EAHRx10 Alumni :Public Lecture by Dr. Joana Joachim

9/30/2020

THERE/THEN, HERE/NOW: BLACK WOMEN'S HAIR AND DRESS IN
THE FRENCH EMPIRE
BY DR. JOANA JOACHIM

WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 7TH, 6:00 PM - 7:00PM

To Register:
https://concordia-ca.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIocO-hqTkoEtZ3RzHW7hAnoSH-sMJElIYY

Joana Joachim earned her PhD in the department of Art History and Communication Studies and at the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at McGill University working under the supervision of Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson. Her research interests include Black feminist art histories, Black Canadian studies and Canadian slavery studies. Dr. Joachim’s SSHRC-funded doctoral work, There/Then, Here/Now: Black Women’s Hair and Dress in the French Empire, examines the visual culture of Black women’s hair and dress in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, investigating practices of self-preservation and self-care through the lens of creolization. She has been appointed as a McGill Provostial Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Institutional Histories, Slavery and Colonialism beginning in the Fall of 2020 and she currently teaches a course on race and art in Canada in the department of art history at McGill.

Dr. Joachim’s dissertation, There/Then, Here/Now: Black Women’s Hair and Dress in the French Empire, posits that the creation of categories of biological racial difference such as skin complexion and hair texture were key sites through which Black humanity was denied and which white slave owners used to position Africans as inferior. She asks how enslaved Black women in the French Empire maintained their hair and dress practices and what it meant that they did so while facing multiple barriers. The book considers the visual culture of dress, hair care, and hair style practises of Black women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in New France/Québec, Louisiana and Saint-Domingue. A central component of transatlantic slavery was the strategic use of violence, captivity and forced extraction of labour to disrupt the enslaved African’s ability to access the time or the tools necessary to maintain what Joachim defines and differentiates as self-preservation and self-care practises. She discusses both historical and contemporary artworks to reflect on Black women’s experiences over and above what is represented by historical artists and to underline the aspects of their lives which were omitted by historical records.

Image: Labrousse (drawing) and Laroque (etching) Bouquetieres de Saint-Domingue. 1796. In Jacques Grasset-Saint-Sauveur’s book, Encyclopédie des voyages (1796) Intaglio (Colour engraving). 24,8 cm x1 8,5 cm. 1796. Musée de Bordeaux. 2003.4. Bordeaux, France.

Dr. Joachim's talk is presented as part of EAHRx10 Alumni, a special series of events in 2020-2021 celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Ethnocultural Art Histories Research Group. EAHRx10 Alumni seeks to highlight the resilience and ongoing labour of care practiced by racialized people in academia as well as reflect on the significant scholarly contributions and creative communities initiatives such as EAHR generate in the realm of arts and culture that reach beyond the university.

Presented by EAHRX10 Alumni: Adrienne Johnson, Geneviève Wallen, Rajee Jeji Shergill, and Tamara Harkness

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