Charmaine Nelson leading the creation of the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery
July 22, 2020
Canada’s only Black Art History Professor is the country’s new Research Chair in Transatlantic Black Diasporic Art & Community Engagement.
Dr. Charmaine Nelson will use the funded seven-year position to work with the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design (NSCAD) to develop the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery.
This is the first research hub that will focus entirely on Canadian slavery’s history.
“What I am announcing to Canada and the world is that this history is worthy of investigation and research,” she said. “The other important thing is when I started to look at what other parallel institutions exist, I could only find about three in the United States and two in the United Kingdom that focus on the study of transatlantic slavery as opposed to ancient forms of slavery or contemporary forms of sex trafficking and things like that.”
The Institute will facilitate the research of students and scholars whose principal focus is on Canadian slavery.
“It’s an establishment that will provide research grants or funds for students that are working on a thesis or dissertation or a scholar who is writing books,” Nelson pointed out. “But the thing about NSCAD that’s so important is that as an art and design university, the capacity for what research means totally explodes. So there’s a space for a filmmaker who wants to do a movie on Canadian slavery, the person who wants to write a play on Canadian slavery, the individual that’s doing painting or sculpture or those that are exploring the clothes that enslaved people wore in Canada. If this was at a traditional university, it will be limited then because the infrastructure at that university for so-called traditional research would just be writing and publishing.”
The Institute’s infrastructure will be created at NSCAD’s Fountain Campus in downtown Halifax through funding from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and the Nova Scotia Department of Communities, Culture and Heritage.
Construction of the new 1,000 square-feet space has been delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“By the end of July, I will be able to virtually engage with some of my colleagues on the ground at NSCAD because they have three different potential spaces where we can build the institute,” Nelson noted. “So we will be making some decisions and hopefully be able to go forward with construction in the fall.”
The birth of the new institute comes in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic that’s having a disproportionate effect on people of colour and Indigenous Peoples and massive protests around the world following the death of George Floyd in the United States after an interaction with Minnesota Police.
“The intersection of multiple things are waking up a segment of society who previously was able to turn a blind eye to our suffering,” said Nelson. “Something is happening now though in that we have a lot of our White allies awakening to what is happening to us and what has been a systemic problem. This, of course, is all connected to the period of slavery and the idea that our bodies are expendable and we literally don’t feel the same way as White people. Another reason why the Institute is so powerful now is that in Canada, we have a holistic view of the 400-year history of transatlantic slavery. On top of that, we have complete ignorance of the 200-year history within that of Canadian slavery.”
For the last 17 years, Nelson has been at McGill University, founded by James McGill who was a slave owner, West Indian merchant and fur trader.
A petition has been launched calling for the removal of the slave owner’s statue on McGill’s downtown campus and the university has appointed two Postdoctoral Research Scholars in Institutional Histories, Slavery and Colonialism to critically examine its connections to slavery and colonialism.
Nelson is disappointed in the approach the university, which celebrates its bicentennial next year, has taken to examine its 200-year history.
“What we have seen with American universities, at Glasgow in the United Kingdom and with even Dalhousie and King’s College in Halifax is the university Presidents striking a task force and investing the financial and social resources of the university behind a project that usually takes years to do intensive research on that university’s ties to slavery,” she pointed out. “As a West Indian merchant, McGill shipped in slave-produced molasses and sugar from the Caribbean. He was exploiting enslaved Black people working on tropical plantations at the same time he was enslaving Black and Indigenous Peoples in Canada. His hands are all over slavery. If the university was really serious about taking a serious look at its past, it should have struck a proper committee. The perfect thing would have been to strike it a few years ago and have the results come out in 2021.”
In Nelson’s 2020 winter undergraduate seminar, 19 McGill students researched and wrote 97 pages of bicentenary recommendations.
https://www.blackcanadianstudies.com/Recommendations_and_Report.pdf
In her negotiations with McGill, Nelson said they could have retained her and the Montreal university campus could have been the space for the new Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery.
With the university choosing not to match NSCAD’s offer, she’s resigning in the next few months to take up her new position in Halifax.
Nelson, who teaches four courses annually in addition to performing heavy administrative studies, is one of three McGill Professors selected to supervise the work of PhD candidates Joana Joachim and Melissa Shaw who have been chosen as researchers to investigate the university’s racist past.
For her to fulfill that role, she insists McGill will have to make her an Adjunct Professor.
Although McGill’s handful of racialized professors scholarship is disseminated widely, Nelson feels the institution doesn’t respect them for that scholarship and the difference their identity brings to their colleagues and students.
Of the nearly 1,700 tenure and tenure-track holders, there are just 10 Black and 11 Indigenous Professors.
“That’s how absurd McGill numbers are,” said Nelson who in 2010 chaired the equity sub-committee on race & ethnic relations for the Principal’s Task Force on Diversity, Excellence & Community. “So you can try imagining then what kind of racial atmosphere is created in a space in which we are so under-represented. You also have to contend with students who are pushing back against you and your identity because they have never had a Black authority figure. The university facilitates that.”
Two years ago, she became just the second Black Professor and second Art Historian to hold the William Lyon Mackenzie King Chair for Canadian Studies at Harvard University.
Nelson taught courses in Canadian art and the visual culture of transatlantic slavery while enhancing her research on Canadian fugitive slave advertisements that are meticulous physical descriptions of enslaved people written by their owner that were used during auctions, sales or as notices of runaway slaves.
Harvard was the ideal space for the 2010 Fulbright Visiting Research Chair at the University of California, Santa Barbara to advance her scholarship.
“Having access to people who understood my work although they weren’t Art Historians, an art gallery devoted to Black Art and the Hutchins Centre for African & African American Research provided the support and infrastructure I needed,” Nelson said. “I also had extraordinary students who were committed to learn something they had not been introduced to before. Harvard has a reputation for a reason and those students were so committed it’s not even funny. I had students who would let me know they were going to miss a seminar for a good reason and then ask if I can give them extra work. Never in my life have I had a McGill student say that.”
Nelson’s interest in Black Canadian history was sparked partly by her Jamaican-born parents.
“As educated people, they instilled in me the love of learning,” she said. “I grew up in the 1970s in Durham region where I never had a Black teacher from the kindergarten to Grade 13 levels. The curriculum back then was worse than it is now in excluding people of colour and indigenous people. My parents gave me an alternative education in that they made clear to me the things that my formal education was leaving out. I also took Art all the way to Grade 13 when most students were dropping that subject after Grade Nine.”
Things didn’t change much when Nelson enrolled in Concordia University’s Art History program.
“I was interested in the absences that I perceived in our history because, at Concordia in the 1990s, I was usually the only Black student in the class or one of very few minorities in our history class,” she said. “But the professors would show sometimes iconic images like the famous French artist Edouard Manet’s’ 'Olympia’, a work that contains both an unclothed White female on a bed and a fully-clothed Black maid. They would show things like this and not talk about the Black person in the painting and I would put my hand up and ask, ‘Why would he choose to have a Black maid as opposed to just two White women in the painting? My professors normally couldn’t answer the question but, to their credit, they said, ‘that’s a good question and please feel free to write a research paper on it’.
“So they encouraged me to pursue that and luckily in my pursuit of these questions that came from my identity, I realized there is a whole field called ‘race and representation’ where scholars were looking at exactly the representation of Black subjects in the Black Diaspora in western art. Most of those scholars were in the United States because the U.S had already established a field called ‘African-American Art History’ from around the 1940s.”
Earning undergraduate and Master’s degrees in Art History at Concordia University, Nelson worked at the Canadian Art Museum in Ottawa before pursuing her PhD. at Queen’s University. She completed her doctorate at the University of Manchester in 2001 and joined the University of Western Ontario as the first Black person to be hired into a tenure-track Art Historian position in a Canadian University.
Nelson has published seven books, including ‘Legacies Denied: Unearthing the Visual Culture of Canadian Slaveries’ that she edited.
The exhibition catalogue is the by-product of an ambitious exhibition that assembles an extraordinary group of art and visual culture objects of direct relevance to Trans-Atlantic slavery and it highlights the role of Canadian art and visual culture in producing, sustaining and contesting the enslavement of people of African descent and Natives in the territories that became Canada.
The two and three-dimensional objects comprise runaway slave advertisements, maps, illustrated travel and national history books, prints, ceramics, photography and other works.
Her last book, ‘Towards an African-Canadian Art History: Art, Memory and Resistance’, is the first publication to consolidate the field of African-Canadian art history. It covers topics spanning a time frame from 1786 to present and brings together chapters on Black Canadian artists with others on the representation of Black subjects in Canadian art.
Nelson’s eighth book, expected to be released later this year, explores fugitive slave advertisements as visual culture that can disclose details about the process of creolization in temperate and tropical sites of empire.
“Slave owners used to place printed ads in newspapers to hunt for enslaved people who ran away from them,” she said. “These ads are today the most detailed descriptions of enslaved people that we have, especially in places where slavery was abolished before photography was invented. Here, we are talking about the British Empire where slavery was abolished in 1833 and photography was invented in the 1840s. In other places like the United States, Brazil and Cuba, there are photographs of enslaved people because they abolished slavery in the 1860s and 1880s. In Canada, you will never get a photo of an enslaved person.”
Nelson’s research and teaching explores various types of 'high'and 'low' art and popular art forms including TV, film, photography, prints, sculpture, painting, and dress. She also works across various genres including portraiture, still-life, nudes and landscape art. She has made groundbreaking contributions to the fields of the Visual Culture of Slavery, Race and Representation, Black Canadian Studies, and African Canadian Art History.
A few years ago, she launched a website – blackcanadianstudies.com – as a resource for Black Canadian Studies and a space to share her past, present and future research agendas and production.
