Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought
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Dangerous or in Danger? Exploring Safety, Omission, and Beauty in Rebecca Hall's Passing (2021)
Get PDFRebecca Hall’s 2021 adaptation of Nella Larsen's Passing, establishes themes of safety in a visual context, examining the Black bodily experience in both white and Black spaces. Hall's use of greyscale lighting, diegetic & non-diegetic sounds, and, most importantly, omission, spotlights what it means to be Black in white space. In the same way Larsen’s story rejects the possibility of ever being safe as a Black person, regardless of whether one can pass as white or not, Hall's cinematic methodology reveals the character of Clare as both dangerous and yet always in danger. Controlling what the viewer is allowed to see, Hall presents a newfound method of storytelling that confronts Black violence in a manner that rejects the glorification of Black trauma, while also presenting the dangers Black persons face from merely existing in their body. 
Black Words and White Space: How Cheryl Foggo’s Pourin’ Down Rain Claims a New Understanding of the Canadian West
Get PDFThis essay analyzes how Cheryl Foggo’s memoir Pourin’ Down Rain contextualizes itself in the recovery of Black space, identity, and story in Canada. An understanding of Black storytelling, founded in Joanne Braxton’s Black Women Writing Autobiography, provides insight into the ways in which Foggo’s memoir fits within a Black storytelling tradition, and how these forms work to disrupt the kind of tradition preserving the ideological space of the “White West.” An analysis of photography and oral storytelling helps explore how Foggo uses alternative narrative techniques to tell a story that challenges dominant perceptions of Blackness and what historical archiving should look like. Finally, this essay deconstructs perceptions of the Canadian West as established by the region’s pre-existing literary canon, and explores how Pourin’ Down Rain opposes these perceptions by challenging some of the common conventions in White prairie narratives
Eyes Gone To Seed
Get PDFEndometriosis and adenomyosis are chronic diseases which affect 1/10 people with uteruses and are drastically understudied and underserved in the Canadian healthcare system. Through experimentation with blank space on the page, this poem explores some aspects of what it means and how it feels to live with and seek treatment for these diseases
The Phone Call: A Short Story
No full text"The Phone Call" is a short story about a woman, Nadia, dealing with grief and her deteriorating mental health
Self-Fashioning and Ambiguities of Revolution in Austin Clarke's "Initiation"
Get PDFThis is a paper on Austin Clarke’s short story from his collection of short stories titled, In This City. The story can be seen as being a part of Diaspora Studies, Immigrant Literature and Black Studies. The paper critically scrutinizes the short story based on the text and the context to argue how there was an absence of sustainable structures in the public sphere for black immigrant masculinities to sufficiently express themselves in a white heteronormative culture. Sociological ideas of Toby Miller and Erving Goffman are used to understand how black immigrant identities could only sufficiently be expressed in alternate sub-structures that remained isolated from the dominant white and heteronormative status quo. The central subject of “white space” of the issue is highly relevant to the paper’s exploration of how the systems of self-fashioning and revolution that exist in the public imagination are “incomplete” in their lack of reliability and sufficiency for black immigrants in Canada. Hence, their position in relation to aspirations of self-fashioning and revolution is one of ambiguity as the title of the paper itself states.
The paper lays bare how these ambiguities are manufactured based on the chasm that exists between the ways in which the characters want to act and the ways of self-fashioning that society approves for them. It also explores how the systems of revolution are incomplete for them as there is an absence in terms of a revolutionary process that ensures stability and self-preservation.