Affective economies in Canada’s post-colonial archives
Aaron Gordon, doctoral candidate, York University
Keywords: archives, archival science, affective economies, Canadian settler colonialism, identity
Archivists create archives by acquiring, describing and making records available according to overlapping orders of value. In part due to demands for indigenous modes of archiving that tend to the spiritual and living aspects of records and queer interventions concerned with the emotional economies of working in archives, archivists have recently turned their attention to the affective orders of values that delimit what comes to have archival value, the way records are dispersed through the archive, and the way archivists meet the needs of researchers. In my paper, I am interested in two aspects of this turn to archival affects: 1) how the take up of sentiment has lead archivists to contrast affective modes of archiving to earlier objective and dispassionate archival theories and practices such that this turn to affects is seen as the overcoming of outmoded archival frameworks and; 2) the call amongst
Canadian archivists to re-create archives as homely spaces in which users can use archival records to build robust communal identities, and how these two aspects intertwine in the offer of homely archives to marginalized groups as a means of overcoming Canada’s history of colonialism and racism. Building on the work of Ann Laura Stoler and Sara Ahmed, my paper will challenge these two aspects by showing how archival theories and practices have always organized the way attachments are formed and sentiments circulate within archives so as to trouble the assumption that efforts to make people feel at home in the archives overcomes Canada’s exclusionary and violent past. I will argue that the construction of a homely archives works to re-legitimate archives and re-authorize archivists at a moment when it and they are called to account. To conclude, I will briefly consider the role of negative sentiments in upsetting these post-colonial emotional economies.

Inscribing the Future: The ‘Layering’ of Media Cultures in Construction of the
Mackenzie House Narrative
Alevtina Naumova, doctoral student, Ryerson / York University
Heritage, material culture, media archeology, historic house museums, cultural data, museum display
The central argument of the paper is that any discussion on heritage should involve thinking about materiality, the physical processes that enabled inscription, preservation, and organization of the cultural data, which is used for construction of cultural narratives. The paper presents a discussion on possible applications of media archaeology as a method of critical analysis of the contemporary construction of heritage texts using the narrative of the historic house museum of William Lyon Mackenzie, Toronto’s first mayor, as a case study.
The project considers media technologies as historical agents, which determine how the future is ‘inscribed,’ and defines data as a cultural resource, which is managed through existing communicative technology. The theoretical framework of the paper draws on Lisa
Gitelman’s understanding of media technologies as being continuously formed through their constitutive relationship with their publics. The project was initially designed to study how the uses and meanings of media technologies between the 1830’s and 1860’s conditioned archiving, organization, and preservation of cultural data, thus delimiting present representation of the life of the Mackenzie family. However, the study has yielded unanticipated results: It demonstrated that while the media culture of the Victorian-era
Toronto influenced the types of inscriptions that were passed on, the contemporary construction of heritage was performed through the writing of a ‘counter history,’ which is heavily influenced by the layering of media cultures of the past and the present. This finding shifted the theoretical discussion in the paper to the analysis of how media technologies of the past and the present commune in their negotiations over the representations of the past and the present. The discussion on the current layering of media cultures, which frames the contemporary readings of the Mackenzie story, expands the definition of media to include embroideries, furniture, and the arrangement and uses of the space of the Mackenzie house.

New Critical Mappings of Dominion and State: The Komagata Maru and South
Asian Canadian Historiographic Practice
Mariam Pirbhai, associate professor, Wilfrid Laurier University
This paper examines recent representations of the Komagatu Maru ‘Incident’ of 1914 as a diasporic meta-narrative for South Asian Canadian migration history. Considering two works of historical fiction, Tariq Malik’s Chanting Denied Shores: the Komagata Maru Narratives (2011) and Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (2007), and film-maker Ali Kazimi’s pictorial and documentary accounts of the event, this paper suggests that the Komagata
Maru serves as a symbolic marker for the centennial history of South Asian settlement in
Canada. An essentially tragic event which made international headlines in its day, the story of the maltreated South Asian passengers who were also “fellow subjects of Empire” at the time of their ship’s arrival on Canada’s west coast, further incited anti-imperial feeling in the
Indian subcontinent. It also became an arena for Canada’s increasing assertion of political autonomy in the matter of immigration policies and practices focused on maintaining a
‘White Canada Forever’. This paper suggests that recent historiographic literary and nonliterary accounts of the Komagata Maru event are driven by a post-colonial sensibility that aims not only to critically redress the erasure of South Asian Canadian migration histories in national annals, but also to foreground the volatile inter-relationship between the ‘Dominion of Canada’ and ‘British India’ at the turn of the century, when both ‘colonies’ were engaged in nationalist ambitions. In memorializing the centennial presence of South Asians in Canada, these works attest to the meta-textual currency of the Komagata Maru as a mythopoetic suture across a pre- and post-60s generation of South Asian migrants, and thus provide new critical mappings of Canada’s own distinctly racialized journey from Dominion to State.