Jamaican Diasporic Counter-Archives: Performative Archival Imaginings In Ontario, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The colonial foundation of institutional archives in this place called Canada preserved records that narrated the nation as White, patriarchal, and capitalist. In this context, scribal and audiovisual records made by the elite were prioritized. The marginalization of Indigenous peoples, Black peoples, and other racialized peoples in society is well documented by the absence of governmental records, diaries, newspaper clippings, and analogue and digital media made by people from these communities. What documents do exist overwhelmingly preserve and reinforce harmful accounts from this colonial perspective. The central inquiry in this dissertation is how archival practices might challenge colonial frameworks and architectures. Drawing parallels between Indigenous definitions of “archives” and their methods of historical preservation, and the methods used by Jamaicans who descend primarily from indigenous peoples in Africa, this research-creation project asks an ontological question: What are archives (the records) in the Jamaican diaspora in Canada? Noting the performative nature of the community’s records, I ask further: What is an archives (repository) of the Jamaican diaspora—its architecture and its functional role? Anchored by critical archival frameworks and a Black feminist lens, I engage in Caribbean-inflected participatory research-creation to develop a counter-archive of Jamaican Canadians in Ontario, Canada. The research creation methodology integrates traditional archival research, interviews informed by Caribbean “liming and ole talk” and “groundings” practices, and the (re)use of audiovisual media through remediation and process cinema. The resulting archive includes both material and embodied forms of knowledge—stories, gestures, songs, and other expressions of cultural memory, all of which were digitized and made accessible through a media sculpture, NansiRoachy, which functions as the architectural support and organizational repository for these records. The artistic treatment of these media archives underscores the importance of incorporating art and aesthetics within the Jamaican/Black Caribbean embodied archive since it fosters a restorative, healing process. This research advances a Black archival practice that acknowledges the performative, embodied, mobile, community-oriented, and digital nature of these records, attributes which shape the repository that supports them. Finally, I advocate for the unsettling of colonial concepts of property and geographically fixed institutions by designing an adaptable, mobile, and vernacular architecture that can travel to different community locations to facilitate the sharing and augmentation of these records within the spaces of the communities they represent.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.052 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".