Discovering / Recovering / Uncovering Heritage: Abel Jordan’s Art of Subtraction - Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3 Accéder directement au contenu
Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2019

Discovering / Recovering / Uncovering Heritage: Abel Jordan’s Art of Subtraction

Claire Omhovère

Résumé

Jordan Abel, a Nisga’a poet and visual artist from Vancouver, identifies publicly as “both an intergenerational survivor of residential schools and an urban Indigenous person.” The removing of Indigenous children from their families was an essential component of the assimilation policies implemented in Canada after the colony obtained its independence, with after-effects that can still be felt nowadays. Abel’s The Place of Scraps (2013) addresses the interrogations faced by those who grew up deprived of the language, beliefs and memories of their ancestors as a result of the cultural genocide perpetrated against the Indigenous peoples of North America to whom his first collection of poems is dedicated. Jordan Abel writes from the position of those who have experienced colonization in terms of spatial confiscation and relegation, those who have no proper place to write from, except perhaps in language. Growing up in the multicultural Vancouver of the 1990s, the son of a Chinese mother and an estranged Nisga’a father, Jordan Abel had no Indigenous culture, language, or even tradition to write or speak from. His father was unable to share with him the alternative story which may have complemented or contradicted the representations of the “Indian” circulated in mainstream culture, sold by the tourist industry, disseminated through schools or museums, and legitimized in the scientific discourse of anthropology. This absence of relation sets Jordan Abel quite apart from the prolific generation of contemporary Indigenous artists who grew up within imperilled communities where roundabout forms of transmission nevertheless occurred that inspired Lee Maracle, Tomson Highway, Eden Robinson, Richard van Camp or even, closer to us, Katharine Vermette with vibrant tales of resilience. With The Place of Scraps, however, Jordan Abel demonstrates that a void is not a vacuum, and that the tension between nothing and something can be a productive place to start from for those who grew up disconnected from the language of their forbears, their culture, and ancestral places.
Fichier non déposé

Dates et versions

hal-04311430 , version 1 (28-11-2023)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-04311430 , version 1

Citer

Claire Omhovère. Discovering / Recovering / Uncovering Heritage: Abel Jordan’s Art of Subtraction. Dissensus in the Postcolonial Anglophone World: History, Politics, Aesthetics, Société d'Etudes Postcoloniales, Feb 2019, Lille (Université Lille 3), France. ⟨hal-04311430⟩

Collections

UNIV-MONTP3 EMMA
9 Consultations
0 Téléchargements

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More