 2021) and the York University Anti-Black Racism Initiative Fund (2020-2021). He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in History at York University and the director for the art-based public history UNESCO project Fragments of Memory: Artistic Representations of Diaspora Lives (Slave Route Project, UNESCO).

Project title: The Canadian press on “Quant à ce qui concerne Bahia”: White fear, Diplomacy, Abolitionism, and the News Coverage of the Muslim African slave rebellions

Project summary: This project lies at the intersection of the Age of Revolutions and the global history of slavery in the complex political landscape of nineteenth-century Canada. My research will use post-colonial strategies to read the transnational links between slave rebellions, anti-slavery debates, colonial policies, and ideologies through the Canadian and international press. Journalists in the “Canadas” the “Maritimes,” and other parts of the world covered events such as Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), the Nat Turner Rebellion in the United States (1831) and the Sam Sharpe Rebellion-Baptists War in Jamaica (1831-32) in great detail, providing a window onto the views and political opinions of contemporaries. A combination of white fear of slave resistance in the Americas and support for the abolition of the slave trade drew Canadians’ attention to these events. My research will focus on news coverage about the Malê Uprising of 1835 in Bahia, Brazil, organized by enslaved Muslim Yoruba and Hausa people.

The research will focus on newspaper material available in four different Canadian provincial archives. The newspaper information from Canadian archives and repositories will be then curated and combined with primary references in eleven different languages about the event for further transnational contextualization. The methodology for the research, in addition to the formal exercise of searching in physical archives in Canada, also involves the use of data mining techniques in digital repositories.

Coming Soon: Listen to Bruno’s CBC Radio’s Mainstreet interview about his project.

Watch Bruno’s presentation from his December 2, 2021 Fellows Talk.