Canadian Studies Announcements

In This Issue:

Program News

• Hildebrand Fellow Claire Chun explores how artist Jin-me Yoon illuminates complexities of Asian-Canadian identity

Upcoming Events

• Sodomy and Settler Self-Government in the Canadian Colonies
• Student Research Showcase: Canadian Identities in Art

External Events

• Emerging Morphological Patterns in Non-Binary French Noun Formation
• Michael Ondaatje: A Year of Last Things: Poems

PROGRAM NEWS

Hildebrand Fellow Claire Chun Explores How Artist Jin-me Yoon Illuminates Complexities of Asian-Canadian Identity

Claire Chun is a PhD candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation research examines the ways that Asian North American diasporic art and media critically engage issues of settler colonial and militarized imperial violence. Claire received a 2023 Hildebrand Graduate Research Fellowship to conduct fieldwork in Canada, examining how artists complicate notions of “Asianness” and grapple with the complexities of living and working in a settler-colonial society.

With the generous support of the Canadian Studies Program, I conducted four weeks of fieldwork in Vancouver and Toronto during Summer 2023. As part of my ongoing research on Korean diasporic visual cultures, I wanted to explore how Asian Canadian visual culture negotiates and is animated by histories of settler, imperial, and environmental violence alongside ongoing Indigenous sovereignty struggles.

Through archival research, place-based observations, and site visits, my field research set out to examine, in Iyko Day’s words, “whether it is possible to view Asian Canada as a social category that is part of a distinctly Canadian racial formation, one that cannot be seen through the US prism of race”. In other words, my research asks: What can Asian Canadian aesthetic practices teach us about the particularities of Canadian racial formation? And how might a critical interrogation of Canadian race-making histories interrupt Asian “settler moves to innocence” as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang put it?

To begin answering these questions, I first traveled to Toronto where I visited and viewed Korea-born and Vancouver-based artist Jin-me Yoon’s retrospective at The Image Centre, which commemorated her 2023 Scotiabank Photography Award win. It was an incredibly significant and timely exhibition that shifted the very terms of my later fieldwork in Vancouver. At Yoon’s retrospective, I was able to view her monumental photographic portrait series, A Group of Sixty-Seven (1996) and other seminal works alongside new art. My trip to The Image Centre allowed me to take stock of my own viewing reactions as well as those of other visitors to the gallery space. While in Toronto viewing Yoon’s exhibition on the traditional territories of the Anishinaabeg, the Haudenosaunee, the Mississaugas, and the Wendat peoples, I traced the ways that Yoon’s artistic career has been in dialogue with the ongoing histories of Asian settler colonialism and Asian Canadian diasporic cultural production.

This participatory viewing experience informed and shaped the field research I did in Vancouver the following month. After viewing Jin-me Yoon’s retrospective, I revised the scope of my archive by narrowing my textual analysis to Yoon’s body of work. Through a trained focus on selected artworks, I heightened my attention to the place-based politics of her aesthetic practice. In Vancouver, I visited the Maplewood Flats Conservation Area, located within the unceded territory of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, which is also at the center of Yoon’s recent works, including Dreaming Birds Know No Borders (2021) and Becoming Crane (Pacific Flyways) (2022). I spent time walking along the trails, and observing how the conservation area relates to the looming Burnaby Refinery, located right across Burrard Inlet. I also spent time at the specific site of Yoon’s Becoming Crane series, because I felt it was important to experience Yoon’s work as an animating force where nature and the environment are collaborative actors and participants.

This focus on the place-based specificity of Yoon’s work heightened my attention to the cultural and ecological significance of Western Canada in shaping settler colonial frontier-building fantasies and tourism projects in the late nineteenth century. I followed this line of inquiry to the archives. At the Wallace B. Chung and Madeline H. Chung Collection at the University of British Columbia, I closely examined pre-war tourism materials from the Canadian Pacific Railway Company. My research in the archives provided me with the historical context needed to comprehensively grapple with the stakes of Yoon’s work, specifically Souvenirs of the Self (1991), Long View (2017), and Testing Ground (2019), which directly address how the settler colonial logics of Canadian tourism obscure the ongoing transpacific violences that link the militarized geographies of Korea and Canada together.

My field research in Canada ultimately served as a major step not only in my methodological considerations of how to bring place-based fieldwork, archival research, and close readings of visual art together, but also in my critical exploration of how Asian Canadian artists grapple with histories of diasporic displacement and migration in relation to ongoing settler, imperial, and environmental contestations.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Sodomy and Settler Self-Government in the Canadian Colonies

Tues., April 16 | 12:30 pm | 223 Philosophy Hall | RSVP

This talk will explore the history of anti-sodomy legislation and its historical consequences in early 19th-century Canada. It argues that the new anti-sodomy statutes sanctioned by the then-new United Province of Canada in 1841 and 1842 reveal an unsettled understanding of the implications of queerness upon settler-colonial manhood. It highlights the complexities surrounding the anti-sodomy debates and their relation to the 1842 capital sodomy trials of Samuel Moore and Patrick Kelly. While the shifting sexual politics of the empire underscores an emerging consensus among colonial legislators that perceived queer sex and individuals as a threat to the colonial project, the cases of Moore and Kelly and Governor General Bagot’s moderate response demonstrate that dissenting voices did exist. By contextualizing these events within a broader trans-imperial framework, the talk will reveal competing understandings of same-gender sex, highlight the intersections of power and privilege, and expose efforts to orient the sexual structures of settler society in 1840s Canada toward straightness.

About the Speaker

Dr. Jarett Henderson is a lecturer in the Department of History at UC Santa Barbara, where he coordinates the Gender + Sexualities Research Cluster. His research explores the history of gender and sexuality in Canada and the wider British Empire. Dr. Henderson earned his PhD in Canadian history from York University in Toronto, and his MA and BA in history from the University of Manitoba. Before arriving in California, Dr. Henderson was an associate professor of history at Mount Royal University in Calgary. His current book project, Unnatural Sex and Uncivil Subjects: A Queer History of Straight Settler State Making in Early Canada, examines the debates over the implementation of white settler self-government in the Canadian colonies alongside efforts to re-criminalize sex between men in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Tues., April 30 | 12:30 pm | 223 Philosophy Hall | RSVP

Learn about the research Canadian Studies funds through our Edward E. Hildebrand Graduate Research Fellowships, as recipients present overviews of their projects. This panel will explore how Canadian artists grapple with themes of “identity” in their work.

“Settler Colonial Wellness Fantasies and Transpacific Korean Diasporic Critique”

Claire Chun, PhD candidate, Ethnic Studies

Claire’s research explores how modern conceptualizations of “Korean” and “Asian” beauty, wellness, and aesthetics are shaped by overlapping forces of militarism, tourism, and humanitarianism. Her Hildebrand Fellowship field research in Toronto and Vancouver examined how Korea-born and Vancouver-based artist Jin-me Yoon’s work addresses and responds to ongoing colonial frontier-building violences that link the transpacific militarized geographies of Korea and Western Canada together.

“Seeking Sweet Beaver: On the Hunt for Joyce Wieland’s Canadian Nationalist Musk”

Madeleine Morris, PhD student, History of Art

Last summer, Madeleine traveled to three Canadian cities to track Canadian nationalist artist Joyce Wieland’s olfactory work Sweet Beaver. Looking at the context of Wieland’s 1971 exhibition True Patriot Love, Madeleine accessed archival documents to examine the use of the sensory in her exhibition. At Canadian art institutions, she also studied artworks by Group of Seven father Tom Thomson, a point of obsession for Wieland and important link for her ecocritical understanding of landscape amid her concerns over Canadian national identity that incorporated both anglophone and francophone Canadians.

EXTERNAL EVENTS

Emerging Morphological Patterns in Non-Binary French Noun Formation

Wednesday, April 17 | 11:30 am PT | Online | RSVP

Canadian Studies is pleased to announce that our Hildebrand Fellow Jennifer Kaplan will give a talk as part of the “Populations Rendered ‘Surplus’ in Canada” series, sponsored by the Center for Canadian-American Studies at Western Washington University. Jennifer is a fourth-year PhD student in the Romance Languages and Literatures Program at UC Berkeley. Her work focuses on queer linguistics, with special attention to the evolving use of inclusive, non-binary, and neutral language in Romance languages. She has published on the competing morphological systems of inclusive French; her current work is focused on language attitudes among trans, non-binary, and genderqueer Montrealers.

Michael Ondaatje: A Year of Last Things: Poems

Wed., Apr. 17 | 7:00 pm | San Rafael, CA | Tickets

Acclaimed Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje will visit the Bay Area this month to talk about his new poetry collection, A Year of Last Things. One of the Globe and Mail’s most anticipated books of 2024, the collection is Ondaatje’s long-awaited return to poetry. In pieces that are sometimes witty, sometimes moving, and always wise, we journey back through time by way of alchemical leaps, unearthing writings by revered masters, moments of shared tenderness, and the abandoned landscapes we hold on to to rediscover the influence of every border crossed. From Sri Lanka to the California coast and his beloved Canadian rivers, Ondaatje casts a brilliant eye that merges memory with the present, in the way memory as the distant shores of art and lost friends continue to influence everything that surrounds him.

This event is hosted by the Institute for Leadership Studies at Dominican University of California and Book Passage. A copy of the book will be included with ticket purchase.

Canadian Studies Program

213 Philosophy Hall #2308

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