SENSORY BAROQUES: COLONIALITY AND ARCHIVAL AFFECT

Manuscripts describing early decades of colonization in Turtle Island (North America) invoke affects and the senses alongside taxonomies of the human, more-than-human, and nonhuman. This talk investigates translocations of gender and ontological categories, often in defamiliarizing declensions, through the sensorium and traces of their scripts of orientation.

By investigating early Indigenous and French materials in ink and paper records, drawings, and treatises, this work turns to questions of classification, complication, being, and ornament in long histories of depicting the more-than-human, performative, and monstrous in kinesthetic, colonial documents.

About the speaker

VK Preston is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Concordia. As a cultural historian of the Early Modern period, VK’s research examines performance archives that reveal charged circulations of both written and unwritten practices.

In dance studies and in research creation, VK works alongside artists as a practice of critical research ethics and methodology, investigating histories of the senses and embodiment through experiential, narrative approaches.

VK’s approaches engage with histories of the Atlantic world, and of Turtle Island, addressing genealogies of racial capitalism, decolonization, non-binary gender, historical memory, and translation. VK is a member of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS), the Centre for Interdisciplinary Society and Culture (CISSC), Feminist Media Studio, and Le Parc (Milieux) as well as being a fellow of the Simone de Beauvoir Institute (Concordia University) and the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies (University of Toronto).