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First published in 1997, No Crystal Stair is an absorbing story of Montreal in the 1940s. Raising her three daughters alone, Marion discovers she can only find gainful employment if she passes as white. Set in Little Burgundy against the backdrop of an exciting cosmopolitan jazz scene--home of Oscar Peterson, Oliver Jones, and Rockhead's Paradise--and the tense years of World War II, No Crystal Stair is both a tender story and an indictment of Canada's "soft" racism. In 2005, No Crystal Stair was nominated for that year's Canada Reads and was defended by Olympic fencer Sherraine MacKay.
Reflecting a rethinking of the making of modern Canada, this well- illustrated anthology of 85 essays reaches beyond ivory tower images and taken for granted assumptions of women's roles. This sampling by primarily women contributors, drawn from personal and organizational records, emphasizes the experiences of diverse women engaged in all spheres of private and public life: from a vignette of Native community life, to profiles of innovators in many fields. Includes a cross-referenced essay index. 10 x 9.5 " format. Cook is a professor of education at the U. of Ottawa. c. Book News Inc.
Readers are often surprised to learn that black writing in Canada is over two centuries old. Ranging from letters, editorials, sermons, and slave narratives to contemporary novels, plays, poetry, and non-fiction, black Canadian writing represents a rich body of literary and cultural achievement. The Black Atlantic Reconsidered is the first comprehensive work to explore black Canadian literature from its beginnings to the present in the broader context of the black Atlantic world. Winfried Siemerling traces the evolution of black Canadian witnessing and writing from slave testimony in New France and the 1783 "Book of Negroes" through the work of contemporary black Canadian writers including G...
Transformation In Loree's Beauty Shop hot combs sizzled against wet oily scalps branding grown woman fantasies into tender young heads. Thick busy afros became long glossy black curls transforming natural Black queens into commercial mahogany princesses (Boyd, 14). This poem by Julia Boyd from In the Company of My Sisters is tragic, but it happens all the time. Afros and natural hair is transformed into something artificial, "fake boobs, fake hair, men don't seem to care whether a woman is real or false." The hair salon is the main site where the transformation happens. This paper accompanies the web-based project Salon Utopia (now defunct) that aimed to transform its clients in a natural way. In the virtual realm, it is not yet possible to do any hairstyles to transform anyone, but the site did aid in transforming the source of where hair comes from, the mind.
How do children of immigrants from countries in sub-Saharan Africa negotiate multiple identities as Black, as African, and as Canadian?
Fiction that reconsiders, challenges, reshapes, and/or upholds national narratives of history has long been an integral aspect of Canadian literature. Works by writers of historical fiction (from early practitioners such as John Richardson to contemporary figures such as Alice Munro and George Elliott Clarke) propose new views and understandings of Canadian history and individual relationships to it. Critical evaluation of these works sheds light on the complexity of these depictions. The contributors in National Plots: Historical Fiction and Changing Ideas of Canada critically examine texts with subject matter ranging from George Vancouver’s west coast explorations to the eradication of t...
In the 1960s, Montreal was a hotbed of radical politics that attracted Black and Caribbean figures such as C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney, Mariam Makeba, Stokely Carmichael, Rocky Jones, and Édouard Glissant. It was also a place where the ideas of Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Malcolm X circulated alongside those of Karl Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. During this period of global upheaval and heightened Canadian and Quebec nationalism, Montreal became a central site of Black and Caribbean radical politics. Situating Canada within the Black radical tradition and its Caribbean radical counterpart, Fear of a Black Nation paints a history of Montreal and the Black activists wh...
Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies is the third volume of essays produced as part of the TransCanada conferences project. The essays gathered in Critical Collaborations constitute a call for collaboration and kinship across disciplinary, political, institutional, and community borders. They are tied together through a simultaneous call for resistance—to Eurocentrism, corporatization, rationalism, and the fantasy of total systems of knowledge—and a call for critical collaborations. These collaborations seek to forge connections without perceived identity—linking concepts and communities without violating the differences that constitu...
Cecil Foster presents a rigorous interdisciplinary analysis of blackness by challenging existing notions of blackness and arguing for the viability of a multicultural world. In Blackness and Modernity Foster traces the main philosophical, anthropological, sociological, and mythological arguments that support views of modernity as a failed quest for whiteness. He outlines how these views were implemented as part of a "world history" and shows how Canada became the first country to officially reject this approach by adopting multiculturalism. Blackness and Modernity presents four categories for understanding blackness and whiteness: the somatic, cultural, status differential, and the idealistic. The somatic - the colour of skin - is merely one category, and perhaps the least meaningful for, while it may be the most important for some people, Foster argues that multiculturalism, which he views as ontological blackness, is an attempt to make rational idealism the only category that matters.
Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature is a pioneering study of African-Canadian literary creativity, laying the groundwork for future scholarly work in the field. Based on extensive excavations of archives and texts, this challenging passage through twelve essays presents a history of the literature and examines its debt to, and synthesis with, oral cultures. George Elliott Clarke identifies African-Canadian literature's distinguishing characteristics, argues for its relevance to both African Diasporic Black and Canadian Studies, and critiques several of its key creators and texts. Scholarly and sophisticated, the survey cites and interprets the works of several major African-Ca...