In the spring and summer of 1858, 600 blacks moved from San Francisco to the colonies that would eventually become British Columbia. The move was in part initiated by an invitation penned by the governor of the British colonies, James Douglas, who is commonly believed to have had African ancestry, a rumour he neither confirmed […]
After Canaan, the first nonfiction book by acclaimed Vancouver poet Wayde Compton, repositions the North American discussion of race in the wake of the tumultuoustwentieth century. It riffs on the concept of Canada as a promised land (or "Canaan") encoded in African American myth and song since the days of slavery. These varied essays, steeped […]
Over the past two decades, Vancouver-based artist Stan Douglas has produced an evolving body of photographic, slide projection and sound, and film and video installation projects. From nascent large-scale panoramic landscape photographs to intellectually probing multimedia narratives on urbanism's transformations, his works persistently excavate the social, political, and epistemological arbitrariness of modernity's claim to progress. […]
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 […]