Queer love in the archive (the case of Casimir Carter): Materializing familial forgetting

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Speculative Fiction, Expansive Literacies, and Futurities

Abstract

This paper explores archival letters and photos detailing an intimate relationship (and lasting friendship) between a professor of English and Casimir Carter, one of the founding members of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. Though these letters present a beautiful and haunting narrative of queer love, Casimir was also my mom’s uncle, and a family figure I have long identified with, despite the fact that, as these letters reveal, much of his personal life was kept hidden. Recognizing that the silences in our (individual/collective) histories can sometimes be the loudest voices of all, I argue that to even begin to sense such secret sounds requires acts of radical restructure, of both ourselves and the forms of representation and languages we use.

Author

• David Lewkowich, University of Alberta