Abstract
Defining reparation
reparation,
– The act of fixing parts of an object or structure to keep it in repair, or of restoring an object or structure to good condition by making repairs
– A part that has been repaired
– Healing, especially of an injury
– The action of making amends for a wrong or harm done by providing payment or other assistance to the wronged party
This themed issue of
When, 3 years ago, we invited contributors to imagine visual culture
But our interest in the political, and aesthetic, possibilities of reparation was motivated by 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 (2012) warn in their path-breaking article. We turned, in other words, thus to repair out of a sense of possibility: that reparation would enable us to attend to the past, and imagine the future, differently. We looked to move beyond the language of reconciliation which, as Métis artist, curator and scholar David Garneau (2016: 30) writes, ‘presses into our minds a false understanding of our past and constricts our collective sense of the future’. Discourses of reparation, on the other hand, ‘articulate a grammar of futurity’, as Zoé Samudzi (2020: 30, 30–35) argues, that opens up the necessity, and possibility, of unsettled futures. Further, as David L Eng (2014) proposes, ‘in the conceptual grammar of psychoanalysis,
Understanding artworks as world-making intersubjective encounters, this themed issue of
To this end, we asked the contributors to this themed issue: How might aesthetic encounters offer us the place and space to imagine creating reparation differently? How does a reparative framework enable artists, curators, scholars, and visual activists to better understand the role visuality plays 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?
And yet, to speak of repair in the present moment feels like an impossibility. Over the course of writing this introductory essay, the historical and material facts of the damage caused by settler colonialism and trans atlantic slavery returned to us again and again. The murders by police of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, the suspicious death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet in Toronto in May 2020 – and Black Lives Matter’s mobilization efforts in response – made visual the atmosphere of anti-Black violence that saturates everything, much like the weather, as Christina Sharpe (2016) argues. The Covid-19 pandemic illuminated the precarities of health care access that already determine who is worthy of repair and restitution, and who is disposable, especially in Asia and the global south, while the ongoing occupation of Palestine reached new heights of militarized violence that targeted civilians, and particularly children. Closer to home for us, as an Indigenous and white settler scholar working in so-called Canada, the announcement that the remains of 215 children had been identified in a mass burial site at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in Tk' emlúps te Secwépemc territory, followed by another 751 unmarked graves found by the Cowessess First Nation on the grounds of the closed Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan in 2021 – only a small fraction of the thousands of Indigenous children we know did not come home from these genocidal institutions – have been violent reminders of the unfinished history, and ongoing nature, of settler colonialism in North America.
Following the announcement of the mass grave of 215 children found near Kamloops on 27 May 2021, Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, stated, ‘It is important to raise awareness and provide education on this dark chapter of our country’s history.’ 1 His remarks implied that the detrimental effects of residential schools are simply a fleeting moment in this country’s history, failing to acknowledge the continuation of intergenerational trauma, the rising representation of Indigenous peoples in foster care and carceral systems, medical discrimination, police violence, and the national crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Trans and Two-Spirit people. When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) published its final report on the legacies of the Indian Residential School System in 2015, it issued 94 Calls to Action in an attempt to facilitate the process of repair between settler and Indigenous relations. By 2021, it was revealed that merely 13 of these actions were put into place (see Nardi, 2021). And while the TRC report implies that repair can be attained, passive inaction on the part of the settler state suggests the act of reparation is framed here under the guise of a ‘compulsory’ rather than a genuine desire to make repair.
The impossibility of reparations
Calls for reparations from survivors and victims are equally plagued by conceptual, practical, and ethical impossibilities. In North America, in particular, reparation claims are frequently framed through the language of neoliberal capitalist ‘debt’ owed to unwaged workers (in the case of the formerly enslaved), or to those whose lands were exploited to turn a profit that the custodians of those territories never received (in the case of Indigenous peoples). For those of us who understand capitalism as the direct result of a racial colonial logic of extraction and appropriation, it is no wonder that Indigenous, Black, diasporic and anti-colonial scholars and activists are reluctant to take up these economic and legal justifications for reparations (see Cooper, 2012). Other calls for reparations have been framed in the 20th-century terms of human rights violations, including genocide, with varied results. Victims of the Holocaust, those exposed to nuclear radiation by the US government, some Indigenous survivors of residential schools in North America, and Japanese Americans and Canadians interned during the Second World War have successfully received payments from national governments, for instance, but only through the troubling criteria of humanism advanced through Enlightenment discourse and solidified in the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948, which grants some bodies the status of the human while excluding others. 2 As Tuck and Yang (2012: 29) note, state reparations projects often re-enact the historical violence of settler colonialism when, for instance, ‘the U.S. government promised 40 acres of Indian land as reparations for plantation slavery’, 3 or when the Canadian state offered monetary compensation to survivors of Indian Residential Schools, but only in exchange for their video-recorded testimony: testimony which required a re-performance of their injury, ostensibly to allow for the nation-state’s absolution. As Garneau (2016: 23–24) argues, victims’ testimonies recorded for the TRC are steeped in ‘Western religious ideology (the Catholic rite of reconciliation and Christian concepts of forgiveness), implying that the process of forgiving the Canadian settler state will allow for prosperous and progressive relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.’
Even when they are legally successful, national reparation schemes pay victims, the injured, and their descendants on the ‘backward-looking grounds of corrective justice’ rather than the forward-looking urgencies of decolonization and liberation (Posner and Vermeule, 2003: 691). Anxious to resolve and move past historical injury, and to call colonialism ‘finished’, these state-organized reparation schemes leap over the acknowledgment of ongoing violence and move directly to implementation, thereby denying the ongoing live-ness of colonial histories for those most impacted by them (Coates, 2014). As philosopher Naomi Zack writes, ‘The discourse of reparations creates dialogues about responsibility that go beyond actions in the life spans of contemporaries’ (Zack, 2003: 141). For those settlers uninterested in, or unwilling to take responsibility for, multigenerational violence – including violence that will be done in the future – such a project would indeed seem impossible. 4 ‘The problem of reparations has never been practicality’, Ta-Nehisi Coates (2014) writes in his multi-part investigation into reparations for slavery in the United States: ‘It has always been the awesome ghosts of history.’ Just as troublingly, although the impetus behind demands for reparations is almost always to redress racial colonial violence, these demands often end up reinforcing the false biological taxonomy of race by emphasizing skin colour as a necessary condition for victims to make these claims (Torpey, 2001). The ‘impossibility’ of reparations, levelled by critics, all too often focuses on what Coates (2014) describes as ‘the myth of “race”, while ignoring the demonstrable fact of injury’. 5
One of the most obvious ways this injury goes ignored is through the perpetrator’s performative act of apology for past injustices that seeks to put the colonial past to rest. Even when reparations are distributed, the onus of forgiveness seems to perpetually fall on the shoulders of Indigenous peoples. But forgiveness is not always possible. As Leey’qsun feminist scholar Rachel Flowers writes, refusing to accept the state’s apology rejects the colonial desire to seek redemption:
Forgiveness is a gesture reserved for the oppressed to capitulate their resentment to benevolently apologetic structures . . . Moreover, forgiveness assumes a singular event that can be reconciled, rather than structures of dispossession that are ongoing and reinforced through settler statecraft. An apology is a singular event that addresses a singular event, rather than a commitment to changed behaviour in response to recognizing the structures and systems that are predicated on violence and permit it to occur in the first place. (Flowers, 2015: 47)
As Patricia Suelke (2021: 10–11) has recently argued, drawing on the work of Eng and Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson, the ‘political (as well as interpretive and aesthetic) investments in repair and reconciliation’ that can be traced in American academia, activism and state policy since the 1970s are ‘deeply implicated in colonial, settler colonial, and imperialist histories’, which police and maintain the racialized boundaries of the human that secure the dominance of white settler subjects over economic resources and life itself, while allowing those settler subjects to feel not so bad about it. Refusing to forgive is therefore a refusal of the continual violence and systemic barriers perpetuated by nationalist rhetoric, that acknowledges the ‘irreconcilable’ nature of this rupture (p. 84). Reparation, these artists, theorists and activists suggest, will only serve its function once it sits outside of a colonial and capitalist framework, and is dependent on finding balance through ‘psychological, moral, social, economic, cultural, religious’ and, we might add, aesthetic means (Flowers, 2015: 47).
Sensing reparation
Amidst this irreparable, and unforgivable, landscape of colonial violence, we nevertheless find ourselves returning to reparation as a space to think, and enact, the impossible. As an act, reparation, as Zimbabwean-American writer and activist Samudzi writes, requires imagining
a world that does not exist, but one that could be fabricated through attempts to repair historical harm and trauma . . . Because the world that accommodates a reparation – a wound remedy demanded by an aggrieved party – is not a world that presently exists, it is one that has to be created. (Samudzi, 2020: 30)
In assembling this themed issue of
Kwakwaka’wakw hereditary chief and carver Beau Dick (far left) on a journey from Vancouver to the steps of the Canadian legislature in Ottawa in 2014, where he would perform the cutting ritual as a ‘challenge’ to all Canadians. © Photo: Stephen Hui. Reproduced with permission.
The shifting role of museums, memorials and public statues in reparative processes – a subject of several authors’ contributions to this issue – helps to underscore the potency of these sites as places where aesthetic encounters allow us to sense reparation, to create new networks of relations, and to unfix the supposedly finished colonial past. The mass grave near the Kamloops Indian residential school, for instance, was confirmed with the help of ground-penetrating radar, and the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nations worked alongside the British Columbia Coroner’s Service, forensic experts, and the Royal British Columbia Museum to identify and repatriate the remains of these children. With 250 boxes of archival materials relating to the province’s residential schools in its holdings, the museum has opened its archive to the University of British Columbia Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre (IRSHDC) in order to expedite the process (Coyne, 2021). Turning to repatriation programs facilitates actions of repair and restitution; however, this partnership between Indigenous nations and the museum archive also leads to questions about what is withheld in archives, as well as how the limited access to these materials impacts their reparative potential. Museums, archives and institutions of Western knowledge production perpetuate colonial violence by remaining gatekeepers of histories – from looted belongings and ceremonial objects, to ancestral remains. In this moment, they can be leading examples of how we can achieve the continual act of reparation as a verb through repatriation and dissemination of archival materials that belong to Indigenous communities.
News outlets are confirming what Indigenous peoples have been repeating for generations: that tactics of genocide and assimilation have been and continue to be enacted on Indigenous nations. This has unleashed insurmountable anger, grief and mistrust towards the Canadian government and the British monarchy by Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike. In 2021, the country has witnessed multiple monuments toppled, statues that are fundamental to Western systems of oppression, including white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, and transphobia. Activists toppled statues of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II at the Manitoba legislature, Egerton Ryerson was torn down in Toronto, while Captain James Cook was thrown into the Victoria Harbour in British Columbia. These statues represent the birth of the settler Canadian state as we know it, but also remain a symbolic reminder of a settler future that celebrates imperialist doctrine. As Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson writes in this issue, ‘Public work that makes the facts of settlement visually and materially present continues violence not only by centering settler futurity, but by substantiating violence in physical form upon the body of the land.’ The tumbling of these monuments establishes a symbolic and literal upheaval of corrupt imperial sanction by the means of collective force. In this way, activists are also rejecting settler colonial futurity, whose possessive and dominant stronghold on the land – embodied in these monuments – is simply unsustainable. They demonstrate the significant demand for reparation, repatriation, and restitution that ensures an equitable chance to rebuild from the immense loss experienced by many generations. Therefore, this collection of contributions, artist projects, and creative texts comes at a moment when colonial violence is increasingly being exposed on Turtle Island, and beyond, revealing the dire need for tangible objects to facilitate repair.
Reparation’s temporality
The articles assembled in this themed issue emerged, in part, out of an international, interdisciplinary conference held in Toronto in winter 2019 (co-organized by the editors with Carol Payne, Carleton University) that examined visual culture in and as a practice of reparations. Bringing together Indigenous, Black, diasporic, arrivant and settler scholars, as well as artists, curators and emerging scholars, the conference investigated the politics and aesthetics of repair, examining its psychic, economic and symbolic potential, and asking what reparation might offer to the growing transnational dialogue about the urgent need to redress difficult histories of genocide, extraction, appropriation, and other forms of colonial violence. Originally titled
Tellingly, the conference itself was the site of ruptures and injuries that required repair and reparation: ruptures that revealed the very different positionalities of white settler presenters from those whose ancestors, elders, and living relations continue to experience the liveness of the history of settler colonial violence. Our shift to naming this themed issue ‘Reparation and Visual Culture’ reflects a shift in our thinking about reparation as a verb, as a necessary, urgent and entirely possible project that visual culture can help us achieve and enact.
To that end, in assembling this themed issue, we invited a wider range of contributors to think about processes of redress, return, repatriation, and reparations in the context of settler colonialism, Indigenous sovereignty, forced displacement, and the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade, while also drawing out cross-cultural alliances and transnational points of connection with other places where the struggle to repair plays out. Working across a range of intersecting fields – including anthropology, art history, sound studies, performance studies, queer theory and education – the contributors in this edited issue address the reparative potential of visual culture considered broadly: from fine art objects, material culture and vernacular photography, to the use of imagery by high school students, poets, filmmakers, and in social media, Indigenous folklore, public art projects, and memorials. They cover a wide range of geographical regions, including Mumbai, Indonesia, Rwanda, Algeria, Palestine, Peru, Australia, so-called Canada, and the United States. Our contributors include presenters from the conference, as well as the emerging scholars who attended, and newly invited artists, theorists, and curators. A glossary of critical terms for doing reparative work with visual culture, submitted by emerging scholars who attended the event, also accompanies this print issue on
Across this intergenerational dialogue, our contributors remind us, time and again, that reparation requires a different orientation to both history and time. Reparation requires ‘embracing a multidirectional memory’, as Samudzi (2020: 32) argues, that can move between the past and the future, and that accounts for the slow pace of repair in the face of unforgivable rupture. Not allowing for this slow time of repair is one of the ways modern imperial violence continues to do harm, in the state’s breakneck rush to resolution. Of the post-war efforts to restore, repair and re-build Europe, and to ‘solve’ the ‘Jewish problem’, philosopher Ariella Aïsha Azoulay writes in this issue that:
The offered ‘solutions’ had nothing to do with the time victims needed individually and collectively to heal, recover, process, protest, idle, rage, mourn, dream, and imagine. The time that they needed is the time that imperial citizenship could not allow to exist.
This themed issue hopes to hold open the time and space for these acts of repair to occur.
It is perhaps for this reason that several contributors to this issue – including Susan Best, Karen Strassler, and Nishant Shahani – turn to the psychoanalytically inflected work of Melanie Klein and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in defining reparation as a psychic process that unfolds between a self and other, involving vacillating between violence and repair, love and hatred, and continuing beyond a singular event. In Klein’s groundbreaking theory, the primal scene of reparation is in infancy, when the helpless and dependent infant wants to violently destroy the mother on whom she terrifyingly depends, only to vacillate back to love and repair out of the necessities of the infant’s dependency. For Klein, these psychic rages and impulses to repair are so forceful, they require the baby to split the mother into a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ object. Only through time and psychic development is the child and then adult able to re-integrate these parts back into the whole person of the mother, and to tolerate and accept the vicissitudes of love and hate, violence and repair, that necessarily mark all intersubjective relationships. 6 For Klein, reparation is never over, nor finished, and the subject incapable of repair would be an irreparable psychic subject.
Sedgwick’s re-imagining of Kleinian reparation as an interpretive practice in her landmark essay on paranoid and reparative reading is another important theoretical touchstone for several contributors in this issue because of the ways Sedgwick frames reading (and looking) as potent political acts. Arguing against the reading practices of critical theory – which put the reader in a paranoid position, always looking out for the ‘bad surprise’ of difficult knowledge that the text will eventually reveal – Sedgwick advocated instead for a reparative reading strategy that stayed open to the queer, pleasurable and disruptive ‘good surprises’ that aesthetic encounters produce. As Strassler (2007: 637) notes, for Sedgwick,
this active process [of reparation] ‘does not assume that the “repaired” object will resemble a pre-existing object.’ Rather than setting out to restore a prior wholeness, the work of repair preserves the traces of brokenness even as it clears a path for moving forward into the future. (Strassler, this issue)
Rupture, transgression, repair: a thematic overview
Indeed, for many of the contributors to this issue, preserving the traces of brokenness while creating a new object is one of visual culture’s most generative contributions to the project of reparation. In Strassler’s assessment of Chinese-Indonesian artist FX Harsono’s work, Best’s discussion of repair in Australian Indigenous art, Maya Wilson-Sanchez’s investigation of the restorative potential of Giuseppe Campuzano’s living museum, and in Nataleah Hunter-Young’s reading of the ‘nobody’ in works by contemporary Black artists, the act of reparation makes the wound or rupture
For others, drawing on the urgent work of Black scholars Katherine McKittrick, Christina Sharpe, and Saidiya Hartman, the ruptures created by settler colonialism and trans atlantic slavery are intertwined and irreparable: the task of visual culture is to help us sense, rather than make sense of, these violent breaches. Kimberly Juanita Brown, for instance, asks viewers to look for spaces of ‘Black enclosure’ in photographs of Black death, to use attentive looking for evidence of survival and mourning after disaster and to enquire into the afterlives of survivors, and the afterlives of images. Jade Nixon, Sefanit Habtom and Eve Tuck similarly chart injury and rupture rather than resolution and repair, using the visual and discursive contributions of their youth co-researchers to ask what it might mean for school officials to, following Hartman, acknowledge the ‘breach’ created by racist incidents in Canadian high schools.
Dylan Robinson, Nishant Shahani and Ariella Aïsha Azoulay each interrogate ‘what we already know’ about settler colonialism, global modernity, and imperial violence. Yet, despite their skepticism about demands for art to reveal what is already known, their articles imagine how words and public artworks can be used to create a mode of address that speaks to non-human subjects and potential histories destroyed by imperialism and colonialism. Azoulay, for instance, acknowledges the relationships between imperialism and ‘hyper-structures’, such as museums complicit in Palestinian dispossession that remain especially pertinent when establishing reparation and repatriation of cultural objects. Meanwhile, Robinson challenges the purposes of public artworks and our inherent disregard for the non-humans inhabiting these spaces, and asks that we de-centre human experiences as a way to repair connections to the land. Linking the building of massive structures to the fabrication of sea link bridges and skyscrapers in an urban setting such as Mumbai, Shahani interrogates their connection to colonialism, modernity, and futurity. These articles tie together the symbolic and physical continuation of colonial dominance through the guise of public artworks, structures and monoliths, and implore that we witness these structures through a critical lens.
Throughout the issue, the voices, practices and archival interventions undertaken by contemporary artists demonstrate what reparation looks like as praxis. From Peter Morin’s re-telling of Tahltan stories recorded by white anthropologist James Teit in the artist’s home territory more than 100 years ago – an act of repair and repatriation amid the Covid-19 pandemic that is recorded here through Morin’s annotations onto and redactions of Teit’s text – to Tanya Lukin Linklater’s practice of visiting sick and exhausted Indigenous objects kept in Western museums, to Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn’s examination of how artists, including herself, operate as ‘developing agents’ in the state archive, these articles and artist portfolios show us the ways artists intervene in settler colonialism’s ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Rancière, 2004) by, as Robinson (2017) has suggested, reading, looking, and sensing in a different temporality.
Conclusion
While the notion of repair remains daunting, these authors and artists dedicate their contributions to finding ways to envision feasible ways to enact reparation as a verb: not through a singular moment in time, but as a lifelong dedication to repairing, healing, and making amends as processes necessary to decolonization, liberation, and sovereignty. Their texts unveil the diversity in experiences of reparation, and its complex and entangled relationship to the legacies of transatlantic slavery and the ongoing violence of the settler colonial state. As a sensory language that can create irruptions in the present political order, and exceed what seems possible for the future, visual culture propels and facilitates these processes. It does not wait for a state-issued apology, nor accept one when offered, but demands the conditions for a reparative future.
This themed issue points to just some of the ways the aesthetic encounters created by artworks and cultural objects might undertake the work of reparation, and we are hopeful that it will set the stage for the work that still needs to be done to address the potential for transnational alliances in reparation projects, the policy changes needed for the material repatriation of visual or cultural objects (amid so many empty promises by colonial nations to do so), and more fulsome collaborations between scholars, artists and community activists that can imagine the dismantling of colonial strongholds and embrace the various ways we can envision a world of rejection, resolution, and repair.
Footnotes
ORCID iD
