Delegate Profile: Karina Vernon

Biography
Karina Vernon is a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Victoria. She is currently writing her dissertation entitled "The Black Prairies: History, Subjectivity, Writing," a genealogy of black cultural production on the prairies, from the nineteenth century to the present.

"The Black Prairies: History, Subjectivity, Writing"
Literary regionalism has at times been regarded as a positive, even radical response (G. Melnyk) to the perceived cultural dominance of central Canada, yet looking at the volumes of prairie writing in particular, one would assume that few black writers live or produce work on the prairies. Criticism of prairie writing, taking their cue from prairie authors of the 1970s and 1980s (e.g., Kroetsch, Wiebe, Laurence, Van Herk), constructed the landscape and its inherited culture as an absence, effectively placing the history of black settlement and cultural production in the region under erasure. The black presence on the prairies also remains invisible in postcolonial assessments of the nation, and even black Canadian cultural studies continues to overlook this region, despite George Elliott Clarke's insistence that it is the interarticulation of race and region that have refracted blackness uniquely in Canada. My dissertation focuses on black prairie writers and black prairie history, not only to make visible what was rendered invisible, but also to examine the challenges to the traditional prairie imaginary posed by writers who (re)locate blackness into prairie space.

Because my primary goal is to examine the ways black prairie writers construct a "home" for blackness on the prairies, this project is at once critical and historiographic. On one hand, I establish a genealogy of black prairie cultural production by examining the archival material gathered in my researches into the history and literary legacy of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century black prairie settlers. Having plumbed the holdings of provincial archives, historical societies and personal collections, my dissertation considers exciting new material previously unexamined in a scholarly context: an autobiography by a black Manitoban pioneer, sound recordings of interviews with early twentieth-century black "settlers," letters, and several memoirs detailing the multi-generational experiences of black families on the prairies. On the other hand, my dissertation examines the work of contemporary prairie writers such as Claire Harris, Suzette Mayr, Ian Samuels, and Esi Edugyan, whose articulation of a black prairie home-space is shaped by current theoretical concerns and diasporic experiences.

In order to achieve this double task the methodology I develop is interdisciplinary. Working with critical histories (Shepherd, Winks, Palmer), and postcolonial thought (Bhabha, Spivak, Anderson), I excavate a sedimented prairie blackness by demonstrating how the prairies have been the site of a unique aspect of black history that spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Diaspora theory (Chow, Gilroy, Walcott, Rhadakrishnan) allows me to deconstruct regional discourses by reading them in relation not to a dominant centre, but in relation to racialized being. Finally, because my project is concerned, in a nutshell, with the ways writers claim a black home space within prairie geographies, my methodology takes into account those theorizations of space and place as those by Said, Appadurai, and Deleuze and Guattari, allowing me to examine how black writers inscribe a connection to the prairies that goes beyond the inscription of inherited regional tropes or geographic essentialisms, toward a sense of "reterritorialization" that imagined communities of writers and readers make possible.