By Klara du Plessis (SpokenWeb UBCO Postdoctoral Fellow 2024-26)
During a brief research trip to Vancouver (Nov 1-3, 2024) with Dr. Karis Shearer—finalizing details for the 2025 SpokenWeb Sound Institute that we are co-organizing at UBC Okanagan—I was fortunate to reroute two mornings to the UBC Vancouver Rare Books and Special Collections and to make some progress on my in-process research on the Writing Thru Race conference that took place 30 June – 3 July 1994.
Writing Thru Race is known as a significant historical gathering for racialized writers, originally billed as “A Conference for First Nations Writers and Writers of Colour.” The programming included panel discussions on curated topics, workshops, and performances. As the chair of the organizational team, Roy Miki, summarized during a press conference on 31 July 1994, the goal was to create a “safe and informal space to discuss common concerns, writing strategies, and critical issues that matter in the internalization experience of racism” (SP 95-372 Roy Miki Fonds).
Unfortunately, the conference is often remembered less for the incisive impact that it had on an entire generation of Canadian authors and more for the media uproar that almost derailed its organization. In particular, the Writers’ Union of Canada retracted its promised funding for the conference, citing the alleged discrimination against white audiences as their justification. This decision resulted in a polemical debate that raged nationwide and split the literary community along lines of support and dissent. The organizational team—encompassing a wide range of important writers, including Lillian Allen, Dionne Brand, Larissa Lai, among others—rallied, obtaining private donations for the conference to take place successfully as planned.
Considering both the media outrage and the fact that the conference proceeded as a protected space for conversations about the intersection between race and literary infrastructure, I find it surprising that the audio recordings of the panel discussions and performances are currently available for any researcher to access in the archives. Entering the archives now as a white woman with links to both Canada and South Africa, I thus have to keep asking myself to assess what I have access to and what I should have access to. Has enough time passed for this fonds to exist in the public domain? Is it different, hypothetically, to assert my presence at the actual events in 1994 than to listen to and learn from their documentation thirty years later? What are my legal rights in the archives and how might I revise those rights from the perspective of my personal ethical standpoint?
Claire Malek, an archivist at UBC’s Rare Books and Special Collections, has confirmed that access regulations were negotiated between UBC as the institutional repository and Roy Miki as the fonds donor. While certain other items—such as manuscript drafts and lecture notes, are, in fact, restricted—Miki granted permission for the Writing Thru Race organizational notes, correspondence, and press clippings preceding and following the conference, to be available to the public. More significantly, he also agreed to the audio recordings and photographic documentation of the conference itself to be accessible. From what I can gauge from my initial, cursory investigation into the issue, these permissions were granted through Miki’s status as creator and/or owner of these materials. That is, each one of the individual speakers on the audio cassettes or participants pictured in the photographs was not invited to sign their own permissions.
The administration of Writing Thru Race favoured a collaborative ethos. Notes from organizational meetings clearly document how decisions were reached through lively debate, occasional disagreement, and eventual consensus. I thus find myself wavering, headphones in hand, at the unilateral agreement of a single signatory. Of course, it would be fantastic to hear a panel discussion labeled “Writing Thru the Body: Race and Sexuality,” especially reading the label’s tantalizing qualifier, “lots of comments from room.” It would be a privilege to listen to Jeannette Armstrong in conversation with Rita Joe, on a cassette titled “First Nations Storytelling.” Yet the constraints placed on the conference’s live content mean that eavesdropping on these recordings after the fact are not synonymous with invitation and inclusion.
Here I look to Dylan Robinson’s prompt in Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies that if “you are a non-Indigenous, settler, ally, or xwelítem reader, I ask that you stop reading by the end of this page. I hope you will rejoin us […] to understand forms of Indigenous and settler colonial listening” (25). Aligned with this sentiment, and departing from the illusion of comprehensive, expert knowledge, I decide not to listen to the Writing Thru Race cassettes with my ears and not to engage with all the research materials supposedly at my disposal.
Rather, I decide to listen to the gaps. As my overarching study on literary curation so clearly shows, one can learn a lot from traces of organizational decision-making, from the scaffolding that makes a series of events possible. I can broaden the definition of the auditory to engage with the public-facing press clippings and the select published transcripts. I can take note of contextual clues leading up to and following the actual conference dates, learning from and gaining a partial understanding of what it was like to attend and participate in the conference. It is possible for me to continue this research, to write a chapter, and to listen respectfully, without pressing play.
Klara du Plessis, Nitobe Memorial Garden, UBC (Vancouver campus), November 2024.
Klara du Plessis is currently the SpokenWeb Critical Remediations postdoctoral fellow at UBCO. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Concordia University. Her ongoing research looks at literary studies off of the page to incorporate insights from a sound and curatorial studies perspective too. It focuses on curatorial structures in the context of twentieth century and contemporary Canadian poetry in performance, thinking critically about the poets’ and curator’s often neglected labour, and how it shapes poetry reading events, whether live or in the audio archive. She is also currently interested in connecting the practical and conceptual labour of organizing literary events to the subjective act of listening relationally to that curation.