Utopian/Dystopian Representations of Race in the Canadian Imaginary: Amendments Performed by Poetry and the Visual Arts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Canada, as in other countries, there are hegemonic ideologies that erase from its national imaginary the experiences of peoples that have both suffered the consequences of discriminating policies and also contributed to its history in significant ways without acknowledgement. Building up from this notion of symbolic violence, my paper will examine how contemporary artwork by Black artists challenges entrenched ideas of Canadas colonial past imagined as a utopia. I will analyze specific examples that attempt to question and reshape mainstream utopic conceptions present in Canadian cultural memory.Some contemporary writers and visual artists make alterations on texts and images that represent white and non-white peoples within the context of a predominant Eurocentric legacy. These alterations have the potential to make (imaginary) amendments to the ways in which societies, geographies and histories have traditionally been expressed through nationalistic lenses, an expression that is usually coded within the utopic/dystopic polarity. A dialogue is created through this intersection of anxieties, and this conversation creates original visual and poetic spaces that faithfully render present-day racial dynamics and radically counteract a naturalized definition of history as a straight line of progress. I will look at how feelings of oppression and desires of liberation of Black peoples are embodied in several art installations and poems that affirm agency by transforming stereotyped bodies, books, photographs, colors, textures, or sounds, and, by extension, museums and touristic sights. I will especially focus on some visual artists that contributed to the exhibition HERE WE ARE HERE: Black Canadian Contemporary Art (2018) and on poets such as Afua Cooper and M. NourbeSe Philip. The iconic significations that utopia and dystopia lend to the decolonizing processes explored in these works enable insights into a received imagery of freedom, exoticism, and dreams, and also one of exploitation, isolation and imposed silences.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.042 | 0.097 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".