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Decolonizing reconciliation : refusing settler innocence through sound

University of British Columbia

My thesis examines the possibility for decolonization in the aftermath of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and proposes settler-shame as both generative and necessary to decolonizing and disrupting the patterns of ongoing colonial violence against Indigenous bodies. I specifically focus on how sound and performance can be used to critically engage and educate on both historical and ongoing colonial violence prevalent in settler-colonial society. I elaborate on how my own performances are an embodied form of settler-shame and put forward a sound technique I’ve called time-stretched witnessing. I draw on encounters within my own practice as an electronic artist/producer as a means of addressing the degree to which it might be possible to create space for meaningful knowledge sharing, memorialization, social transformation, and decolonization. To decolonize is to work towards a reconciliation that refuses ‘reconciliation’ as we have known it thus far, one that refuses settler innocence and encourages settler-shame, and centres Indigenous leadership, the return of land and an end to gender-based violence.

Text; Sound

2016-04-07

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/57479

Political Science

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/