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The Algorithmic Turn: Emergent Processes and the Reformation of Knowledge

This is a meditation on the shifting agency of algorithms—once confined to calculation, they have emerged as active forces in the generation of knowledge. It reflects on how this transformation unsettles conventional ideas of authorship, intention, and understanding, inviting us to reconsider the delicate interplay between human thought and machine influence in shaping our reality. A continuation of my earlier post Abstracted Intelligence: AI, Intellectual Labour, and Berkeley’s Legacy in Public Policy. A reading list is below.

The algorithm has quietly evolved from a tool of calculation into a generative force shaping the very terrain of knowledge. No longer confined to precise computation alone, it now participates actively in structuring how we understand, interpret, and create. As Wendy Chun demonstrates, these systems do more than process inputs—they habituate us, embedding themselves deeply into our cognitive and social rhythms. This evolution signals a fundamental reconfiguration of knowledge itself: no longer solely the product of human cognition or systematic observation, knowledge emerges through recursive, machine-driven processes that entwine human and computational agency.

At the heart of the algorithm lies a set of rules designed to produce outcomes, but its function has expanded far beyond problem-solving. Luciana Parisi’s insight into algorithmic speculation captures how these processes generate novelty and reshape aesthetic and epistemic landscapes rather than simply calculate or represent. Algorithms now inhabit artistic, cultural, and social realms where they do not merely answer questions but frame the very logic through which questions arise. As Alexander Galloway emphasizes, the algorithm operates at the level of interface—a mediator where legibility is constructed and constrained, and where meaning becomes both possible and limited. This shift subtly relocates authority: from human hands to encoded processes, from fixed categories to contingent and often opaque patterns.

The consequences of this shift are profound. Tarleton Gillespie’s work reveals the infrastructural labour behind these systems, which govern visibility and legitimacy in ways frequently invisible to those governed by them. Algorithms do not simply replace human decisions; they reconfigure the conditions of decision-making itself, often beneath the surface. Their generative capacity introduces complexity and opacity, producing outcomes that exceed the understanding of their creators. These recursive patterns complicate verification and accountability, exposing a form of epistemic vulnerability that challenges traditional frameworks for knowledge and governance.

Expanding this perspective, Benjamin Bratton situates algorithms within a planetary computational architecture that transcends local or institutional boundaries, reconfiguring sovereignty, cognition, and identity at a global scale. This shift implicates knowledge production in a vast technical stack that governs infrastructures of power and information flow across geographies and societies. Kate Crawford grounds these theoretical insights in material realities, illustrating how AI and algorithmic systems are embedded in extractive economies, labor conditions, and environmental costs. What may appear as immaterial knowledge production is inseparable from physical and political infrastructures that shape and constrain the possibilities of computation.

Viewed through this lens, algorithmic processes resemble dynamic narratives unfolding through layers of input, context, and recombination. Like storytellers without fixed authorship, these systems orchestrate data flows and conditional operations to produce forms that exceed their components. The outputs are not passive reflections but active interventions that reorient our relationship with knowledge—from stable transmission toward real-time interpretation and negotiation. This dynamism signals both power and precariousness, demanding ongoing reassessment of assumptions and a willingness to confront the shifting locus of interpretive authority.

The visual arts offer a vivid example of this transformation. Generative algorithms produce imagery that moves beyond imitation to invention, collaborating with human creators while introducing unpredictability and chance. This interplay opens new aesthetic spaces but carries risks: the flattening of complexity, amplification of bias, and erosion of clear boundaries between authorship, intention, and effect. The algorithm becomes a co-creator and gatekeeper, shaping the field of possibility even as it expands it.

This transformation reflects a deeper epistemological turn. Knowledge no longer appears as fixed or discrete but emerges within dynamic, recursive systems that resist containment or full comprehension. Algorithms function as agents in the production of meaning, their agency demanding reflection on not only what they enable but also what they obscure or distort. In both artistic and intellectual practice, the tension between human intention and algorithmic variation generates new possibilities while compelling vigilance. When opacity deepens and systemic influences become normalized, the risks extend beyond creativity into the realm of knowledge itself.

This challenge recalls earlier philosophical critiques of abstraction and the limits of knowledge that I have talked about before. The eighteenth-century philosopher George Berkeley, for instance, challenged the legitimacy of abstract mathematical entities—infinitesimals—that lacked direct empirical manifestation. Such critiques resonate today as we grapple with algorithmic processes that often operate as “ghostly inferences,” producing outcomes whose internal workings and assumptions remain intangible or obscured. Like Berkeley’s warning against unmoored abstractions, this calls us to critically examine the epistemic foundations and consequences of the algorithmic turn. See my post on Berkeley for more here.

Emerging from this shift is a new epistemic condition: knowledge as emergent, relational, and mediated through evolving systems. In this environment, we become not only interpreters but stewards—charged with critical engagement and ethical responsibility for the infrastructures of meaning that shape our world. This requires embracing process over product, contingency over fixity, and acknowledging the redistribution of agency from cognition to computation, from conscious intent to iterative dynamics. The challenge moving forward is to interrogate not only what these systems make possible but to ask persistently under what assumptions, for whose benefit, and at what cost.

Machine art from an exhibition a few years back.

A short reading list from sources that I have read over the last few years on this topic.

Taken together, these six works form a conceptual constellation that reframes the algorithm not as a neutral instrument, but as an active participant in the production of knowledge, culture, and power. Wendy Chun foregrounds how algorithms habituate us, not just through interface but through repetition and memory, revealing the affective and social dimensions of computation. Luciana Parisi pushes further, showing that algorithms speculate—they generate rather than merely calculate—thus altering aesthetic and epistemic landscapes. Galloway’s analysis of the interface illuminates the algorithm as a mediator of meaning, a site where legibility is constructed and constrained. Tarleton Gillespie turns to the infrastructural labour behind algorithmic systems, exposing how platforms subtly police visibility and legitimacy under the guise of neutrality. Benjamin Bratton scales this transformation globally, mapping a planetary computational architecture that reconfigures sovereignty and cognition alike. And Kate Crawford grounds these abstractions in the material and political, revealing how AI and algorithmic systems are inseparable from extractive practices, labour exploitation, and environmental cost. As a group, these texts chart a shift in thought: from seeing algorithms as tools of control to understanding them as environments—generative, recursive, and contested—within which control, creativity, and understanding are continuously renegotiated.

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Liminal Visibility: Migration, Data, and the Politics of Boundaries

The first reading of Canada’s Bill C-2 signals a significant expansion of digital surveillance and data collection powers within immigration enforcement, including enhanced capabilities for electronic monitoring, biometric data use, and information sharing across agencies. These provisions illustrate how the state increasingly relies on computational systems to govern migration, embedding control within data infrastructures that produce visibility and legibility on its own terms. This legislative shift exemplifies the broader Data Turn—where algorithmic models and surveillance reshape who is recognized or excluded. Examining this through the lens of contemporary visual art reveals how artists expose and resist these mechanisms of control, offering critical counter-narratives that emphasize opacity, ambiguity, and the contested politics of representation in immigration regimes. This article stems from my reading of Canada’s Bill C-2 informed by Joy Rohde’s Armed with Expertise (that I just finished reading), connecting contemporary data-driven governance in immigration to its historical roots in Cold War expertise, and exploring how these dynamics shape the politics of visibility and liminality.

The Data Turn has reordered not just how states govern, but how they see. In systems of immigration control, policing, and security, governance now operates through data—through predictive models, biometric templates, and behavioral scores. These systems do not represent reality; they construct it, enacting a vision of the world in which subjects are rendered as variables and futures as risks. This logic, increasingly dominant across global institutions, marks a shift from rule by law to rule by model. And as it reconfigures power, it also reconfigures aesthetics.

This shift towards data-driven governance deeply affects how migratory subjects are categorized and controlled, often reducing complex human experiences to discrete data points subject to algorithmic prediction and intervention. The imposition of predictive models and biometric surveillance transforms migrants from individuals with agency into risks to be managed, their identities flattened into probabilistic profiles. This reordering not only reshapes bureaucratic practice but also redefines the conditions of visibility and invisibility, inclusion and exclusion. Those caught in liminal states—between legality and illegality, presence and absence—are particularly vulnerable to these regimes of measurement and control, which perpetuate uncertainty and precarity.

Visual artists have responded to this transformation not only by thematizing data regimes, but by dismantling the very mechanisms that render them invisible. They expose the apparatus behind the interface—the wires, scripts, ideologies—and stage counter-visions that assert opacity, indeterminacy, and refusal. In doing so, they challenge the way the Data Turn governs the liminal, especially those living in the suspended space of migration, statelessness, and bureaucratic indeterminacy.

This artistic intervention reframes vision itself—not as a neutral or purely descriptive act, but as a tool of power embedded within technological and bureaucratic systems. By peeling back layers of digital mediation, these artists reveal how contemporary surveillance and data infrastructures actively produce knowledge and enforce hierarchies. Their work highlights that visibility is not simply about being seen, but about how one is seen, categorized, and ultimately governed—a dynamic that is especially acute for those inhabiting the ambiguous spaces of migration and statelessness.

Artists like Trevor Paglen and Hito Steyerl foreground this shift from image to instrument. In their work, surveillance footage, facial recognition outputs, and satellite tracking systems are not just visual materials—they are operational weapons. Paglen’s images of classified military sites or undersea data cables reveal the landscape of surveillance that underpins contemporary geopolitics. Steyerl, in pieces like How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, explores how machine vision abstracts, targets, and governs. In both cases, the act of seeing is no longer passive; it is a condition of being classified and controlled. The migrant, in such systems, is no longer a presence to be engaged but a deviation to be filtered—a datapoint, a heat signature, a probability.

Paglen and Steyerl’s work exposes the mechanisms through which visibility becomes a tool of control, transforming subjects into data points within vast systems of surveillance. Yet this logic of enforced legibility provokes a critical response: a turn toward opacity as a form of resistance. Where the state insists on clarity and categorization, artists embrace ambiguity and fragmentation, challenging the totalizing gaze and creating spaces where identity and presence refuse easy definition. This dialectic between exposure and concealment reflects the lived realities of migrants caught within regimes that demand transparency but offer exclusion.

If the state’s data infrastructures demand visibility and legibility, many artists respond with strategic opacity. Édouard Glissant’s philosophy of opacity—his insistence on the right not to be reduced—resonates powerfully here. In the works of Wangechi Mutu and Walid Raad, opacity takes material form: fragmentation, distortion, layering, and pseudofactuality unsettle any stable claim to truth or identity. These aesthetic strategies echo the experience of navigating migration regimes—systems that demand transparency from those who are systematically excluded from its protections. Opacity becomes a refusal of capture. It asserts a right to complexity in the face of an infrastructure that reduces lives to binary certainties.

I am guided here by the words of WG Sebald and the art of Gerhardt Richter and their use of things like dust and blur as integral to understanding of history and memory, in addition to the use of light and shadows in works of art immemorial and its relation to knowledge.

Building on this embrace of opacity, other artists turn their attention to archives—the sites where power not only records but also erases and shapes memory. By interrogating immigration documents, military footage, and bureaucratic data, these artists reveal how archives carry forward histories of violence and exclusion. Their work challenges the illusion of “raw” data, exposing it instead as deeply entangled with structures of power that continue to marginalize and render migrants invisible or precarious. In doing so, they create counter-archives that reclaim erased voices and insist on recognition beyond official narratives, mirroring the ongoing struggles of those living in legal and social liminality.

Other artists interrogate the archive: not just what is remembered, but how, by whom, and with what effects. The work of Forensic Architecture, Susan Schuppli, and Maria Thereza Alves reveals the afterlife of data—how immigration records, censuses, or military footage embed structural violence into bureaucratic memory. Their work testifies to how data is never “raw”: it is collected through regimes of power, and it carries that violence forward. These artists reanimate what official systems erase, constructing counter-archives that expose the silences, absences, and structural forgettings built into systems of documentation. This resonates deeply with the immigrant condition, in which legal presence is provisional and recognition is always deferred.

As archival artists uncover the hidden violences embedded in bureaucratic memory, another group of practitioners turns to the physical and infrastructural dimensions of data governance. By making visible the often-invisible hardware and networks that sustain digital control, these artists reveal how power operates not only through data but through material systems—servers, cables, and code—that shape everyday life. This exposure challenges the myth of a seamless digital realm, reminding us that governance is grounded in tangible, contested spaces where decisions about inclusion and exclusion are enacted.

Where the logic of governance is increasingly immaterial—hidden in code, servers, and proprietary systems—some artists work to make the infrastructure visible. James Bridle, in exploring what he terms the “New Aesthetic,” captures the eerie, semi-visible zone where machine perception intersects with urban life and planetary surveillance. Ingrid Burrington’s maps and guides to internet infrastructure render tangible the cables, server farms, and chokepoints that quietly govern digital existence. These works push back against the naturalization of the digital by showing it as a system of decisions, exclusions, and material constraints.

The “Data Turn” can be understood as a continuation of intellectual movements that critically examine the production and mediation of knowledge, much like the “Literary Turn” of the late twentieth century. The Literary Turn foregrounded language and narrative as active forces shaping historical meaning and subjectivity, challenging claims to objective or transparent truth. Similarly, the Data Turn interrogates the rise of data and computational systems as new epistemic tools that do not merely represent social realities but construct and govern them. This shift compels historians to reconsider the archives, sources, and methodologies that underpin their work, recognizing that data is embedded within power relations and ideological frameworks. Both turns reveal the contingency of knowledge and demand critical attention to the infrastructures through which it is produced and deployed.

By revealing the physical infrastructure behind digital governance, artists highlight how power operates through material systems that govern access and control. This focus on the tangible complements artistic engagements with the symbolic and bureaucratic forms that mediate migration. Together, these practices expose how both infrastructure and imagery function as aesthetic regimes—tools that shape and enforce legal and political inclusion, while also offering sites for creative rupture and alternative narratives.

Even the forms that mediate migration—passport photos, visa documents, biometric scans—are aesthetic regimes. They precede legal recognition; they shape it. Artists like Bouchra Khalili, in works like The Mapping Journey Project, appropriate these documentary forms not to affirm their authority, but to rupture them. Her work stages alternative cartographies of movement—ones based not on state control, but on narrative, memory, and resistance. In such works, the migrant is not a risk profile, but a storyteller.

By transforming state documentation into acts of storytelling and resistance, artists reclaim the migrant’s agency from reductive systems of classification. This reimagining challenges the prevailing logic of legibility, opening space for more nuanced understandings of identity and belonging beyond the constraints of bureaucratic control.

Across these practices, art offers not just critique but proposition. It creates space for reimagining how we understand legibility, personhood, and the infrastructures that shape both. In contrast to the Data Turn’s promise of seamless optimization, these works embrace what is incomplete, contradictory, and opaque. They remind us that data is not destiny, and that what cannot be captured might still be what matters most.

Together, these artistic interventions reveal that data regimes are not neutral frameworks but deeply embedded with values and power. By embracing ambiguity and incompleteness, they challenge dominant narratives of control and certainty, opening new possibilities for understanding identity and presence beyond bureaucratic constraints.

For scholars working at the intersection of immigration, data, and liminality, this aesthetic terrain is not peripheral—it is central. Art shows us that the Data Turn is not merely technical; it is philosophical. It carries assumptions about what kinds of life count, what futures are permissible, and how uncertainty should be managed. Visual practices, especially those rooted in the experience of liminality, offer a different grammar of visibility—one attuned not to classification, but to ambiguity; not to risk, but to relation.

photo of me, by me, from an art exhibition of the surveillance state in Montreal
this was from a room that tracked me taking photos of it taking photos of me

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Crowned in Ruin: Resonances Between Kurosawa’s Ran and Anthony Hopkins as King Lear (2018)

This post builds on a few earlier posts in the same vein, Cassian Andor and the Shakespearean Tragic: Macbeth in a Galaxy Far, Far Away and Shared Shadows: Samurai and Scottish Kings comparing recent interpretations of Shaekespeare's works. Each of those posts considered how Shakespearean motifs migrate across aesthetic and cultural regimes, illustrating the persistence of his tragic structures as they are recontextualized—from the ritualized violence and visual codes of feudal Japan to the allegorical architectures of the Star Wars universe. @DM - Thanks again for the suggestion!

Across cultures and media forms, King Lear, like MacBeth, resists containment, defying easy categorization or fixed interpretation. Its tragic scope—centred on the violent disintegration of power, family, and selfhood—possesses a universality that transcends time, place, and medium, enabling it to translate with remarkable force into radically different aesthetic and cultural settings. This is not simply a matter of thematic portability, but of profound structural and psychological resonance: the fissures in authority, the betrayal of kinship, and the unraveling of identity under existential pressures are motifs that persistently echo across civilizations and epochs. When Akira Kurosawa’s Ran is placed in dialogue with Richard Eyre’s 2018 film adaptation starring Anthony Hopkins, what emerges is not a straightforward comparative exercise but rather a meditation on how cinematic form and cultural context serve as vehicles to channel and transform the play’s eschatological despair. Both works adapt Lear not by slavishly preserving Shakespeare’s text or its Elizabethan idioms, but by distilling and preserving its structural truths: the implosion of sovereign power, the fragility and fracture of family bonds, and the ravaging of selfhood through time, betrayal, and grief. The critical question ceases to be about fidelity to text and instead focuses on how each adaptation exploits its medium—film’s visual grammar, narrative economy, and sensory impact—and responds to its own historical moment to crystallize a shared metaphysical crisis that remains powerfully relevant.

Kurosawa’s Ran is steeped in the imagery, ritual, and disciplined austerity of Noh theatre and the monumental landscapes of feudal Japan, offering a reimagining of Lear through the figure of Hidetora Ichimonji, an aging warlord whose attempt to divide his domain between his sons triggers a cascade of civil war, chaos, and existential ruin. Noh’s emphasis on stillness, subtle gestures, and the use of masks to express internal states resonates profoundly with Kurosawa’s cinematic approach to Lear. Rather than relying on dialogue to convey psychological complexity, Ran conveys the ineffable through composition and the choreography of bodies within space—faces frozen in painted expressions of torment, eyes that communicate despair through a stillness that contrasts sharply with the violent chaos surrounding them. This ritualized embodiment of suffering heightens the sense that the characters are not merely individuals but archetypes caught in the inexorable machinery of fate. The slow, deliberate pacing and the stylized blocking in Ran echo Noh’s meditative rhythms, inviting viewers into a contemplative space where tragedy is not simply witnessed but intuited at a spiritual level.

This film is a work not of language or speech but of silence and visual poetry: moments of stillness punctuated by haunting gazes exchanged across blood-soaked battlefields, the sight of fallen bodies scattered across hills painted with a surreal red, and faces contorted into stylized masks of suffering and rage. Kurosawa deliberately evacuates Shakespeare’s rich verbal tapestry, replacing it with an intense focus on composition, movement, and the symbolic use of colour and space. The succession crisis, the brutality of civil war, and the devastating natural disasters that punctuate the narrative become more than mere plot elements; they are staged as elemental forces working against human order, as if the natural world itself revolts against the arrogance and folly of man. This is Lear refracted through a cosmology governed not by Christian providence or justice but by the inexorable logic of karma and cosmic balance. The film’s sense of time is cyclical and cosmic rather than linear: history is not a progression but a repeating pattern, where violence begets more violence and human folly is met not with divine retribution but with the cold, indifferent consequences of fate. The film’s epic scale and ritualized style invite viewers to perceive the tragedy as part of a universal, cyclical human condition, where individual and political collapse mirror the vast, relentless rhythms of the cosmos.

Moreover, Kurosawa’s masterful use of sky imagery throughout Ran amplifies the film’s cosmic and metaphysical dimensions. The vastness of the sky—whether storm-darkened, brooding with portent, or piercingly clear—serves as a mutable canvas reflecting the inner turmoil and external chaos that engulf Hidetora and his world. In key sequences, the sky appears almost as a silent, omnipresent witness to human folly and suffering, its shifting colours and moods marking the rise and fall of power and sanity. Storm clouds gathering above battlefields echo the gathering doom, while moments of eerie stillness under open blue skies accentuate the loneliness and vulnerability of the fallen warlord. This sky imagery resonates with the cyclical view of history embedded in the film: the heavens do not intervene with divine justice but remain indifferent, a vast and empty space that dwarfs human struggles and amplifies their tragic futility. The sky thus becomes a symbol of the cosmic order—or disorder—that underlies the mortal world, a reminder that human agency is caught within forces far greater than itself.

In this way, Kurosawa’s visual and thematic choices transform Lear from a tragedy of a singular monarch into an epic meditation on the impermanence of power and the fragile intersection of human will with destiny. The Noh-inspired stillness punctuating the chaos underscores a fatalistic acceptance, as characters enact their roles within a predetermined cosmic drama. This ritualized aesthetic deepens the film’s meditation on time—not as a linear march but as a swirling continuum where past violence informs present suffering, and where Hidetora’s downfall is but one turn in an endless cycle of rise and ruin.

In stark contrast, Eyre’s 2018 King Lear thrusts the drama into a recognizably contemporary and militarized state—a Britain that is vaguely 21st century, marked by post-democratic malaise and institutional coldness. This modern setting is not simply a backdrop but an active commentary: Lear here is not a tragic monarch steeped in dynastic tradition, but an autocrat unmoored from institutional constraints or moral accountability, whose hubris precipitates a breakdown resonant with the decline of modern empires and the fragility of late-stage political order. Anthony Hopkins’s Lear is portrayed with a brutal clarity, embodying a figure more brittle than mad, more cruel than noble, a man whose decline is accelerated by a society that demands strength and punishes weakness or ambiguity without mercy. The adaptation distills Shakespeare’s sprawling text to its rawest emotional and political conflicts, tightening the narrative noose so that the tension and despair are borne primarily through the actors’ performances rather than linguistic flourish. Here, the tragedy is stripped of cosmic or metaphysical grandeur and recast as systemic and institutional: it is the failure of governance, the erosion of familial loyalty, and the collapse of genuine care within a hypermodern, bureaucratic, and alienated social order that drive the narrative. Madness in this version is psychological trauma writ large, a fragmented internal collapse in a world that has become inhospitable to vulnerability, a bleak portrait of mental disintegration framed by cold, oppressive spaces that amplify isolation.

Yet, despite these vastly different aesthetics and cultural idioms, both Ran and Eyre’s King Lear converge around a powerful, shared image: the body stripped bare and exposed—on the storm-swept heath, amid the ruins of once-powerful realms, in madness, silence, and desolation. In Ran, Hidetora’s corporeal decline is rendered as a slow, mournful journey across desolate fields ravaged by storms and bloodshed, his mind shattered by the horrors unleashed in his name. His body becomes a visual embodiment of shame, madness, and the ultimate futility of worldly power, framed through ritualized imagery and the stylized masks of classical Japanese theatre. In Eyre’s adaptation, Hopkins’s Lear similarly staggers through urban wastelands and confining, prison-like interiors, his psyche collapsing under the cumulative weight of regret, betrayal, and lost authority. Both men are undone by the very power they once wielded—victims of a violent logic of their own making. Their children—whether daughters as in Shakespeare and Eyre, or sons as in Ran—echo this collapse structurally and thematically: filial relationships degrade into transactional calculations, virtue is met with indifference or cruelty, and kindness where it surfaces is either futile or extinguished. The family becomes a site where political and emotional structures alike unravel, embodying the deep fractures within human society and identity.

Though these adaptations differ markedly in their gestures, they resonate profoundly in tone and affect. Both reject Shakespeare’s verbal poetry in favour of registers suited to their respective media and cultures: Kurosawa’s painterly frames and ritualized blocking recall the precision and symbolism of Japanese theatre, while Eyre’s claustrophobic mise-en-scène and psychological realism immerse the viewer in a contemporary world stripped to its emotional essentials. Both invite audiences not to decode or intellectualize Shakespeare’s text, but to viscerally experience what happens when the scaffolding of meaning—family, order, sovereignty—collapses into chaos. The storm that rages in both works is more than a plot device; it is a metaphysical force, a symbol of the loss of place and belonging in a world turned hostile and indifferent. This elemental turmoil conveys a profound crisis of being, where the human self is uprooted from the structures that once gave it identity and security.

Just as Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and the Donmar Warehouse’s Macbeth illuminated each other through resonance rather than direct comparison, so too do Ran and Eyre’s King Lear engage in a shared dialogue across cultural and temporal divides. Together, they create a sensorium of decay and desolation, drawing from culturally distinct but emotionally proximate traditions. One unfolds through the epic fatalism of Japanese historical drama, where ritual and cosmic cycles shape human destiny; the other, through the claustrophobic intimacy of modern political collapse, exposing the fragility of late capitalist governance and family life. Yet despite these formal and cultural differences, both leave us with the same haunting sense: that the human heart, once severed from love, responsibility, and the ethical bonds that sustain it, cannot endure the corrosive weight of its own power.

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“We talk about granting new citizenship but we talk about none of its meaning.”—Mavis Gallant

Mavis Gallant’s 1947 article “Are They Canadians?” appeared just as the first Canadian Citizenship Act came into force. This legislation marked a formal break from British subjecthood and a symbolic assertion of national identity. Yet Gallant was quick to observe a core contradiction: while legal citizenship was conferred, its meaning—socially, culturally, and emotionally—remained undefined. She cited the case of 1,500 naturalized Yugoslavs who, despite investing in Canadian society, ultimately returned to Europe. “They obviously did not feel they belonged here,” she wrote. “There has never been an organized program to teach immigrants the English language, let alone the rudiments of citizenship.”

More than seventy-five years later, her critique remains salient. Canada’s evolving identity continues to be shaped by shifting geopolitical dynamics—no longer by the British Empire, but increasingly in relation to the United States. In this context, questions about belonging, integration, and national cohesion are as urgent as ever.

Today’s policy frameworks emphasize inclusivity, multiculturalism, and respect for diversity. Yet public discourse often defaults to symbolic gestures rather than substantive engagement with the meaning of citizenship. This risks creating a gap between the formal acquisition of status and the lived experience of belonging—echoing Gallant’s concern.

Complicating the contemporary picture are Indigenous perspectives on identity, citizenship, and sovereignty. These views are foundational to Canada’s history and future but do not fit neatly into conventional narratives of integration. Policymaking in this area must avoid simplistic inclusion and instead recognize the distinctiveness and plurality of Indigenous nationhoods.

Unlike the assimilationist model historically favoured by the United States, Canada’s approach to citizenship remains more open-ended. This is a strength—but only if paired with deliberate policy supports. Citizenship cannot be treated as a one-time legal event. It must be understood as an ongoing, participatory process grounded in common principles: democratic values, linguistic and civic literacy, Indigenous rights, and the rule of law. These serve as flexible but firm guardrails for fostering a shared sense of purpose.

For policymakers, the challenge is clear: to invest in the infrastructures—educational, social, cultural—that make belonging possible. This means expanding access to civic education, supporting language acquisition, affirming Indigenous jurisdiction, and creating inclusive spaces for plural narratives. Citizenship, in this context, becomes not only a legal designation but a collective, continuous process—one that reflects a nation still defining itself.

AreTheyCanadianDownload
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Shared Shadows: Samurai and Scottish Kings

After seeing the Donmar Warehouse’s Macbeth starring David Tennant and Cush Jumbo, alongside Andor (see my other post here), a friend suggested I revisit Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood from 1957—a prompt that opened a corridor between seemingly distant worlds.

Across cultures and centuries, Macbeth has proven uniquely adaptable—not because its language is universal, but because its psychological architecture and ritual mechanics resonate beyond context. The play’s core is less about words than about the patterns of human ambition, the cyclical nature of power, and the haunting consequences of guilt. These elemental forces find expression through highly specific cultural forms, yet somehow the underlying emotional and metaphysical structures transcend linguistic and geographic boundaries. When we look at Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood alongside the Donmar Warehouse’s modern staging, what emerges is not merely a contrast in style or medium, but a deep structural affinity. Both works articulate a shared grammar of ambition, guilt, and spectral dread, communicating a universal human crisis through distinct sensory and ritualistic vocabularies.

In Throne of Blood, the influence of traditional Japanese theatre, particularly Noh, shapes the film’s aesthetic and emotional tenor. The soft rustle of Lady Asaji’s kimono, for instance, is not incidental but a deliberate sonic signifier steeped in cultural meaning. In Japanese performance, such sounds evoke the ghostly restraint and suppressed violence characteristic of spirits and doomed aristocracy. This subtle auditory presence externalizes internal psychological turmoil in a way that is deeply evocative yet restrained—an elegiac whisper of fate’s inexorability. Likewise, the persistent motif of crows circling or calling in the background serves as an ominous refrain, a natural chorus underscoring the inevitability of doom. The bird’s symbolic weight crosses cultural boundaries, appearing in both Kurosawa’s and the Donmar production as a harbinger of death and the uncanny.

Conversely, the Donmar Warehouse’s staging, while embedded in contemporary theatrical forms, draws on an equally potent ritual language of its own. The palpable tension, the fractured psychological states, and the ever-present sense of paranoia and surveillance resonate with modern anxieties but also echo timeless human fears. The crows’ calls punctuate the space, anchoring the narrative’s supernatural and fatalistic elements, while the intense physicality and raw vocal performances evoke a different kind of ritual — one rooted in Western dramatic tradition but suffused with a contemporary edge. This juxtaposition reveals how cultural codes operate not to isolate but to illuminate shared affective experiences. Both versions of Macbeth externalize inner collapse and moral disintegration through a rich interplay of sound, movement, and symbolic imagery, adapted to their cultural and historical contexts.

The fascination lies not in erasing these differences, but in tracing how seemingly distinct traditions converge in affective resonance. Shakespearean eschatology, with its linear progression toward an apocalyptic reckoning, contrasts with the cyclical time of East Asian fatalism, yet both frame ambition and guilt within inevitable cosmic orders. Similarly, courtly restraint as embodied by Lady Asaji’s measured silence finds an uneasy counterpart in the martial paranoia of the Donmar’s Macbeth, who is equally trapped by invisible forces and internal demons. These are not mere thematic overlaps but expressions of ontologies that shape how power, fate, and the self are understood and performed. The works do not speak to each other through direct translation but through the vibration of shared human experience refracted through culturally specific prisms.

In this light, Throne of Blood and the Donmar Macbeth are less adaptations of a text and more dialogues between worldviews, each exposing how ritual and narrative craft produce meaning. They remind us that theatre and film are not simply vehicles for storytelling but complex systems of sensory and symbolic mediation where time, space, and identity intersect. The rustling kimono, the haunting caw of crows, the measured silences, and the bursts of violent expression function as nodes in a network of affect, drawing spectators into a shared psychic landscape of dread and desire. By exploring these shared shadows—between samurai and Scottish kings, between East Asian fatalism and Western eschatology—we glimpse the universality of Macbeth’s tragic vision while appreciating the particularities that make each iteration compelling and distinct.

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Cassian Andor and the Shakespearean Tragic: Macbeth in a Galaxy Far, Far Away

I just finished watching David Tennant and Cush Jumbo’s Macbeth and the experience lingered long after the final scene. There’s something about the way Shakespeare captures ambition’s darkness, the pull of fate, and the heavy weight of guilt that feels timeless. This production is one of the best that I have seen and I watched it from the comfort of my living room. I have also been watching Andor and suddenly, Cassian Andor’s story in Andor and Rogue One came into sharper focus—not as a simple space rebel, but as a tragic figure shaped by forces beyond his control, haunted by his own choices, and bound to a destiny that feels both cruel and inevitable.

Like Macbeth, Cassian is caught between his will and something larger—something mysterious and powerful. In Macbeth, it’s the witches. Their prophecy cuts through the air, twisting the future and planting seeds of ambition and doubt. They are strange, otherworldly figures—symbols of chaos, fate, and the unknown. In the Star Wars galaxy, that mysterious force takes shape as the Force itself, an invisible current that both guides and traps the characters who try to grasp it. It’s the spiritual undercurrent to Cassian’s rebellion, the unseen power that moves through everything and everyone.

Cassian isn’t driven by ambition like Macbeth—he doesn’t thirst for power or crowns. Instead, his fire burns for justice, freedom, survival. But the price he pays feels just as steep. Watching him, you feel the weight he carries: the betrayals, the violence, the endless paranoia. Like Macbeth’s hallucinations—ghosts and bloodied hands—Cassian’s scars are quieter but no less real. They live in his haunted eyes and his weary silence. Both men are trapped in a cruel dance with their consciences, a struggle that shakes them to their core.

Cassian sits in the shuttle, silent, his face carved in shadow. Jyn speaks beside him, unaware. He stares ahead, burdened—not just by his orders, but by the years that led him here. After Andor, the moment is heavy with history: this is a man unraveling quietly, long before the mission begins.

And yet, here the stories split. Macbeth’s path is a downward spiral—corruption, tyranny, death. Cassian’s is a slow-burning tragedy that ends in a sacrificial blaze. But beneath that sacrifice lies a quieter, deeper pain: the tragedy of a man caught between who he is, who others expect him to be, and who he fears he can never fully become. His death in Rogue One isn’t just an end; it’s a beginning. The bitter loss becomes the spark that lights a rebellion, a defiant hope born from sacrifice. Where Macbeth’s tragedy warns of ambition’s ruin, Cassian’s story whispers that even in loss, even in the failure to fully embody the heroic ideal imposed on him, there is power and meaning.

There’s also something communal in Cassian’s fate. He’s not alone—his sacrifice belongs to the many who fight alongside him, the countless unknown rebels who risk everything. And yet, in this collective struggle, Cassian’s personal fracture remains: the quiet anguish of feeling unable to be the perfect hero, the ideal symbol, or the saviour everyone demands. It’s a chorus of voices, a shared grief and courage that makes his story more than personal—yet his story is also the story of fractured identity, of the lonely burden carried behind the mask of rebellion. It is the collective heartbeat of resistance, shaped by the silent cracks in its most reluctant hero.

In the end, Cassian Andor stands as a tragic hero for our times—haunted and conflicted, caught in the relentless currents of unseen forces that shape his fate and fracture his identity. He wrestles endlessly between what the world demands of him and the limits of what he can give. The weight of sacrifice presses down not just on his actions but on who he is—or who he feels he is failing to be. Like Macbeth, Cassian’s story plunges into the shadows that live within us all: the fears, doubts, and moral ambiguities that make heroism feel at once noble and unbearably heavy. Yet where Macbeth’s descent ends in ruin and silence, Cassian’s darkness carries within it a fragile, flickering hope. His tragedy is not just about loss but about the quiet resilience of that spark—an ember that refuses to die even when the night seems endless. It reminds us that even in the deepest shadows of doubt and sacrifice, there is still light, still meaning, still a reason to keep fighting.

But what sets Cassian apart from the tragic heroes of the past—Macbeth, Oedipus, Hamlet—is the modern complexity of his identity and the fractured nature of his heroism. Classical tragedy often hinges on a fatal flaw—ambition, pride, hubris—that leads to a solitary downfall. Cassian’s tragedy, however, is rooted in a more nuanced tension: between the self he knows and the impossible ideals others impose on him; between the limits of his own being and the vast collective cause he must serve. He is not undone by hubris but burdened by the crushing weight of expectation and the sense that he can never fully embody the hero he is meant to be.

Unlike the solitary tragic figures of old, Cassian’s story emerges from within the murk of a collective struggle—where the self dissolves into the cause, where one life is both vital and disposable. His sacrifice is not singular but shared, echoing the quiet heroism of countless others lost to the margins of history. And yet, this solidarity does not spare him from isolation. If anything, it deepens it. He moves through the rebellion as a man hollowed by experience, forced to wear conviction like armour, even as uncertainty corrodes him from within. After Andor, we see that his courage isn’t blind—it’s bruised. That’s what makes it tragic. That’s what makes it real.

Moreover, Cassian’s tragedy is entwined with mystical and systemic forces—the Force, the Empire, the rebellion itself—which are not mere backdrops but active players shaping his destiny. His struggle is both personal and political, reflecting the modern anxieties of agency and meaning in a world dominated by overwhelming systems beyond individual control. In this way, Cassian Andor is a tragic hero for our fragmented, uncertain age—haunted by fate, fractured by identity, and defined by the delicate balance between resistance and sacrifice.

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From Da Nang to Canada: The Precursor to the Boat People Exodus

The Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series provides an essential window into the internal deliberations of American policymakers during moments of global crisis. Compiled by the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Historian, FRUS volumes contain declassified memos, transcripts, and cables that reveal in real time how U.S. officials assessed and responded to unfolding events. In the case of South Vietnam’s collapse in 1975, these documents offer an unfiltered look at the rapidly changing military situation, the breakdown of civil authority, and the early contours of a refugee crisis that would eventually reach Canadian shores. Drawing from these records, this article traces how the fall of Da Nang marked the beginning of the boat people migration—one of the most significant humanitarian movements of the late 20th century. These excerpts are from Collapse and Evacuation, February 26–July 22, 1975 - Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume X, Vietnam, January 1973–July 1975

By the spring of 1975, the Republic of Vietnam was in freefall. While the world would later fixate on the iconic images of helicopters lifting evacuees from rooftops in Saigon, the real beginning of the humanitarian crisis—and of the Vietnamese diaspora to countries like Canada—can be traced to earlier moments, particularly the collapse of Da Nang.

In March 1975, Da Nang, South Vietnam’s second-largest city and a key northern stronghold, descended into chaos. As one U.S. official noted in a high-level conversation, “the political situation now is radically different,” with Communist forces gaining ground and establishing what many viewed as a legitimate revolutionary government. Ambassador Martin tried to argue that Da Nang might still hold or link to the south, but his view was challenged by others who insisted that the South Vietnamese forces were stretched too thin and facing imminent collapse.

This was not an overstatement. By late March, military analysts predicted Da Nang could fall “within a few days” due to overwhelming North Vietnamese pressure, disorganized South Vietnamese defenses, and mass civilian panic. One internal memo noted, “the situation in DaNang is chaotic,” and that “its defences could simply collapse”. President Thieu, then still in power, was reportedly considering pulling forces from the city entirely—a strategic retreat that left the civilian population vulnerable.

Meanwhile, U.S. President Gerald Ford and his advisors were receiving dire updates. CIA Director William Colby predicted that Da Nang would fall even if elite Marine units remained in place. “It should fall within two weeks,” he said, “even if the Marine Division stays”. When asked about the evacuation of civilians, Colby described “terrible mob scenes” at both airports and ports, where thousands tried to flee. Soldiers were firing their way onto ships. Law and order had broken down entirely.

What emerged in Da Nang was not just a tactical withdrawal or a city lost—it was the collapse of an entire civic order under the weight of war. The distinction between military personnel and civilians dissolved as desperation overtook discipline. Refugees overwhelmed the last remaining points of escape, creating a humanitarian crisis that left even U.S. officials stunned by its speed and scale. These early signals from Da Nang, echoed in classified briefings and policy cables, began to shape how allied governments would later understand their responsibilities—not just in geopolitical terms, but as urgent moral imperatives. In Canada, although formal resettlement programs were still years away, these early images and reports laid the groundwork for a new kind of foreign policy conversation: one that placed refugee protection at the heart of international engagement. The seeds of Canada’s eventual leadership in refugee resettlement were sown here—in the failure to protect, and the dawning realization that the world would soon be asked to respond.

This was more than a military failure. It marked the first wave of what would become a global humanitarian emergency. The fall of Da Nang was the beginning of a refugee crisis that would swell into the exodus of the thuyền nhân—the boat people—fleeing Vietnam by sea. Canada’s eventual involvement in resettling these refugees has become one of its most important modern migration stories, but the roots of that response lie in the scenes of terror and flight that emerged in places like Da Nang weeks before Saigon itself fell.

What distinguished the collapse in Da Nang was not just the loss of territory, but the unraveling of social and institutional fabric in real time. Unlike the images of orderly withdrawal sometimes projected in official narratives, the reality on the ground—documented in these U.S. diplomatic cables—was of disintegrating command structures, mass panic, and a population abandoned by any sense of coordinated response. It was in these moments that survival became individualized. Families fractured at airfields, children were separated from parents, and decisions were made with no time, no plan, and no guarantee of safety. The trauma of that sudden collapse carried forward into the boats, camps, and eventual resettlement pathways that followed.

The stories of those who would later arrive on Canadian shores—traumatized, stateless, and often separated from loved ones—began in these early, chaotic weeks. While many Canadians remember the arrival of the boat people in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the seeds of that journey were planted in the final weeks of the Vietnam War, when the international community was still struggling to comprehend the scale of what was to come.

For Canada, the fall of Da Nang and the refugee flight that followed posed both a moral and logistical question: how would the country respond to a new, mobile, and vulnerable population created by geopolitical collapse? The answer, forged in policy rooms and across civil society, would help redefine Canada’s refugee policy and multicultural identity in the decades to follow.

The 65-person polyurethane sculpture “La Foule Illuminée” (“The Illuminated Crowd”). Sculpted by Franco-British artist Raymond Mason, this public art has stood in front of the BNP/Laurentian Bank Tower since the mid-1980s. In the words of the artist: “A crowd has gathered, facing a light, an illumination brought about by a fire, an event, an ideology—or an ideal. The strong light casts shadows, and as the light moves toward the back and diminishes, the mood degenerates; rowdiness, disorder and violence occur, showing the fragile nature of man. Illumination, hope, involvement, hilarity, irritation, fear, illness, violence, murder and death—the flow of man’s emotion through space.”
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Narrative Laundering: The Hidden Art of Shaping Belief

From The Economist: Russia is particularly keen on this kind of “narrative laundering”, in the words of Victor Ilie of Snoop, a news site in Romania. 

In Canada’s recent federal election, the battlefield was not confined to physical spaces or traditional media but unfolded dramatically within the digital realm. Here, foreign actors deployed a subtle yet potent form of information warfare, crafting narratives that blurred truth and fiction with deliberate precision. These stories did not announce themselves with grand fanfare; instead, they seeped quietly through trusted networks, their origins masked, their intentions concealed. Each narrative was layered and rewritten, shaped not only by its creators but by the very algorithms that govern digital spaces.

This contemporary form of narrative laundering, where information is continuously repurposed and sanitized to appear credible, exposes the vulnerabilities of our democratic processes in an age dominated by digital flows. Algorithms—those invisible arbiters of attention—act not merely as neutral conduits but as active amplifiers, selectively promoting content that engages, divides, or provokes. In doing so, they transform these crafted stories into echo chambers of influence, deepening existing social fractures while eroding trust in institutions meant to uphold collective governance.

The design of digital platforms, driven by profit and engagement incentives, turns influence into a form of subtle accumulation—where power grows not through direct confrontation but through constant, invisible shaping of attention and belief. This quiet manipulation feeds on data, harvesting behavioral patterns to refine and target narratives that shift perceptions and identities over time. The recent Canadian election exposes how this relentless layering of curated content can erode democracy, not by force, but through the gradual distortion of collective reality—an insidious accumulation of influence embedded in the architecture of the digital economy.

This moment demands a reckoning with the interplay between narrative, technology, and power. It calls us to consider not only the content of stories but the systems that enable their spread and transformation. To engage critically with digital narratives is to participate in a form of cultural vigilance—recognizing the layers beneath the surface, the coded incentives that shape what we see, and the ethical stakes of storytelling in an algorithmic age.

Storytelling is an act of resistance, a deliberate effort to reclaim truth amid the noise. It challenges us to move beyond passive consumption and to cultivate an active, critical literacy that can navigate complexity without succumbing to cynicism. As the lines between fact and fabrication blur, our collective task is to safeguard the democratic project by illuminating the mechanisms of influence, fostering resilience, and insisting on narratives that honour nuance, transparency, and human connection.

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Montreal in Black and White

Montreal’s architecture is a site where history and memory converge, with its blend of neoclassical, modernist, and postmodern structures reflecting the city’s layered cultural narratives. In monochrome, the play of light and shadow accentuates this tension between past and present. Shadows here are not simply absence but a marker of time, revealing the subtle ways in which architecture both preserves and reinterprets the city’s evolving identity and historical consciousness. And don’t get me started about the food!

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Echoes of Forced Migration: 50 Years of the Tragedy of Indochina and Canada’s Promise of Refuge

I recently attended a poignant event at the McCord Stewart Museum in Montréal, which marked the 50th anniversary of the end of the U.S.–Vietnam War—an inflection point that remains significant not only in global geopolitics but also in the history of immigration and identity in Canada. The event brought together a multigenerational audience: members of Montréal’s Vietnamese community, refugees who arrived in the wake of the war, scholars, academics, students, local dignitaries, and members of the Canadian Immigration Historical Society (CIHS). Held within one of the city’s foremost institutions for cultural memory, the gathering underscored the enduring importance of remembrance as both a personal and collective act.

The evening unfolded with intention—not as a commemorative, nationalist exercise, nor as nostalgia, but as a reflective gathering that captured the layered experiences of individuals and communities shaped by war and displacement. The atmosphere was thoughtful, yet vibrant with the presence of those who shared histories of resilience and survival. As the evening drew to a close, a panel discussion offered rich, nuanced perspectives on the intersections of personal history, trauma, and the formation of diasporic identity in Canada. Particularly moving was the presence of those who had lived through the unfolding of these events, a reminder of the importance of documenting immigration stories with care—not merely as historical record, but as acts of recognition and understanding.

The evening began with a generous spread of food, rich in both flavour and significance, setting a tone of warmth and hospitality. Members of the Vietnamese community, alongside politicians and dignitaries, gathered in solidarity, creating a space where shared histories could be acknowledged and celebrated.

Live traditional Vietnamese music filled the space, weaving an elegiac thread through the evening that linked memory to continuity and grief to cultural expression. The music underscored the solemn yet celebratory tone of the event, honouring the community’s resilience and strength in the face of hardship.

A documentary, featuring archival CBC footage and interviews with Canadian immigration officials and survivors, provided crucial historical context. The film offered a sobering glimpse into the bureaucratic and public discourse surrounding Canada’s response to the refugee crisis, juxtaposed with the human stories of loss and dislocation. One particularly poignant segment included a photograph of a young Michael Molloy, taken during his work as an Immigration Officer on the ground fifty years ago, serving as a powerful emblem of Canada’s evolving humanitarian identity during this pivotal period in immigration history.

Equally resonant was a short animated film created by a young Canadian filmmaker—the grandchild of a migrant who fled Vietnam. Drawing from their family’s experience, the film used stark symbolism and visual metaphor to convey the dislocations, terrors, and silences that followed the fall of Saigon. Haunting in its honesty, the animation offered an unflinching portrayal of state violence, resilience, and the quiet determination to rebuild. The poetic nature of the film transformed the unspeakable into something both shareable and sacred, ensuring that the memory of the tragedy would be preserved and passed on to future generations.

As a Canadian historian that studies liminal and boundary spaces defined through data, the event reinforced something fundamental to our collective identity: the quiet yet profound efforts of public servants and community leaders who, often unseen, shape the arc of memory and history. In many ways, the evening was a living archive—a convergence of memory and the moral duty to bear witness. The presence of those who fled war, alongside those born into the legacy of exile, reminded all in attendance that history is not defined by treaties or agreements or data alone. It is carried forward in the everyday acts of preservation: through photographs, music, stories passed down, and gatherings like this one, where the past is not merely remembered but consciously reassembled into a shared Canadian narrative.