Originally intended to be a white man's country, Canada helped develop the prototype for the nation-state that privileged the descendants of Western Europe and marginalized all others, including those who were aboriginal to the land. This is the prototype that also characterized apartheid South Africa. Now, thanks to the policies of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Canada […]
The African-Canadian community is definitely evident in Caribana, which is less a gift book than a souvenir album. Cecil Foster and Chris Schwarz have collaborated to produce a big, splashy, colourful book that explores the origins and events of the Caribana festival that is held every August in Toronto. In early years the festival occurred […]
Foster presents an interdisciplinary analysis of blackness by challenging existing notions of blackness and arguing for the viability of a multicultural world. He traces the philosophical, anthropological, sociological, and mythological arguments that support views of modernity as a failed quest for whiteness.
Hard-hitting, controversial and well researched, A PLACE CALLED HEAVEN lifts the thin veil of racism against blacks in Canada. Cecil Foster maintains that what Canada's mainstream delivers to the black community is skewed justice, fear as a first response, fair-weather political representation, and a sensationalist media. Exploring how crime, violence, immigration and women's issues all […]
Smartly dressed and smiling, Canada’s black train porters were a familiar sight to the average passenger—yet their minority status rendered them politically invisible, second-class in the social imagination that determined who was and who was not considered Canadian. Subjected to grueling shifts and unreasonable standards—a passenger missing his stop was a dismissible offense—the so-called Pullmen […]
Cecil Foster tells the tale of an estranged mother and daughter caught in the web of a crushing poverty and the immigration bureaucracy. Moving from the warm spiritual life of Jamaica to the cold isolation of Toronto, Sleep On, Beloved follows Ona Morgan she leaves her Jamaican home and her newborn daughter Suzanne to pave the […]
Rich with the details of Bajan culture—from food preparation to political and financial affairs, from sexuality to spirituality—Independence is a fascinating window onto a little-known world and a touching portrait of a journey to adulthood and the women who guide it.