Black Queer Arts as Archive

• In Event: Black Queer World-Making and the Pursuit of Truth in Educational Research

Abstract

Documenting the life of queer blackness is a labor of love that challenges and disrupts normative, scholarly constructions of truth and society’s pervasive ideology of itself. This paper presentation seeks to affirm Black queer life in Canada through community arts that speak to the futurities of queerness and blackness that long for epistemic value and accessibility in our modern context while understanding the cultural development and historical relevance of simply, being. The author will discuss and provide examples of archiving queer blackness through cultural productions by Black queer creators, which he/they explains is about building a dialectic between the past, present and future. Specific cultural productions to be discussed include the documentary film Our Dance of Revolution directed by Phillip Pike, Picasso’s Black Canvas, a verbatim theatre piece about the lives of young Black gay men in Toronto, and Legacies in Motion, a Black queer Toronto archival project. By analyzing these sources, the author takes up AERA President Richard Milner’s charge to consider “alternative modes of research dissemination” (2022, para. 6)—in this case, documentary film, theatre production, and community archives—as he/they explore Black queer worldmaking as a innovative form of truth-telling. In conclusion, the author considers the functions of Black queer arts as archive, the emotions that archives activate, the memories dregged up and forgotten, and the ways in which cultural productions are a vehicle for dialoguing about the past and creating a future.

Author

• Lance Trevor McCready, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author