Call them Isobar: Memory, Mythmaking, and the Black Diaspora in Canisia Lubrin's Voodoo Hypothesis

Abstract

This thesis looks at the work of Canisia Lubin in the context of national identity and intergenerational memory. Using Christina Sharpe’s theory of “wake work” as a starting point, the paper analyses the ways in which Lubrin’s poetry situates blackness in a Canadian and colonial context. Lubrin uses memory and myth as a means of re-imagining Black existence outside of white supremacist, hegemonic ideologies, and, in doing so, draws attention to the ways that dominant conceptions of identity perpetuate racism and stifle kinship in diasporic communities. This paper shows how memory, in Lubrin’s poetry, becomes a means of forming an intergenerational and transnational understanding of a collective past.