Beyond European Extractive Modernism: Appropriations of West- and Central-African Cultural Belongings in Paul-Émile Borduas' 1942 Gouaches
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis argues that the celebrated Québécois modernist Paul-Émile Borduas (1905-1960) appropriated West- and Central-African cultural belongings in five of his 1942 gouaches. Through popular literature including the surrealist magazine Minotaure, and exhibitions spaces such as the Musée d'ethnographie du Trocadéro and the Paul Guillaume Gallery in Paris, and the Exposition missionnaire and McGill Museums in Montréal, Borduas encountered the African cultural belongings he would eventually appropriate. The artist likely sought out these points of contact as a way to feed his interest in global Indigenous cultures. Using a post- and anti-colonial approach, this thesis highlights how influential literary and museological colonial channels were on the artist. The extractive nature of these channels places Borduas within a tradition of "extractive Modernism," pervasive in early twentieth-century European Modernism. While he was made aware of African cultural belongings in Paris, Borduas also took an interest in European art and likely adopted extractive Modernism as a way to assert his independence and originality in war time Québec. As well as engaging with global colonialisms, Borduas' appropriations can be placed in dialogue with local colonial legacies in Montréal. This thesis concludes that some of Borduas' 1942 gouaches are doubly transnational: first as they appropriate West- and Central African cultural belongings, and second as they inherit from European extractive Modernism. By placing Borduas at the intersection of these two themes, this thesis places Québec art history within global dynamics of colonialism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".