For the past several years, I have had the pleasure of thinking alongside Adrienne Huard about the possibilities and impossibilities of reparation in and through visual culture. We’ve been at work co-editing a special issue of the Journal of Visual Culture on this theme, which grew out of the conference “Reparative Frames: Visual Culture After Reconciliation,” co-organized with Carol Payne (Carleton University) and hosted by the Art Gallery of Ontario and OCAD University in 2019.
Imagining repair beyond its legal and financial frameworks, the special issue features a wide array of voices, both emerging and established, who consider the multiple registers of reparation and visual culture from various disciplinary and aesthetic vantage points. Many of our contributors also push back against the so-called “reparative turn,” offering alternative models for critical care through the lens of rupture, transgression, and restoration. I am incredibly grateful to our contributors, who include Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (Brown University), Susan Best (Queensland College of Art, Griffith University), Kimberly Juanita Brown (Dartmouth College), Tanya Lukin Linklater (artist), Peter Morin (OCAD University), Jade Nixon, Sefanit Habtom and Eve Tuck (University of Toronto), Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn (Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design and KTH Royal Institute of Technology), Nataleah Hunter-Young (Ryerson and York Universities), Dylan Robinson (Queen’s University), Maya Wilson-Sanchez (independent curator), Nishant Shahani (Washington State University), and Karen Strassler (Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York).
The special issue launches in April 2022, alongside an online roundtable discussion by the contributors. In assembling this volume, we were compelled by the important political and affective work that artists do in sensing and seeing reparation. We think, in particular, of the late Kwakwaka’wakw hereditary chief and carver Beau Dick’s act of cutting copper on the steps of the British Columbia legislature in 2013, and in front of the Canadian Parliament Buildings in 2014. This revival of a shaming ritual that is designed to instigate an apology helped to visualize the unfinished history of settler colonialism in Canada: an apology from the federal government never came. In this way, Dick’s intervention exposed a break or cut that has yet to be repaired.
As Adrienne and I write in our editorial introduction:
“This special double issue of the Journal of Visual Culture examines the critical role art and aesthetics play in processes of reparation. Invoking reparation in its multiple registers—as an act of repair, as the part that has been repaired, as a process of healing an injury, and as an act of justice—the essays and artist projects assembled in this issue move beyond the dominant juridical or financial definitions of reparations to think and sense reparation as a singular verb: an active process oriented towards the future that does not lose sight of the ongoing “liveness” of the colonial past.
When, three years ago, we invited contributors to imagine visual culture in and as a form of reparation, it was out of a sense of deep frustration with the ways that the language of reconciliation and decolonization had been taken up in the academy, the nation state, and the wider neoliberal institution of the university: as mere metaphor, as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang warn in their path-breaking essay.[1] But we also turned to repair out of a sense of possibility: that turning to reparation would enable us to attend to the past, and imagine the future, differently. The language of reconciliation, as Metis artist, curator and scholar David Garneau writes, “presses into our minds a false understanding of our past and constricts our collective sense of the future.”[2] Discourses of reparation, on the other hand, “articulate a grammar of futurity,” as Zoé Samudzi argues, that open up the necessity, and possibility, of unsettled futures.[3] Or, as David L. Eng proposes, “in the conceptual grammar of psychoanalysis, reparation functions more as a verb” in the face of reconciliation’s noun, evoking “a continuous process of violence and repair.”[4]
Understanding artworks as world-making intersubjective encounters, this special issue of the Journal of Visual Culture proposes that visual culture allows us to sense, to feel, and to enact reparation. Building on the work of cultural anthropologist Deborah A. Thomas, we frame visual culture as part of the “archives of affect” that, “as technologies of deep recognition, can cultivate a sense of mutuality that not only exposes complicity but also demands collective accountability.”[5]
To this end, we asked the contributors to this special double issue, how might aesthetic encounters offer us the space to imagine creating reparation differently? How does a reparative framework enable artists, curators, scholars, and visual activists to better understand the role images play in intervening in asymmetrical systems of power, in undoing the regime-made disasters of state sovereignty, and in creating an unsettled future? How has visual culture been complicit in structures of colonial violence, and conversely, how might it be used to make restitution, return or repair possible?”
[1] Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1.1 (2012), pp. 1-40.
[2] David Garneau, “Imaginary Spaces of Conciliation and Reconciliation: Art, Curation, and Healing,” Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action in and beyond The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Edited by Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin, Wilfrid Laurier University Press (2016): 1-27, 30.
[3] Zoé Samudzi, “Reparative Futurities: Thinking from the Ovaherero and Nama Colonial Genocide,” The Funambulist: Politics of Space and Bodies 30 (July/August 2020): 30–35, 30.
[4] David L. Eng, “Reparations and the human,” Profession (Modern Language Association), March 2014: https://profession.mla.org/reparations-and-the-human/, original emphasis.
[5] Deborah A. Thomas, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 7.
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