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How might Kingston be a port of call for the Overseas Chinese? And how might Hong Kong be an important metropolis of the Black diaspora? In this talk, Tao Leigh Goffe examines the intersections of the African and Asian diasporas in a journey from New York to Jamaica to the New Territories in Hong Kong where through the technology of photography and the internet she was reunited with Afro-Jamaican and Chinese family she had never knew existed. The story of the Jamaican Chinese, a story of distant and close cousins, can be mapped through vernacular photography—family portraits, passport photos and snapshots—that chart the intimacies of everyday life and migration between two continents.
With the digitization of diaspora, this talk explores how new technologies affect what we are able to house, harbor, and archive. To be considered are the family photos that we choose to frame and place on walls and the photos that remain discarded in disheveled piles in the basement. How do we know the stories of those who have been pushed to the margins of the family, and have been pushed to the edges of the family frame? How do we account for the black sheep and invisible branches of family trees? The inside children and outside children?
