Unsettling the Great White North: Black Canadian History

Description

An exhaustive volume of leading scholarship in the field of Black Canadian history, Unsettling the Great White North highlights the diverse experiences of persons of African descent within the chronicles of Canada’s past. The book considers histories and theoretical framings within the disciplines of history, sociology, law, and cultural and gender studies to chart the mechanisms of exclusion and marginalization in "multicultural" Canada and to situate Black Canadians as speakers and agents of their own lives. Working to interrupt the myth of benign whiteness that has been deeply implanted into the country’s imagination, Unsettling the Great White North uncovers new narratives of Black life in Canada. Cover Page i Title page Copyright page Contents Redacted Text, 2019: Statement from the Artist Introduction Bookend I. The Future Has a Past: Canadian History and Black Modernity 1 Critical Histories of Blackness in Canada Section One. Enslaving Blackness 2 Planting Slavery in Nova Scotia’s Promised Land, 1759–1775 3 Where, Oh Where, Is Bet? Locating Enslaved Black Women on the Ontario Landscape Section Two. Constructing Blackness across Borders and Boundaries 4 A Forgotten Generation: African Canadian History between Fugitive Slaves and World War I 5 Petitioning Power: Canadian Racial Consciousness Meets Alabama Injustice, 1958 Section Three. Building Black Communities and Shaping Black Resilience 6 The Shiloh Baptist Church: The Pillar of Strength in Edmonton’s African American Community 7 Establishing Communities 8 Montreal’s Black Renaissance Section Four. Controlling Black (Working) Bodies 9 “Likely to become a public charge”: Examining Black Migration to Eastern Canada, 1900–1930 10 “… not likely to do well or to be an asset to this country”: Canadian Restrictions of Black Caribbean Female Domestic Workers, 1910–1955 Section Five. “Schooling” Black Canadians 11 Stories from The Little Black School House 12 Black Education: The Complexity of Segregation in Kent County’s Nineteenth-Century Schools 13 “We have to strive for the best”: The High Aspirations of Black Caribbean Canadian Youth of the 1970s and 1980s Section Six. Creating New Diasporic Communities: Continental African Experiences 14 Creating Spaces of Belonging: Building a New African Community in Vancouver 15 “The part of you that’s Rwanda”: Creating a Rwandan Diaspora Community in the Greater Toronto Area in the Early Twenty-First Century Section Seven. Locating Historical Black Presences in Cultural Artefacts 16 Race, Community, and the Picturing of Identities: Photography and the Black Subject in Ontario, 1860–1900 17 Hogan’s Alley Remixed: Wayde Compton’s Performance Bond and the New Black Can(aan) Lit 18 Jazz, Diaspora, and the History and Writing of Black Anglophone Montreal Section Eight. Black Women’s Orality and Knowings 19 “I don’t know if I should say this”: Black Women, Oral History, and Contesting the Great White North 20 Re-thinking and Re-framing RDS: A Black Woman’s Perspective Bookend II. The Past Has a Future: Critical Intellectual Histories of Blackness 21 Wrestling with Multicultural Snake Oil: A Newcomer’s Introduction to Black Canada Contributors