Mercurial Whiteness | WIP Seminar with Sajdeep Soomal (HYBRID EVENT)
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HYBRID EVENT
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Meeting ID: 827 8998 9687
Passcode: wip
Abstract: What led to the mercury poisoning of Grassy Narrows and White Dog First Nations? Relating commodity racism to environmental racism, I argue that cultural desires for ultra-white paper in postwar Canada led the Dryden Pulp and Paper Company to construct mercury-cell chemical infrastructures in the late 1950s and early 1960s to manufacture brighter, whiter paper—infrastructure that released volatile mercury waste into the Wabigoon River and consequently poisoned Grassy Narrows and White Dog First Nations. I introduce the concept of mercurial whiteness to name this historical entanglement of bureaucratic inscription and chemical violence. The presentation moves in two parts: first, it examines the cultural pursuit of “the whitest white” paper as an indicator of purity, cleanliness, and civilizational modernity; second, it analyzes why Dryden opted for mercury cell technology to produce bleaching agents when less toxic options were available, pointing to the logic of chemical œconomy.
Bio: Sajdeep Soomal is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. He is currently writing about the history and philosophy of geochemistry for his dissertation project, The Chemicalization of Substance, which looks at the critical role that colonial chemical knowledge infrastructures played in the making of Canada as a large-scale industrial petrol, mining and agricultural state in the 19th century. Sajdeep works on related curatorial projects about the politics of chemical visualization with artists who are re-imagining, playing with and altering our synthetic surround. He serves as the Chairperson of the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC), a collective member of Sanghum Film, and as a programming committee member of InterAccess. He has previously conducted research projects for the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), South Asian Visual Arts Centre (SAVAC), and the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives (CLGA). From 2015-2016, he held the Archie Malloch Fellowship in Public Learning at the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas (IPLAI) at McGill University. He holds a BA in History from McGill University and an MA in History from the University of Toronto.