Active History

Source: Centre International de Documentation et d’Information Haïtienne, Caribéenne et Afro-canadienne (the International Center for Haitian, Caribbean, and Afro-Canadian Documentation and Information), also known as the CIDIHCA Collections.

Virginie Belony

As the situation in Haiti becomes increasingly complex and challenging for many observers to comprehend, delving into Haiti’s past and the experiences of its diaspora here in Canada can offer valuable insights and examples of resilience, resistance, and community mobilization.

The election of François Duvalier as President of Haiti in September 1957 marked the onset of a period ostensibly characterized by political stability yet marred by significant human rights violations. This pattern persisted throughout the tenure of his successor, his 19-year-old son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, who held power from 1971 to 1986.

While in exile in Quebec, Canada in the 1970s, many Haitians participated in a resistance movement commonly referred to as the “Action Patriotique.” The exiled Haitians engaged in organizations, debates, and critiques, particularly through printed materials, targeting the actions of the Duvalier regime. Additionally, they adopted a critical stance towards both the Quebec and Canadian governments for their support of the Haitian dictatorship.

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Photo of the author, courtesy of Fung Ling Feimo.

To launch the exhibit More Than a Face, part of the new Active History on Display initiative, we invited   Fung Ling Feimo, one of the storytellers, to set the stage: 

More Than A Face opens at activehistory.ca!

It is a collection of soundscapes, visuals, written and spoken word, offering stories told through our individual voices.

We have storytellers from distinct backgrounds, time and space; from different places in the immigration cycle and eras. Yet our faces all fit the “Asian” catchall as if there’s a language and culture called “Asian”.

The irony is we often find ourselves the wrong kind of Asian while there is no one “Asian”. The diaspora identity is fluid, and the beauty is that is we can be “Asian” and “Canadian” and everything in between; free to choose which to embrace at a given moment. We can reminisce about ancient traditions, blurry memories, things lost, at the same time know English and French as “bad” as any other Canadian. Continue reading →

Source: Bonifacio Eugenio Romero, a Mexican migrant worker who died from Covid-19 on 30 May 2020, in the Windsor-Essex region of southwestern Ontario. Source: Human Cost of Food Exhibit.

Active History is delighted to launch our digital history initiative, Active History on Display (en français: Expositions d’Active History). The project features two exhibits. The first, More Than a Face, engages with nine storytellers to challenge dominant narratives of what it means to be Asian Canadian – and indeed to challenge the very idea that such a capacious category can have a single coherent meaning. The second, The Human Cost of Food, examines the history of death, injury, and illness among migrant farm workers in Canada to reveal the suffering that underlays our food system – but also longstanding practices of worker resistance that seek to remake it.

Active History on Display builds on the mission of Active History while extending it in new directions. Active History began as a collaborative effort in 2009 to make history accessible to a wider audience and to provide a forum for a diversity of perspectives. Our mission states: “We define active history variously as history that listens and is responsive; history that will make a tangible difference in people’s lives; history that makes an intervention and is transformative to both practitioners and communities. We seek a practice of history that emphasizes collegiality, builds community among active historians and other members of communities, and recognizes the public responsibilities of the historian.”

Supported by the Government of Canada’s Canada History Fund, the Canadian Historical Association, and the Canadian Committee on Labour History, Active History on Display is the product of a partnership between Active History, McGill University, the Department of History and the Centre for Public History at Carleton University, HistoireEngagée.ca, and the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies program at the University of British Columbia.

This post is the first in a three-part series to launch the project. Below, each curator will introduce their exhibit: Laura Madokoro for More Than a Face and Edward Dunsworth for The Human Cost of Food. On Wednesday, one of the storytellers of More Than a Face, arts and culture advocate, , Fung Ling Feimo, will introduce that exhibit. On Thursday, award-winning public historian Gilberto Fernandes will introduce and comment on The Human Cost of Food.  Continue reading →

Reading None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, Pelee Island. Photo by author.

Krenare Recaj

In the third year of my undergrad, I was sitting beside my friend Jeremy in a lecture for the class America: Slavery to Civil War. The professor was going into explicit detail – showing photos and drawings – of the torture enslaved people in America were subjected to. The logic was that these details were necessary to properly appreciate the gravity of the suffering. Sitting in the same place I sat no matter the class – last row, closest to the exit – I could see the laptop screens in front of me. Twitter. Facebook. Instagram. Online Shopping. Suddenly the professor’s alarm went off. He stopped mid gruesome detail, and told us it was time for the 20 minute break. I sat in the hallway with Jeremy and tried to hide my tears. I couldn’t reconcile the fact that while listening to the darkest depths of human suffering, the worst moments of real human lives, I too was scrolling Twitter. What does that say about our attention spans, I wondered? But more importantly, what does that say about our humanity? Jeremy is both kind and disciplined. He was one of a small handful of students in the entire class that was not scrolling the internet that day. He told me that I was being too hard on myself, and that maybe scrolling is how students coped with the heaviness of the class content. I told him that when I was in high school, I painted the words “apathy is the enemy” on my walls. I felt the weight of those words in that moment and promised both Jeremy and myself that I would never treat human suffering as dismissively as I had that day. After the break, I sat back down in the lecture hall, ready to take more notes on human suffering. My hand twitched. I kept nearly opening another tab.

Had callousness become a reflex?

I wish I could say that I haven’t opened Twitter in class since that day. But I can’t. However, that day has never left me. I have since spent a lot of time wondering what it means to be a historian. Not what it means for humanity, but what it means for the soul. I have tried to be intentional about how I study history and how I process the trauma experienced by others. I have tried to remind myself that human suffering is still suffering, whether it happened a millennium ago, a century ago, a decade ago, or yesterday. I have tried, and failed, but really really tried to center dignity even if it often feels like I am making a career out of the suffering of others. I work on histories of displacement involving the Kosovar Albanian diaspora, a history that I am bound up with. As I embarked on graduate studies I was determined not to sacrifice my humanity for a career… or that’s what I told myself at least.

But then comps happened.

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