This bittersweet novel portrays John "Leeds" Kipligat, a 16-year-old Kenyan émigré living in Vancouver who decides to become a runner to escape the poverty, family strife, and mind-numbing routine of his daily life. But the path to a track scholarship is fraught with obstacles-physical, mental and emotional. As Leeds starts to train and recognizes within […]
A soucouyant is an evil spirit in Caribbean folklore, and a symbol here of the distant and dimly remembered legacies that continue to haunt the Americas. This extraordinary first novel set in Ontario, in a house near the Scarborough Bluffs, focuses on a Canadian-born son who despairingly abandons his Caribbean-born mother suffering from dementia. The […]
With shimmering prose and mesmerizing precision, David Chariandy takes us inside the lives of Michael and Francis. They are the sons of Trinidadian immigrants, their father has disappeared and their mother works double, sometimes triple shifts so her boys might fulfill the elusive promise of their adopted home.
In The Black Shoals Tiffany Lethabo King uses the shoal—an offshore geologic formation that is neither land nor sea—as metaphor, mode of critique, and methodology to theorize the encounter between Black studies and Native studies. King conceptualizes the shoal as a space where Black and Native literary traditions, politics, theory, critique, and art meet in […]
This article centers Saidiya Hartman's and Hortense Spillers' theorizations of Black fungibility as well as two speculative visual works in order to read Black bodies on plantation landscapes as symbols of transition, process, genderlessness and boundarylessness. I argue that reading Black bodies in this way breaks with the totalizing visual, conceptual and ontological regime of […]
From the Flint water crisis to the Dakota Access Pipeline controversy, environmental threats and degradation disproportionately affect communities of color, with often dire consequences for people’s lives and health. Racial Ecologies explores activist strategies and creative responses, such as those of Mexican migrant women, New Zealand Maori, and African American farmers in urban Detroit, demonstrating […]
Black Canadian Studies is the exploration of the range of histories, experiences, contributions, perceptions, feelings, convictions, triumphs, and obstacles awaiting to be overcome, of identified Black people of African descent resident in Canada. Black Canadian Studies revolves around the agency of Black people as the subject of investigation. Their stories, their interpretations, their pride, their […]
This paper examines how enslaved Africans living in Upper Canada at the turn of the 19th century protested and resisted their enslavement in diverse ways, and the impact of this resistant behaviour on attempts to legislate against and ameliorate the effects of slavery in the province.
The Journey from Tollgate to Parkway looks at the history of blacks in the Ancaster-Burlington-Hamilton area, their long struggle for justice and equality in education and opportunity, and their achievements, presented in a fascinating and meticulously researched historical narrative.