Karie Liao
This twelfth SDUK broadsheet examines the diverse means by which individuals and communities build lasting or fleeting bonds. Coinciding with the conclusion of Crossings: Itineraries of Encounter, the Blackwood’s 2021–22 lightbox series, this issue, BONDING, echoes themes seen throughout Crossings: migration, diaspora, borders, and archives. Where the lightbox exhibitions examine image-making practices, this SDUK issue engages print culture in new and recurring formats including visual storytelling, poetry, a letter exchange, and a recipe.
Food is the source of many enduring cultural bonds, and thus one might be tempted to start from the gut: See Diasporic Dumplings for a site-responsive recipe for Mississauga. Huynh’s adaptive practice begs the question: How do cultural practices shift for a local context? While Huynh describes the dumpling as a diasporic vessel, poetry by Cecily Nicholson reflects on the transformation of land for agriculture. Her verse considers the enactment of Canadian settler colonialism through farmland practices of tilling, sowing, and reaping.
If bonding evokes notions of home and community, readers may wonder: How do we forge bonds across difference, and across culture? Karie Liao’s column examines the many valences of solidarity in the GTHA—expanding on the term’s origins in the labour movement to trace its resurgence in socially-engaged art practice, and disability and migrant justice activism. Continuing the focus on deepening equity across difference, a Q&A compiles the insights of diverse healthcare practitioners on the movement toward more gender-inclusive reproductive care.
Artists might approach this issue by asking: How are cultural bonds strengthened through art and craft? In a new essay, Nadia Kurd discusses how textile weaving serves to reclaim national identity for diasporic Palestinians, while bolstering broader community bonds. Hangama Amiri’s artworks, stitched from fabrics sourced from Central and Southeast Asia, attest to the resilience of Afghan women. Theodore (ted) Kerr connects archival histories of HIV/AIDS with artmaking and publishing; Kerr considers archival misdirections and misattributions as opportunities to recalibrate our lenses on the present.
Considering the unprecedented involuntary migrations that animate this issue, one may ask: What are the lasting effects of migration? Sociologists Rula Kahil, Laila Omar, and Neda Maghbouleh chronicle their research with Syrian refugees resettled in the GTA, with close attention to their own positionalities. In their work, each researcher’s own migratory and familial histories animate bonds with study participants. Artist Rehab Nazzal likewise draws on her lived experience in an account of art therapy sessions for Palestinian children in Gaza City.
In a world of increasingly rigid borders, migration and incarceration are deeply intertwined. What are the underrepresented effects of carceral spaces? In a book excerpt, Tings Chak examines spaces of migrant detention using the visual vocabulary of architectural drawing. Alongside Chak’s analysis of the built environment, Mercedes Eng and Kriss Li discuss the affective toll of imprisonment in a letter exchange that traces family experiences of incarceration, and prisoner penpal initiatives.
BONDING concludes with a glossary, which grapples with the complex and multifaceted keywords found throughout the broadsheet. See this issue unfold across the Blackwood website for additional links between glossary terms, editorial questions, and ongoing programs and research.