1st Edition
The Routledge Handbook of Black Canadian Literature
The Handbook of Black Canadian Literature offers a comprehensive overview of the growing and increasingly significant field of Black Canadian literary studies. Including historical and contemporary analysis, the volume is an essential text that maps the field over the almost 200 years of its existence across a range of genres from slave narratives to prose fiction, poetry, theatre, dub and spoken word. It presents Black Canadian literature as encompassing a diverse set of viewpoints, approaches and practices, as touching every aspect of Canadian territory and life, and as deeply influencing debates and understandings of Black peoples far beyond its borders. The handbook employs an interdisciplinary framework that incorporates literary, historical, geographical and cultural analysis. The book’s 32 chapters are organized into five sections that chart the literature’s development into a recognizable canon, trace Black literary geographies across Canada from east to west, delineate the literature’s various genres and expressive forms, and honor the writers and thinkers who have influenced the growth of the field. The volume’s range of subject and plurality of perspectives provide an excellent resource for teachers, researchers, and students from multiple disciplines, including Canadian studies and literature, Caribbean studies, global Black studies, hemispheric studies, diaspora studies, history, and cultural studies.
Introduction
Andrea A. Davis
PART ONE: ESTABLISHING A CANON
1. The Code That Limits: Black Canadian Anthologizing and Anthologies
Sharon Morgan Beckford
2. Black Small Press Literary Publishing in English Canada
Stephen Cain
3. Palimpsests of Nation & Diaspora: Black Writing in Canada and Canadian Literatures
Paul Barrett
4. Afropolitanism and the African Immigrant in the African-Canadian Literary Canon
Amatoritsero Ede
PART TWO: BLACK LITERARY GEOGRAPHIES
5. Black Maritime—Africadian—Literature: An Introduction
George Elliott Clarke
6. Black Canadian Literature in Francophone Quebec
Susan Ireland and Patrice Proulx
7. Jazz, Diaspora, and the History and Writing of Black Anglophone Montreal
Winfried Siemerling
8. Writing Toronto
Darcy Ballantyne
9. From Absence to Abundance: Recovering the Black Prairie Archive, 1872-2023
Karina Vernon
10. ‘It is arrogant to disappear:’ A Humble Re-Visioning of Black Literature in British Columbia
David Chariandy
PART THREE: GENRE AND MODES OF WRITING
11. Slave Narratives as a Transnational Genre
Nele Sawallisch
12. Post-Slavery and the Making of the Black Canadian Novel, 1850s-1990
Jennifer Harris
13. African-Canadian Poetry in English: 1890-2000
George Elliott Clarke
14. Black Canadian Children’s Literature: Evolution, Writers and Impact
Janet Seow
15. Writing Black Canada: An Unfinished Project of Freedom
Andrea A. Davis
PART FOUR: PERFORMANCE AND VOICE
16. Speak OurStory! 12 Poet-to-Poet Conversations on the Legacy, the Now, and Future of
Black Canadian Dub Poetry & Spoken Word
Wendy Motion Brathwaite
17. National and Diasporic Dialogues: Black Canadian Drama and Theatre
Jacqueline Petropolous
18. Rising, Lifting, Resisting: A History of Black Dramatic Feature Filmmaking in Canada
Andrea Medovarski
PART FIVE: MAJOR WRITERS OF INFLUENCE
19. Marie-Celie Agnant
Susan Ireland and Patrice Proulx
20. “The Abacus of her Eyelids”: Dionne Brand’s Poetics
Christina Sharpe
21. Dionne Brand: Ambivalent Novelizations
Eshe Mercer-James
22. After Canadian Multiculturalism: David Chariandy
Rinaldo Walcott
23. Austin Clarke’s “Out-a-Order” Poetics and the Archiving of Black Lives
Michael A. Bucknor
24. George Elliott Clarke: A Biocritical Examination
Joseph J. Pivato
25. Wayde Compton: From Archive to Innovation in the Black British Columbian Lived
Imaginary
Heather Smyth
26. Esi Edugyan: Black Fugitivity and the Possibility of a Second Life
Pilar Cuder-Domínguez
27. Lawrence Hill’s Critical Aesthetics of Cultural Resilience
Ana María Fraile-Marcos
28. “Magic in the Real”: The Speculative Engagements of Nalo Hopkinson
Maureen Moynagh
29. Dany Laferrière
Claire Reising
30. The Multiplicities of Émile Ollivier: Haitian Tragedies and Montreal Crossroads
Amanda Perry
31. Disturbing the Peace, Caring for the Word: M. NourbeSe Philip
Kate Siklosi
32. Makeda Silvera: Prioritizing Marginalized Voices
Eshe Mercer-James
Biography
Andrea A. Davis is Associate Vice President: Equity Diversity and Inclusion and Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. Prior to this, she was Professor of Black Cultures of the Americas at York University where she founded the Black Canadian Studies Certificate. Co-editor of the Journal of Canadian Studies, she has published widely on the literary productions of Black women in the Americas and is the author of Horizon, Sea, Sound: Caribbean & African Women’s Cultural Critiques of Nation (2022). Her current book project is an autofictional exploration of women’s journeys in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries across the Atlantic Ocean and Sargasso Sea.
Leslie Sanders is University Professor Emerita in the Department of Humanities at York University. She is the author of The Development of Black Theater in America (l988), a general editor of the Collected Works of Langston Hughes: Gospel Plays, Operas, and Later Dramatic Works (2004), and editor for two volumes of plays. She has published on such Black Canadian writers as Austin Clarke, Dionne Brand, M. NourbeSe Philip, Claire Harris, George Elliot Clarke, Maxine Tynes, and Djanet Sears. She created African Canadian Online, the first available database of African Canadian artists and their work in literature, film, music, dance, theatre and visual art.
