Submerged: Race and Migration in Long Island Whaling Diasporas (Short Film and talk)

Dr. Ayasha Guerin (University of British Columbia, Department of English) will present Submerged (20 min). As a short film in flux, this ever-evolving audio-visual workbook is a compilation of Dr. Guerin’s iphone footage, photographs from her archives, images of museum artifacts and maps, which come together to tell a story about shorelines as historical spaces of inter-species contact, colonial conquest, and borders.

This iteration of Submerged (2021) focuses on “Race and Migration in Long Island Whaling Diasporas” (an article by this same title is published by Dr. Guerin in Island Studies Journal, Vol. 16, No.1). Urging attention to the ways in which extractive relationships at sea are interconnected with histories of Indigenous and Black displacement from land, Submerged explores how British colonization of the Unkechaug, Montaukett, and Shinnecock people’s shorelines in the mid 17th century Long Island, New York, transformed the sacred Indigenous practice of harvesting drift whales into a trans-oceanic hunting enterprise that profited white settlers and decimated global whale populations. In showing how intimate relations between whales and whalers were shaped by processes of colonization, coastal displacement, and by conditions of indebtedness, enslavement, and fugitivity, Submerged reveals the entangled fates of species under colonial capitalism and the value of cultivating ideas of mammalian kinship for our shared survival.