by Fred Cholowski
Festivals are a place of celebration and community, places in which people share their collective history or go to learn the collective history of others. Festivals, though do not happen overnight and there is a degree of importance that goes along with calling one’s event a festival. With the title of festival carries a responsibility to not only provide a “fun event” but to create something that will ultimately be culturally significant for the city and provide a platform for voices that may be hidden. Yasin and a trip around the city. While looking for photos and promotional material for the African Decent Festival that takes place in the city of Vancouver we were taken on a big adventure of sorts. The meeting began in Downtown but eventually migrated to city hall as our contact Yasin was going in to hand in and collect various documents for the ADF and decided, in the interest of time to have Jane and I tag along. The adventure itself provided a fascinating look into what exactly goes into creating a weeklong festival and the importance to everyone involved in creating something of that magnitude. We were taken through a journey across numerous city offices, and got to meet different city officers who help provide park space and funding towards the festival. Afterwards Yasin took us through all the various files that had to be made and meetings that had to happen in order to make the ADF a reality. The files, which included funding requests, declarations of importance, applications for park space, floor plans, and various proofs of concept were fascinating. It shows how much weight are placed on festivals as cultural spaces, not just by the folks who are creating the festival but by the city of Vancouver itself. We were told that in order to even hold a festival in Vancouver it must have a cultural relevance and hold a sort of importance to the growth of the city itself. This shows the value of what festivals can be in terms of not only creating a space of celebration but an archive of sorts of a cultural history that exists and is important in defining the cultural landscape of Vancouver. The other discovery that shows the importance of a festival were the changes of the ADF itself. The festival began solely as a music festival but in order to better encapsulate the diversity of blackness in Vancouver the festival changed in order to celebrate a cultural history as well as its musical history. Yasin claimed that this helped bring in different black communities who were not a part of the festival in its earlier incarnations. To me this shows the importance of the planning that goes into a festival. It shows that festivals that celebrate similar cultures can have different meanings to different folks, and its planning and execution are majorly important in encapsulating all the various communities throughout the city. The small experience of walking around the city with Yasin opened my eyes to the detail that goes into creating a festival and the importance that they carry not only to the cultures they represent but to the archiving of a sense of culture and community throughout the city. Festivals are vitally important in the study of blackness in Vancouver because they show the elements that the city deems important enough to be culturally relevant enough to be apart of the celebration of a festival as well as the work that has to go in to encapsulate the diverse communities that represent blackness in Vancouver. by Amanda Wan
The process of creating an archive is, in some ways, an exercise in forming a body of memory. In one sense I mean the formation of a body of knowledge, often done through the perceived connections that are implied between concepts and objects when they are placed together in an archive. In another sense, I mean the bodies that it takes to create what is to be remembered. Assembling memory for the archive: Interview with Olivier The idea of bodies as connected to the process of memory-making resonates with me as I engage in filming and editing interviews to be placed in this archive. Certain aesthetic and syntactic decisions trace through the video-editing process, decisions that will shape how the material is presented and archived. At an immediate level, we face matters of what an editor decides to retain or omit in the final version of the video; somewhat deeper, there are questions of how to play with time and space within the film, by our treatment of the temporal chronology in the raw footage, for example. We are all active agents in choosing what to include in this archive and in developing our respective justifications for it, of course, but filming and editing interviews imbues me with a unique form of agency that is enacted as I actively and consciously shape the archival material itself, a process that stands in relation to the (ostensibly) more passive act of selecting items and putting them onto this blog. The question of what kinds of things can be remembered through certain mediums intervenes as I edit our interview with Olivier, an attendee at the Caribbean Days Festival and part of our entry for that event. There is the somewhat direct memory of the questions and answers of the interview, of course. What else can we remember through the medium of the filmed archive? I begin to wonder what the layers of sound in this archived material can present. I am listening to the persistent rain in the background; Wendy's voice, interviewing on the left side of the camera; my own voice, a little louder in the footage because of where I'm seated when I jump in with my questions from immediately behind the camera. The pauses we take throughout the interview, as we form our thoughts and interact through nonverbal cues such as nodding or making inquisitive facial expressions. Through these aural inflections, sound begins to map a sense of spatial relations between us, the three people in the room. This memory does not contain just spoken questions and answers, but also the memory of the weather that day; the distance between each of us and our bodies, our voices; and the ways we must move and position ourselves in order to communicate with one another. At one point during a nonverbal pause, Olivier briefly stretches (09:58 mins.). This allows me to wonder about yet another realm of understanding and memory: physical sensation. Without projecting physical sensations onto this brief stretch—is it possible to archive physical (dis)comfort? The stretch aside: Olivier does not remember with intensity the exact sights and sounds of the Caribbean Days Festival, for example, but does remember the feeling of being overwhelmed, overstimulated, and tired that week. They also remember their response to the festival—the feeling of not being able to connect with their Haitian and Caribbean heritage—because of the ways in which white and non-Black people of colour took up space in the festival, both with their presence and their booths. To develop upon the question of archiving physical (dis)comfort, then, and to phrase it in a more specific manner: how do we archive and remember the embodied nature of the work that is done to produce knowledge and materials for an archive--not just the work done by the people consciously creating the structures that constitute an archive, or even by the people who spend hours sitting in physical collections or scrolling through digital repositories--but by the people who are being read/written into the archive as the subjects? Mapping memory and desire: Interview with Yasin As we map the festivals and the spaces they take up around Vancouver through collecting materials that come out of them, we see how the connections between memory, history, land, and space are woven into the fabrics of festivals and their origins. Hogan’s Alley, for example, seems indispensable to Yasin’s telling of the beginnings of the African Descent Festival. When we meet the director of the African Descent Festival next to the Jimi Hendrix shrine, he promptly takes us on a tour around the area, pointing to the grass several times and remarking on the music one would hear in the neighbourhood’s underground before the area was demolished to make room for the Georgia viaduct. When asked what inspired him to begin the festival, he recalls the desire to have a place to go to, noting the Sun Yat-Sen gardens available for the Chinese community in Vancouver and the work being done on campuses by groups like the African Awareness club at UBC, where he had been a student. This desire is quickly followed by accounts of logistics and revenue around festival planning, constraints that regulate how space is accessed and felt. After telling stories about the sleeping car porters who worked at Pacific Central station in front of Thornton Park and the park as a location for Black communities to gather, and citing the chance to "feel" the heritage as one of the reasons for choosing this location, Yasin reveals that it costs about $1500 to rent this space from the city of Vancouver, a fee that must be renewed every year. In this way, the desire to remember--to archive--the heritage of Blackness in Thornton Park through the development of an annual festival continues to be partially guided by problems of capital. Careful not to ground Blackness in Vancouver to physical spaces and historical events at the expense of transformative experiences such as desire and visions for futurity--how do we remember, in the archive, the corporeal limitations of spaces wrought by historically-enacted conditions of capitalism and colonialism, while remembering the possibilities of imagination and desire for new relationships to those very spaces? Works Cited “Caribbean Days Festival Interview - Olivier.” YouTube, uploaded by Vancouver Black Festivals Archive, 22 October 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG95-GhInkI by Jane Shi
To assemble an archive from the ground up, i.e. with our individual discretions as a group of students (even if this archive is assembled for a class within UBC), is also to reveal how structural power shapes feelings and embodiment within physical spaces. Festivals strike me as particularly apt, as sites of particular feelings (such as joy, excitement, nostalgia, surprise, anticipation) rooted in culture, arts, music, sensations, and memories; and bodies intermingling in public space. Put another way, because festivals are about celebration and uplifting communities, they bring bodies together to create specific kinds of feelings about the communities in question. However, what on the surface is celebratory can, through the process of archiving festivals, also reveal tensions, power dynamics, conflicts, the absence of structural support, and the loss of physical space. Digital Archival Work I realized that the blogging platform Weebly might be a valuable tool for organizing the archive because we can create posts for past dates, thus enabling us to situate each event/archived item on the date it occurred or was created, allowing visitors to time-travel within each festival’s blog page. This website also allows the average Internet user to navigate festivals one after another, as a directory for events in the city and as a window into each of their histories. Organized through blog posts, online mapping tools, and video interviews, the archive of Black festivals in the Lower Mainland can thus be understood both spatially (maps) and temporally (chronological events) through this popular blogging interface. As Internet-savvy archivists, we use one of Weebly’s portfolio themes to match the marketability that festival organizers promote through their own festival websites. Far more malleable and customizable than Wordpress, Weebly is nonetheless still a commercial enterprise that requires us to pay to add more features. Just like festivals, finances determine how extensive and elaborate our archive can be. (Racialized) Bodies within the Archive Instead of going into libraries, we sought to learn about our archive through festival organizers’ and attendees’ oral and written accounts. While interviewing Yasin and Ezeadi, I was aware of the ways that racialized bodies immediately learn to relate to one another in the process of archiving; that relationality is also part of the archive. At one point during the tour that Yasin gave us, he referred to Shirley Chan, an important player within Chinatown’s freeway fights, and conjured up an image of her presence in the space of Hogan’s Alley by pointing to me. “Just like you,” he said, comparing me to a young Shirley in her 20s. This embodied act of relating historically and contemporarily opens up more questions about the archive. For instance, when he shared about the lies told to the Black community in Hogan’s Alley and its subsequent displacement, I wondered: did Shirley and those who fought successfully against the freeway also work alongside their Black Canadian neighbours in Hogan’s Alley? If they didn't, why didn't they? What is the significance of the correspondence in time between the displacement of Hogan’s Alley, the start of the Powell Street Festival, and the period of successful anti-gentrification efforts for the Chinese Canadian community in Chinatown? Yasin shared with us the support that Powell Street Festival organizers have for African Descent Festival, though such connections do not seem readily obvious. Which narratives about Chinatown, Powell Street, and Hogan’s Alley get swallowed up when these relationships and potential relationships are not archived? With this reflection I hope to remember, alongside future readers, that embedded in the process of archiving Blackness is also the question of who does the archiving and how that changes what gets archived. Talking to Ezeadi reveals that festival organizers are always thinking about how the broader audience would receive the festival and how social justice can be achieved through teaching that audience about the culture the festival is trying to represent. For Ezeadi, organizing festivals is a particular way of resisting racial injustice, with the goal of teaching and sharing knowledge on African heritage. He noted that the term "Blackness" emerges from a response to racial violence that people of African heritage continue to endure and thus does not represent the vibrancy of cultures belonging to folks of African heritage and descent. Privileging the language of racial difference, he would argue, ultimately fails to capture unity between all people. He recalled a colleague in Berkeley who was studying the appearance of words in Japanese language that were exactly the same in the Igbo language. Relating the Festival as most importantly about speaking to and with the Indigenous hosts of this land, Ezeadi’s oral storytelling allows our archive to listen closely to the Black Atlantic in Canada, but also how its narratives and stories function globally. Even so, it is impossible to talk about Black vernacular culture (and in particular with Ezeadi, music), without talking about race. Throughout our interview (just like the interview with Yasin) Amanda and I’s bodies as racialized (and gendered) subjects are related to as points of reference for the cultural heritage being promoted within the festival. However, instead of racial difference, the focus is on sharing and teaching cultural traditions across communities. The festival is not just for people of African heritage; it is for us as well: Ezeadi noted that he expected us to come out to the festival's next events. Though I rarely find myself in Surrey, I remember nodding. Entangled Histories and the Limits of City Planning Towards the end of our interview with Olivier, they shared with us that while these festivals provide an opportunity for Black folks to come together and transform a physical space in the city, a permanent centre for Black folks in Vancouver is necessary. Even though Olivier has a specific experience of Blackness in Vancouver (being Haitian and Caribbean), the desire to uplift and celebrate Blackness more generally manifests through this permanent structure, specifically in Hogan’s Alley where the community was originally displaced. Each of the festival we archived, while temporally specific, attempt in some way to speak to that desire. Yasin’s walking tour of Hogan’s Alley—starting with Jimi Hendrix’s Shrine—led us to a deeper awareness of the neighbourhood currently known as the Downtown Eastside and why the festival is organized at Thornton Park every year. Yasin tells us that an archive is like a will, something to pass on to one’s grandchildren. But where the dead cannot tell us their exact wishes, the living have a responsibility to reimagine their ancestors’ desires. Thornton Park, while where formerly enslaved African Americans first came to stay in Vancouver in the early 1900s, is also the site of the Women’s Monument which memorializes the women killed in the Montreal Massacre and one of many spaces in the DTES where homeless and low-income people call home and living room. While Yasin, among many others, imagine an African Descent Heritage Centre where the Georgia viaducts are now, the Park does not explicitly point to that early history of Blackness in Vancouver until the active assertion by the African Descent Festival put on each year. Having once attended a Women Transforming City event where the history of the memorial statues were discussed, I recall that if this history had been brought up it was tangential to the discussion of the monument and the Irish Canadian one that the arts and feminist community objected to (for being too ‘phallic’). It’s hard to say what those who are no longer with us would have wanted, but regardless, it seems inevitable given city planning that different communities would vy for different outcomes for spaces. Nowhere does the sense of competition for space seem more obvious than at a developer’s open house that Wendy and I attended for a rezoning application of the building proposed at the site of the original Jimi Hendrix Shrine on Main and Union. One Tuesday, I was planning on visiting the Vancouver Art Gallery with Wendy. However, because she got on the bus late, I decided to drop by the Chinese Cultural Centre because I learned from Facebook that there was an open house for a building proposed in Hogan’s Alley. Upon arriving, I saw Yasin with a wooden display of photographs tabled outside in the lobby, away from the official open house (which was structured put on both by the developer and the city). Recalling that my roommate (who works at the Art Gallery) had told me that that day was the last day of the Monet exhibit, I phoned Wendy: “Hey maybe we should go to the Art Gallery later; it might be really busy right now!” The moment I arrived at the open house, I was immediately prompted to help out Chinese seniors who were filling out comment forms to the city about the proposed rezoning. While this development was part of Hogan’s Alley, it is also part of the broader issues of housing and affordability that low-income Chinese seniors face in the neighbourhood. I saw Shirley Chan with her dog; I also saw then by-election councillor candidate Pete Fry. After Wendy arrived at the Cultural Centre we spoke to my friend Mark Lee, a simultaneous translator. I took photographs of both the developer and the city’s boards, and pointed at the one that prompted us not to use abusive language. At one point I put on a sign that said “People before profits,” after a senior in the space handed it to me to wear. With Mark, we asked someone who worked for the developer a number of pointed questions about social housing and what it means to develop in this neighbourhood. After meeting with Yasin in person, however, it seemed that instead of ensuring that no condos are built in the space, one particular vision for the space is Vie’s Chicken and Steakhouse, something we would not have otherwise thought of. It makes me reflect, again, on the freeway fights as well as the potential for collaboration that does not always seem possible in the neighbourhood. Something struck me about how Yasin guided us through Hogan’s Alley. At one point, he crossed the street without checking both ways or waiting for us. We promptly j-walked, following him. Having a fear of cars, I only jaywalk if I am in a Chinese city because that is the only way to cross the street, but the impromptu walking tour demanded that I put my fear aside. Here, storytelling subverted the strategies of city planning and asserted the tactics of imagining history itself (à la Michel de Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life). If Vie’s Chicken and Steakhouse was a cultural and musical hub for the Black community, and across the street were where many Black folks lived, history remembers the space not as road for vehicles but as a street for foot-traffic and for the intimacy of everyday neighbourliness. Breaking the rules of city planning is the only way to reimagine Hogan’s Alley spatially. Archive of Distractions Such embodied work through city streets is vastly different than assembling the archive via this website. Browsing through the African Descent Festival’s website, I quickly find myself audibly gasping at the fact that Odera has done commissions for Beyonce and Solange. I excitedly look through their Black sailor moon series and wonder how much the average artist makes on Patreon (a former roommate is also an artist on Patreon). I find myself listening to Lillian Allen’s powerful dub poetry on youtube. I strain to recall when I had first met Jillian Christmas and remember all the times I heard her perform, instead. I recall the time when I attended Verses Festival of Words’ “Black Lives Matter Showcase,” where experiences of relating to lovers, God, and Black elders, and feelings of joy, grief, pride, and shame were spoken into life for the audience. I compare Maneo Mohale’s more recent poetry with her piece performed for Vancouver South African Film Festival, commemorating Nelson Mandela. In short, the archive is a place to recall your relationships to people, experiences, and places; the process of archiving them will always foreground certain memories and relationships over and privilege what the archivist already knows. Getting lost in the archive is really about finding what you already know and failing to see everything else that is there. Archiving Blackness through the Internet also acknowledges how awareness of festivals get circulated (though Ezeadi warns us against privileging social media over traditional means of event promotion) and how past festivals are archived. Even if physical spaces do not yet imagine the permanence of Blackness and its festivals in time and space, digital media--tangible and felt through our computers, laptops, iPhones, Androids, etc—does. Closing Thoughts Even though we were archiving festivals, we were also archiving potential reparations and dreams for the future. Not currently the time of year when these festivals happen, we were not able to experience what we were archiving ourselves, but were asked to imagine it through the subjects we encountered and the online archives we reassembled into ours. While the dream of a Black heritage space is still a dream, the way Blackness takes up space in the city is powerfully imagined through our map: Black festivals happen all over the Lower Mainland. To sum up, archiving Black festivals in Vancouver and the rest of the lower mainland has revealed that
by Ana Maria Fernandez archive
ˈärˌkīv/ noun 1. a collection of historical documents or records providing information about a place, institution, or group of people. Before this project, I’d never given much thought to archives. Frail paper documents in temperature controlled rooms, heavy boxes collecting dust in someone’s basement, and maybe even my mother’s family albums, were the extent of my associations to the word archive. With this project however, I realized there is an entire other side to the word archive, a second definition. It turns out it is also a verb— to archive, the act of archive-ing. While I always thought the most important part of an archive were its contents, the process itself of archiving revealed itself to me as the most critical. In this project I had to decide what was worth archiving, and by effect —gave value to something simply through the choice of deciding to archive it. With this new sense of power, and to use a cliché, responsibility, I was led to ask myself, who am I archiving for? I like to think that things inevitably loose context over time. Something that may seem redundant or superfluous right now, like writing “Vancouver, 2017” somewhere on this website, or titling this entry “Reflection”, may become a critical piece of information needed to decipher the contents of what may become an ancient artifact in the future. More so, it may be the key for a future audience (I’m thinking fifty, 200 years from now) to be able to understand and engage with this archive. In relation to archiving black festivals in Vancouver, my approach was to purposely archive things that today may seem ‘redundant’ or ‘obvious’. Precisely because information which is often taken for granted or common knowledge, is in turn most likely to be omitted, it is therefore, most easily forgotten and lost. An example is the publicity poster for the Vancouver Folk Music Festival. It contains the dates July 14th, 13th, 15th and 16th, but no year date. Of course at the time these posters where printed and distributed throughout the city, it was obvious they meant July 2017, but to a future audience, they would have absolutely no idea what year this festival took place in— a crucial piece of information. You’d be left trying to figure it out based on poster design choices or the list of artists performing. By including the year date in the archiving of this poster, we preserve the ‘obvious’ information that ironically is actually most vulnerable to loss. This lack of permanence is something many of the contents of our archive have in common— in particular forms of online media. For example, facebook and youtube accounts depend on constantly changing platforms. Their contents are most susceptible to loss in the simple press of a ‘delete’ button or the deactivation of an account. We chose to archive for example, a facebook event detailing Kevin Cameron’s performance at the Hogan’s Alley Poetry Series, because who knows if it will be available in the future. Festival websites are also in danger of a certain ‘page not found’ extinction. We made an effort to preserve these valuable websites by taking snapshots of their contents, and likewise providing context for them. As the archiving process took on the form of archiving online sources more and more, I was really struck by how transient the ‘matter’ of online media really is. This impermanence in turn added value and importance to the archiving work. In terms of learning all about black festivals in Vancouver I found this to be a really fun topic to learn about! Most significantly, it definitely widened my perspective of what constitutes as ‘Vancouver culture’. As an immigrant to Canada myself, my perception of Vancouver culture has always been pretty ambiguous. The variety, success and existence of these festivals has made me realize culture is not bound to place specificity. What I mean is that Caribbean or West African culture is just as much part of Vancouver culture, as walking the seawall or July 1st celebrations. In effect, culture may be displaced but that does not make it any less powerful. The black community of Vancouver is a part of Vancouver culture, even if they may not be the majority. It was inspiring to meet and interview those actively working towards sharing their own culture within Vancouver, like Yasin of the African Descent Festival. Looking forwards, I hope those that visit our archive, present and future, are able to perceive the vibrant presence of blackness in Vancouver—one that celebrate’s its culture through festivals— all around the city! By Wendy Addo
In class, several students expressed their dismay that sample archives that we were shown were “messy” and “chaotic”. Our professor pointed out to us that our positionalities inform the way we experienced the archive and its relative messiness or neatness. Indeed, a white privileged person who feels alienated from the beginning from an archive of blackness and the cacophony that is inherent in such an archive may have less patience with an archive format that does not readily yield itself to their intellectual mastery. In a different instance of a person “getting turned off” from the chaos of the archive, someone who struggles with ordering their thoughts due to a cognitive disability or condition may similarly experience the archive as too disorganized and frustrating to navigate but for different reasons. For our archive, we chose the format of a website, arguably, for those with access to computers and for whom the inherent layout of computers in and of themselves is not a barrier, one of the more accessible and navigable forms an archive can take. Websites can be quickly and easily searched, bookmarked, and navigated with the simple clicking of a few buttons. From the archivist’s perspective, content can be easily organized and “nested” and layered. It is also easier and faster for the archivist to put content aside for later and find it again in the process of archiving than it might be to do the same in a paper-based archive. As well, we are dealing with sensitive and precious matter, acting as caretakers of the black cultural inheritance that is black vernacular culture. The subject matter – which consists primarily of orature and some literature as well - is inherently caucophonous and polyphonic. What we have tried to do with this website is to impose some degree of order onto the messiness that is our uncurated content in order to honour the cacophonous content and provide some easy access points into the inherently messy world that is the archive. I archived the Hogan’s Alley Poetry Festival, Pan African Slam and the Surrey Fusion Festival. Thinking about the presentation of the archive, specifically in the poetry festival blog pages that I curated, and how the presentation of the archive orients the peruser towards what might otherwise be messy content, I return to the work of George Elliot Clarke and Kevan Anthony “Scruffmouth the Scribe” Cameron and their curatorship. This website picks up on George Elliot Clarke and Kevan Anthony “Scruffmouth the Scribe” Cameron’s project of preserving and enshrining black Canadian literary and oral culture. As Dr. Phanuel Antwi has noted, Clarke’s anthology, Fire on the Water, privileges the literariness of the works it presents over the sociological dimension of these works, in response to the fact that people often go to black writing and orature in search of sociological information. Clarke prefaces the anthology with a discussion of the importance of theology to Africadian culture and uses biblical allusions to books in the Bible to order the anthology. In doing so, he not only archives the letters and orature that he anthologizes, but he also canonizes the authors of these works and maps a constellation of black apostles. Cameron takes up this same project in organizing Pan African Slam and Hogan’s Alley Poetry Festival and archiving these festivals on YouTube. In a YouTube video archiving the material cultural remnants of the 6th annual Pan African Slam, titled “PAN AFRICAN SLAM 2013”, he writes, “We are honored that you took the time to connect the cosmic dots. We are all stars bursting with life force, forming communities of constellations.” Indeed, the name of the organizer of these events, “Black Dot and Roots Culture Collective”, highlights Cameron’s project of mapping and enshrining that is his organizing and archival work with the organization name’s reference to stars.Like the orature and literature in the Clarke Anthology, the festivals that Cameron organizes and the orature presented in these festivals are themselves archives of black journeying and experiences. For example, in, “Wendy ‘MOTION’ Brathwaite @ PAN AFRICAN SLAM 2014”, Wendy “MOTION” Braithewaite makes reference to Bob Marley and rap music and traces the origins of music to the origins of the world, the beating heart and the beating of drums in Africa; she says that the griot was the first MC. Her performance archives her own mediated musical journeying throughout the Black Atlantic. However, in contrast with the more active anthologizing work of Clarke and Cameron, we chose a rather more passive approach to archiving – letting the dates of the first public appearance or posting of the content that we present dictate the place of the content in the archive. As well, in all of the videos that we posted, we used the original descriptions written by their original posters on YouTube as captions. Using the original dates and original captions of the content we post honours the agency and the archival work of the original poster and enables them and their work to speak through our platform. Organizing the archive thusly draws attention to the dialogue that is going on between us and the other archivists from whom we draw. Indeed the unique thing about our archive is how dependent it in fact is on the other archives that it references and from which it draws. YouTube videos may be deleted. Similarly, links that are posted on the archive may expire. What is more, our archive also interacts with other archives as YouTube videos are already arranged into groupings with other YouTube videos by YouTube itself. As well, strangers can comment on the YouTube videos long after we link them to our website. By posting YouTube videos, we are putting our archive in dialogue with all of these different agencies. Furthermore, the passive and systematic manner in which we archive content, organizing it by the date of its original posting, contributes to a “professional” polished look to the website; as content is ordered and titled according to date, the systematized nature of the archive lends the navigability of a library to the archive. The website builder that we used adds a sleek, glossy finish to our collections. This, I argue, contributes to the work of honouring and enshrining the literature and orature that we present in something that is beautiful and lasting. While our website is perhaps passive in organizing, it is active in remembering. In multilayered feats of imaging, we actively remember the original occurrence of the events of the festivals and the buildup to them through the process of remembering their original archiving and invite our perusers to travel back in time with us. Although the date-based model that we use to systematize the archive may lend the appearance of objectivity to our archival work, we have taken other measures to centre our subjectivities as archivists. The inclusion of this journal section in which these reflective posts are found is one of them. As well, the chatty introduction to our archive on the home page of our website serves to call attention to the subjectivities of our perusers with the question, “What comes to mind when you think of Blackness in Vancouver?” This usage of direct address invites the peruser to situate themself in relation to the topic of the blog. The names of the authors of the blog and context in which the blog was created are also provided on the first page, calling attention to the subjective nature of archival work as well. The use of the blog format itself centres the subjective nature and the intimacy of the archival work. Compared to websites, blogs have a much more personal and amorphous format. They invite intimate interactions. Additionally, the decision to use article “clippings” instead of full articles evokes a scrapbookesque intimacy. As well, the titles of the vidoes in the format of “[date] [Name]’s Performance” also creates an intimacy and with the performer and reminds us that we are interacting with the art of real people. This is a much more intimate way of presenting the videos than titling them something more distant like, “A Performance of [Etc, Etc] by [So and So]”. The former presentation style indexes the name of the performance and the performance itself for people who have already attended it and are familiar with it. Thus, I have shown that our archiving work has given the archive enough structure to be navigable for and accessible to the general computer-literate and computer-accessing public and that it participates in a larger project of enshrining, preserving and reverently mapping Black culture in Canada. New cacophonies and polyphonics emerge as content is ordered and mapped. Works Cited Antwi, Phanuel. 19 September 2017, Buchanan D, Vancouver, B.C. Lecture. Clarke, George Elliot, editor. Fire on the Water: An Anthology of Black Nova Scotian Writing. Pottersfield Press, 1991. “PAN AFRICAN SLAM 2013” YouTube, uploaded by Scruffmouth, 3 January 2013,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXDRpX8BkMI. Vancouver Black Festivals Archive. Weebly, vancouverblackfestivalsarchive.weebly.com.Accessed 23 October 2017. “Wendy "MOTION" Brathwaite @ PAN AFRICAN SLAM 2014” YouTube, uploaded byScruffmouth, 9 December 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0hbuO6D45k. "slave (SLAV) n. slaves. A person who is owned by another person and can be sold by that person. A slave works without pay. There are no slaves in this country any more."
Stencilled onto a sidewalk curb at Union x Gore Street in Vancouver. |
JournalReflections on compiling and shaping this archive Writing from the unceded, ancestral, occupied territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people.
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