When a moment of quietly ignored bigotry prompted his three-year-old daughter to ask "what happened?" David Chariandy began wondering how to discuss with his children the politics of race. A decade later, in a newly heated era of both struggle and divisions, he writes a letter to his now thirteen-year-old daughter. David is the son […]
We are still struggling to develop adequate terms for the profound socio-cultural dislocations resulting from modern colonialism and nation-building, dislocations epitomized in the histories of indenture, transatlantic slavery, and the expulsion of indigenous peoples from ancestral lands. Of course, in addressing these dislocations, we aspire not to mythologize victimization but, rather, to better appreciate how […]
Black Canadian writing has been in existence for over two hundred years, and, as such, second-generation writing is not really a new phenomenon. Moreover, in perhaps only the past fifteen or twenty years, black Canadian writing in general has grown from a small press and community-based phenomenon into something of significant, albeit precarious, national attention, […]
This is the first book to place the self-fashioning of mixed-race individuals in the context of a Black Atlantic. Drawing on a wide range of sources and a diverse cast of characters – from the diaries, letters, novels and plays of femme fatales in Congo and the United States to the advertisements, dissertations, oral histories […]
The killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012 by a white assailant inspired the Black Lives Matter movement, which quickly spread outside the borders of the United States. The movement’s message found fertile ground in Canada, where Black activists speak of generations of injustice and continue the work of the Black liberators who have come before […]
Indigenous populations, sex workers, and migrants have been legally, socially, and economically disenfranchised by the Canadian state in a multitude of ways—often in the name of “anti-trafficking.” In effect, state-led anti-trafficking enforcement measures fail to address the root causes of the harms created by past and present colonization, anti-sex work laws, and racist immigration measures […]
Sexism was also a major issue built into the commission itself. In examining the content of the consultation, it is easy to spot the sexism in the representation of racialized immigrant women. This is exemplified by the intense scrutiny and focus on "the veil," symptomatic of a sexist representation of Muslim women as "other" and […]
Challenging the myth of African Canadian leadership "in crisis," this book opens a broad vista of inquiry into the many and dynamic ways leadership practices occur in Black Canadian communities. Exploring topics including Black women’s contributions to African Canadian communities, the Black Lives Matter movement, Black LGBTQ, HIV/AIDS advocacy, motherhood and grieving, mentoring, and anti-racism, […]