Vanier Award Interview with McMaster University’s Faculty of Humanities

Linzey Corridon, a PhD student in English and Cultural Studies, has received a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship. Considered one of Canada’s most prestigious academic awards for graduate students, the Vanier scholarships are administered by Canada’s three federal granting agencies and provide $50,000 per year for up to three years. The scholarships are awarded based on academic excellence, research potential and leadership.

Here, Linzey talks about his work – and the challenge of adjusting to a new city in the midst of a pandemic.

Congratulations! You’ve had … a year.

I moved here from Montreal. I did my MA at Concordia, and I decided to move in the middle of the shut-down. Other people were planning to take a break, take a year off, but I said nope – we’re moving, and I’m going to start this PhD ASAP. I was figuring all that out when I got word that I’d been nominated for the Vanier scholarship. It was a great opportunity, but I didn’t have internet at home, because we’d already shut it off because we were moving! So I did most of my initial writing, typing and thinking from my phone.

Now that I look back on it, I think the application was as strong as it was because I was working within those limitations at the beginning – there wasn’t much room for error, so I had to be focused and on task.

What’s your Hamilton experience been like so far?

It’s a big change, leaving a city like Montreal. I’ve always considered myself a downtown kind of person. But people have been telling me that what I lose leaving Montreal I’ll gain in other ways – like nature, and how much the outdoors is a big part of life in Hamilton. There are big city feelings that I’m missing from Montreal, but I know here I’ll have different feelings.

I’m a poet, and since I’ve moved here, I’ve found myself writing eco-poetry – this is traditionally a factory city, but at the same time, there’s a natural environment that’s thriving alongside the industrial side of Hamilton.

I’ve been making sense of that by writing about it. I’m starting to understand that Hamilton is a lot more complex and nuanced than people think.

You started your PhD this year – who is your supervisor?

My supervisor is Dr. Amber Dean, who is wonderful. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Amber. Before I got packed up and moved, she helped me sort everything out, and when I got here, she helped me get settled. She remains someone who helps me to make sense of the PhD experience. Now, we can meet up to go for walks in Gage Park. She’s kept me grounded – I definitely would not have applied for the Vanier scholarship without her guidance.

Tell me about your research.

I’m working across several disciplines, primarily in Caribbean and Diaspora Studies, as well as Policy Studies, Gender and Sexuality, Queer Theory, and Literary Criticism.

What I’m hoping to do is to study the queer literary histories of the Caribbean and the diaspora – more specifically, I’m interested in how current discourses around queerness and queer theory have failed queer people like myself, and have failed the queer West Indian community. They’re largely non-existent, and the ones that do exist are either very conservative and restrictive, or they’re wrapped up in the global north, liberation-leaning narratives of queerness.

I’m looking at questions like: what has queerness looked like beyond the scope of what has already been addressed? How is it different from queerness in the global north? What does queerness in the global south have to say for itself?

There’s a hegemony when speaking about queerness, especially in the Caribbean – it’s always about sexuality in some shape or form. But queerness is more than that. I’m interested in the family – how are family structures constructed differently? Why? What are the queer histories that are informing those differences? I’m also asking people to rethink how they believe queer Caribbean peoples to live, how they move through the world, what the quotidian looks like for them.

I spent the last year as a resident of the Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship, where I’m working on a digital project to map the queer literary history of the Caribbean over the last 100 years or so. Of course, there’s not a lot publicly – but when you gather it all together in a digital space, you can visualize it and, more importantly, see that there have been moves towards writing and recording West Indian and diaspora queerness.

What’s the inspiration for your research?

That’s a big question with a big answer.

My research definitely comes from a personal place. I’m a queer man. I’m a queer Caribbean man – I was born and raised in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, then I left as a teenager and moved to Montreal where I completed CEGEP, BA, and MA studies.

My research stems from personal issues, personal hopes, personal aspirations – I want the things that I was unable to acquire for myself as a queer kid growing up in the archipelago. I want to make sure that some of those things are accessible to people who come after me.

Knowledge is so powerful – you just have to make it available when you can to the people around you. That’s why I’m doing the digital project alongside my more theoretical work – it’s an alternative to a more academic dissertation. People will be able to type in a search term and play with the tool. We all need to rethink how we’re looking at and presenting insights.

There’s a personal and professional investment in the work I’m doing. This isn’t simply research – this is lived experience, it’s my lived experience, it’s the documented lived experiences of people who have come before me. It’s me channeling the queer histories that were left to me, and trying to add to those histories in my own way.

When someone is accessing my research, it’s a natural progression of things that were, and things that will be. I’m a link in the chain.

Source: McMaster University