Unsettling the Great White North offers a chronological, regional, and thematic compilation of some of the latest and best scholarship in the field of Black Canadian history.
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 marginalisation 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.
Table of Contents:
Preface
Introduction
Michele A. Johnson and Funké Aladejebi
Bookend I: The Future Has a Past: Canadian History and Black Modernity
1. Critical Histories of Blackness in Canada
Barrington Walker
Section One: Enslaving Blackness
2. Planting Slavery in Nova Scotia’s Promised Land, 1759–1775
Karolyn Smardz Frost
3. "Where, Oh Where, is Bet?": Locating Enslaved Black Women on the Ontario Landscape
Natasha Henry
Section Two: Constructing Blackness across Borders and Boundaries
4. A Forgotten Generation: African Canadian History between Fugitive Slaves and World War I
Adam Arenson
5. Petitioning Power: Canadian Racial Consciousness Meets Alabama Injustice, 1958
Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey
Section Three: Building Black Communities and Shaping Black Resilience
6. The Shiloh Baptist Church: The Pillar of Strength in Edmonton’s African American Community, 1910–1940
David Este and Jenna Bailey
7. Establishing Communities
Amoaba Gooden
8. Montreal’s Black Renaissance
Sean Mills
Section Four: Controlling Black (Working) Bodies
9. "Likely to become a public charge": Examining Black Migration to Eastern Canada, 1900–1930
Claudine Bonner
10. "…not likely to do well or to be an asset to this country": Canadian Restrictions of Black Caribbean Female Domestic Workers, 1910–1955
Michele A. Johnson
Section Five: "Schooling" Black Canadians
11. Stories from the Little Black School House
Sylvia D. Hamilton
12. Black Education: The Complexity of Segregation in Kent County’s Nineteenth-Century Schools
Deirdre McCorkindale
13. "We have to strive for the best": The High Aspirations of Black Caribbean-Canadian Youth of the 1970s and 1980s
Carl E. James
Section Six: Creating New Diasporic Communities: Continental African Experiences
14. Creating Spaces of Belonging: Building a New African Community in Vancouver
Gillian Creese
15. "The part of you that’s Rwanda": Creating a Rwandan Diaspora Community in the Greater Toronto Area in the Early Twenty-First Century
Anna Ainsworth
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 to 1900
Cheryl Thompson and Julie Crooks
17. Hogan’s Alley Remixed: Wayde Compton’s Performance Bond and the New Black Can(aan)Lit
Paul Watkins
18. Jazz, Diaspora, and the History and Writing of Black Anglophone Montreal
Winfried Siemerling
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
Funké Aladejebi
20. Re-Thinking and Re-Framing RDS: A Black Woman’s Perspective
Esmerelda M.A. Thornhill
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
Daniel McNeil
