Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T10:59:26.493Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Outside of the Inside: Blackness and the Remaking of Canadian Institutional Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2020

Abstract

This paper reads Black Canadian literary fiction for what it reveals about the ironic place of blackness in Canadian universities. It weaves together this literary analysis with the author’s first-person account of classroom practice in order to illuminate the risks involved for Black scholars and students currently teaching, learning, and producing knowledge within Canadian institutional structures.

Type
Articles
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This paper is dedicated to all Black university students everywhere who keep going no matter what they come up against. My gratitude to Neil ten Kortenaar, Uzoma Ensonwane, and Suzanne Conklin Akbari for organizing the Literature, Pedagogy, and Decolonization Workshop at the University of Toronto in November 2017, where I first gave this paper. Gratitude also to Ato Quayson and Anhkhi Mukherjee for helpful feedback on an earlier draft.

References

1 Ahmed, Sara, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham, NC: University of Duke Press, 2012), 186Google Scholar.

2 Mayr, Suzette, Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2017), 85Google Scholar.

3 Mayr, Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall, 23.

4 Mayr, Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall, 20–22.

5 Ahmed, On Being Included, 174.

6 Henry, Frances, Dua, Enakshi, James, Carl E., Kobayashi, Audrey, Li, Peter, Ramos, Howard, Smith, Malinda S., The Equity Myth: Racialization and Indigeneity at Canadian Universities, (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2017), 3Google Scholar.

7 Henry, et al., The Equity Myth, 5.

8 Michael Richardson, Gestures of Testimony: Torture, Trauma and Affect in Literature (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 2.

9 Canada. Census of Canada 2016. “Census Profile,” https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/171025/dq171025b-eng.htm.

10 Racialized Canadians may understand their identities and histories quite differently than the identity categories demarcated by the census of Canada. For instance, as James Torczyner notes, Black immigrants from majority Black nations may identify as “British,” “French,” “Somali,” and so forth, rather than as “Black” (quoted in Clarke, George Elliott, Odysseys Home: Mapping African Canadian Literature [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002], 280CrossRefGoogle Scholar), and thus may not be registered as “visible minorities” in the national census. The problems of defining and empirically measuring the racialized population of Canada serves as an important reminder that “race,” as writer Wayde Compton puts it, is “a folk taxonomy; a pseudo-scientific demographic categorization system. Like a national border or a literary genre”—or, indeed, the barriers of educational institutions—“race is only as real as our current social consensus” (25).

11 Henry, et al., The Equity Myth, 5.

12 Audrey Kobayashi, “‘Now You See Them, How You See Them: Women of Colour in Canadian Academia,” in Racism and the Canadian University: Demanding Social Justice, Inclusion, and Equity, ed. F. Henry and C. Tator (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 60–75.

13 Henry, et al., The Equity Myth, 5.

14 Office of the Vice-Provost, Faculty & Academic Life, Faculty Gender Equity Report, 2017–18, May 2019, 3. See https://faculty.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Faculty-Gender-Equity-Report-2017-18.pdf.

15 Office of the Vice-Provost, Faculty & Academic Life, Faculty Gender Equity Report, 2017–18, 3.

16 Mayr, Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall, 24.

17 Ahmed, On Being Included, 178.

18 Mayr, Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall, 26–27.

19 Mayr, Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall, 17.

20 Mayr, Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall, 90.

21 Mayr, Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall, 91.

22 Mayr, Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall, 93.

23 Ahmed, On Being Included, 176.

24 Mayr, Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall, 91.

25 Apple, Michael, Education and Power (New York: Routledge, 2015), 133Google Scholar.

26 Sugars, Cynthia and Moss, Laura, eds., Canadian Literature: Texts and Contexts, vols. I and II (Toronto: Pearson, 2009)Google Scholar.

27 Bennet, Donna and Brown, Russel, eds., An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English (Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press Canada, 2010)Google Scholar.

28 Kellough, Kaie, Accordéon (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2016), 39Google Scholar.

29 Brand, Dionne, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2002)Google Scholar.

30 Maynard, Robyn, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present (Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2017)Google Scholar.

31 Philip, Marlene NourbeSe, Zong!: as told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng (Toronto: Mercury Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

32 Philip, Marlene NourbeSe, Bla_K: Essays and Interviews (Toronto: Book *Hug, 2017)Google Scholar.

33 Fanon, Franz, “The Fact of Blackness,” Postcolonial Studies: An Anthology, ed. Nayar, Pramod K. (Maldan, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 1532CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 16.

34 Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness,” 17.