The Routledge Handbook of Black Canadian Literature

Introduction: Black Canadian Literature and the World

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 J. 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 and 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-Célie 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 Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies and Associate Vice President: Equity Diversity, and Inclusion 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 and 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 (1988), 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.