Storied Icebergs: Floating Formations of Decolonial Knowledge Production About the Canadian North
Storied Icebergs seeks to understand how, in the context of story(telling), Qallunaat knowledge production about the Canadian North might be decolonised. Inspired by Tiffany Lethabo King’s The Black Shoals (2019), this dissertation uses the iceberg as a critical terrain upon which to both interrogate the coloniality of Qallunaat knowledge production and comprehend the decolonial possibilities of story(telling). Inuit hi/stories are positioned as storied icebergs that are capable of slowing, disrupting, and transcending the hegemonic order of knowledge production. Storied Icebergs is divided into two sections. The first section addresses the disruptive potential of the storied icebergs hermeneutic. As impediments to plain sailing, storied icebergs can slow and interrupt the normative movement of the vessel of colonial knowledge production about the Canadian North. This argument is substantiated through a pointed focus on the ways in which Inuit hi/stories of Sir John Franklin’s fatal disaster have repeatedly ruptured the dominant narrative of his demise. Storied icebergs can throw Qallunaat thinking overboard; they can force Qallunaat to contend with epistemologies that exceed (settler) colonialism. In this sense, storied icebergs index possibilities for radical transformation. The second section builds on this to argue that storied icebergs do more than disrupt, they are themselves floating formations of decolonial knowledge production Canadian North. Through a poetics of storied icebergs, this section shows how storied expressions of Inuit reclamation and resurgence can reorient Qallunaat knowledge systems towards modes of thought beyond coloniality. Fundamentally, Storied Icebergs seeks to contribute to restor(y)ing epistemic relations between Qallunaat, Inuit, and the Canadian North in pursuit of a decolonial future.
Story, Colonialism, Decolonisation, Canadian North, Inuit
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