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Endurant Bodies/Atmospheric Borders: Race, Indigeneity, and Transmedia Art in Contemporary Canada

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Endurant Bodies/Atmospheric Borders: Race, Indigeneity, and Transmedia Art in Contemporary Canada Endurant Bodies/Atmospheric Borders: Race, Indigeneity, and Transmedia Art in Contemporary Canada Tyler Morgenstern A Thesis in The Department of Communication Studies Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts (Media Studies) at Concordia University Montreal, Quebec, Canada April 2015 © Tyler Morgenstern, 2015 iii iii ABSTRACT Endurant Bodies/Atmospheric Borders: Race, Indigeneity, and Transmedia Art in Contemporary Canada Tyler Morgenstern Interrogating post-9/11 shifts in the institutional and discursive organization of policing and incarceration capacities, state surveillance practices, and citizenship and immigration policy, this work argues that the contemporary Canadian state manages the boundary between the (normatively white) social body it names and its Indigenous and racialized Others by way of an atmospheric bordering regime. An ambient system of disciplinary pressures that overreaches the state’s territorial limits, this regime functions as a technology, simultaneously representational and irreducibly material, for moving bodies through and removing bodies from the state by consolidating and ascribing, to some bodies more than others, particular forms of racial and Indigenous difference – interrelated and co-constitutive, yet never strictly equivalent. Through this process, racialized and Indigenous bodies are variously configured as strange, backward, and contaminating; as ‘points of tension’ that, for threatening to rend a “shared atmosphere” (Ahmed, 2014, para. 15) of national belonging, are targeted for exclusion, expulsion, and elimination. While tracing how these dynamics weave through specific discursive artefacts (policy documents, press releases, news reports, legal proceedings, and governmental pronouncements), I also emphasize how critical representational practices might hold open the possibility of contestation. To this end, I turn to the work of four contemporary Indigenous and racialized artists working in Canada, exploring how their transmedial practices recast our embodied encounters with difference, and help us to grasp at ways of being in touch with o/Others across and against the racial and (settler) colonial logics embedded in the labour of atmospheric bordering. iv Acknowledgements: This research was conceived and completed primarily on occupied Mohawk territory, in a place now known as Montreal, Quebec. Moreover, it has been deeply informed by many years spent living, working, and studying on unceded and/or occupied Coast Salish, Okanagan, Algonquin, and Tohono O’odham territory. I offer my sincere gratitude to these nations and communities for accommodating my likely unwilled presence on their lands. I do not take this (perhaps strained) welcome lightly. It seems the smallest of gestures, but I offer the following pages to you openly, and in a spirit of thanks, reciprocity, and accountability. Similarly, I cannot overestimate the contributions of my thesis supervisor, Dr. Krista Geneviève Lynes, to whom I dedicate this work. Dr. Lynes’ intellectual generosity, remarkable patience, and challenging thinking run through this document, beginning to end. Immense thanks are due as well to my second reader, Dr. Peter C. van Wyck, who from the very earliest moments of my affiliation with Concordia University has been nothing but encouraging in the utmost. Much of what follows is the inheritance of Dr. van Wyck’s rare and moving commitment to both politics and poetics. To Daniel Guadagnolo, Sharon Stein, Farah Atoui, Maggie MacAulay, Ryan Conrad, and Ian Alan Paul – my stalwart colleagues and intellectual allies – I owe everything, not least of all my passion for this work. And to the faculty and staff of the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University, I owe my sincerest gratitude. Special thanks are reserved for Dr. Charles Acland and Dr. Monika Kin Gagnon, not only for the assistance they have offered me throughout this project, but also for their outstanding commitment to their students, their programs, and their pedagogy. This project, finally, was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, to whom I extend my humble thanks. There are, of course, countless others who deserve acknowledgement, but brevity demands that I name only a few here: Dr. Stuart Poyntz, Dr. Kathi Cross, Dr. Zoë Druick, Dr. Fiona Jeffries, Allison Robins, Jennifer Gibson, Stephen Irving, Amanda McCuaig, Katie Stewart, Anna Pringle, Rachel MacNeill, Pierson Browne, Brietta O’Leary, Alex Lussier-Craig, Daniel Zomparelli, Braden Lemaire, Matthew Greaves, Emily Cooley, Miranda Martini, and Lindsay Brown. My most sincere appreciation to you all. And to my family – inherited and chosen – all of my love, care, and gratitude. For those who struggle. v TABLE OF CONTENTS: Introduction: Restless Edges.……………………………………………………………………1 An Atmospheric Border………………………………………………….. 4 Pushing the Border Out……………………………………………………8 The Essays……………………………………………………………….12 Notes on Method…………………………………………………………15 Chapter 1: Performing an “Elsewhere in the Here:” Atmospheric Bordering, Incarceration, and Gendered Abandonment in Contemporary Canada..…………………..……………….21 Race, Space, and Gender in Settler-Colonial States……………………..23 Policing, Incarceration, and the Familiar-Familial….………………….. 26 Performing Abandonment………………………………………………..31 An Elsewhere in the h/Here……………………………………………..39 Chapter 2: Endurance in/as Error: Indigenous Cultural Transmission Against Settler State Surveillance in (And) Other Echoes .………..……..…………………………………………..44 Settler State Surveillance and Atmospheric Bordering…………………..46 Surveillance, Indigeneity, and the Portrait……………………………….50 Error, Echo, Exile, Endurance……….…………………………………..54 “place to place from time to time”……………………………………….60 Chapter 3: From Strange Encounters to Stranger Intimacy: Touching (an) Otherwise in FIRE/FIRE………..…………………………………………………………………………….65 Technologies of Estrangement…………….……………………………..67 Historical Roots/Routes………………………………………………….71 Towards a Stranger Intimacy…………………………………………….75 Claims……………………………………………………………………82 Conclusion: For Complicated Beginnings…………………………………………………….88 Comprehensive Bibliography……….…………………………………………………………94 Mediography…………………………………………………………………………………..104 Endurant Bodies/Atmospheric Borders !1 Introduction: Restless Edges To write of the border, Gloria Anzaldùa claims in 1987, is to undertake the difficult work of centring an edge; to place at very the core of one’s critical efforts precisely those experiences, phenomena, and epistemologies presumed to live at the periphery of a given social world. And it is to account as well, Anzaldùa suggests, for how the border lives not simply as an abstraction inscribed across an empty territory, but also in the very bodies of those who would traverse it, coming to rest in and on the flesh itself: etched into the skin, carried on the back, a wound that refuses to heal. For Anzaldùa, this is not a merely diagnostic labour. It is, rather, a transformative one: a striving both for a different way of living and a critical consciousness that does not abide the violent, essentialist sifting out of self from o/Other, here from there, physical from metaphysical. It is less a methodology than a world-making practice that attempts to nourish non-coercive encounters within and across difference: “the new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity…Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else” (p. 101, my emphasis). Wary, of course, of its specificity to the US-Mexico borderlands from which she wrote, this project began as an effort to think Anzaldùa’s challenge in relation to another, notably less-studied site of geopolitical cleavage, one that cuts much closer to my own geographies: the Canada-United States border. In particular, I was interested in the sweeping discursive, technical, and institutional renovation it underwent in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks; how swiftly it was transformed from the world’s longest (so-called) undefended border into the world’s longest secure border (Conway & Pasch, 2013; Roberts & Stirrup, 2013). In what, I wanted to ask, did this different sort of ‘edge’ consist? What legal frameworks, technical capacities, and discursive and representational strategies were involved in its production? And, more importantly, how has it impinged upon the lives and bodies of those who would traverse and contest it? Those whose very movements, socialities, subjectivities, and corpo-realities seem to disrupt its integrity? Given, for instance, the virulent racism that saturates so much post-9/11 North American political discourse and visual culture (see Puar, 2007, 2002; Thobani, 2007; Baaba Folson & Park, 2004), how has the securitization of the 49th Parallel produced new configurations of racial difference – Endurant Bodies/Atmospheric Borders !2 or modified existing ones – and how have these shifts conditioned the movement of racialized migrants into, through, and out of the space of the Canadian state? How are these dynamics, moreover, ensconced within the ongoing exercise of settler- colonial rule in Canada, a form of governance that involves not only “the summary liquidation of Indigenous people” and “the dissolution of native societies,” but also the concomitant erection of “a new colonial society on the expropriated land base” (Wolfe, 2006, p. 338)? What does it mean to securitize a border in the interest of regulating the mobility of racialized migrants
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