Black History Month honours the experiences, achievements and enduring contributions of Black communities in Canada, while deepening our collective understanding of their history and impact on Canadian society.
Throughout February, we celebrate the diversity and accomplishments of Black Canadians in our community. Black History Month is also a time to reflect on Canada’s painful history and the systemic barriers that Black communities continue to face, including anti-Black racism and discrimination, and to reaffirm our shared responsibility to address them.
To promote and celebrate Black Canadians in our community, The University of Winnipeg Library is highlighting three research guides Race, Racialization and Racism, and Colonization, Decolonization Postcolonialism and a book display in February for Black History Month.
Black History Month reading list includes a cross section of authors and these are the readings:
Cecil Foster. Blackness and Modernity: The Colour of Humanity and the Quest for Freedom. McGill-Queens University Press, 2007
In Blackness and Modernity, Foster interrogates the notion of multiculturalism central to Canada’s image of itself as a tolerant, liberal, multi-ethnic society. This places Blackness and Modernity in a long tradition of political debates around multiculturalism, liberalism, identity, and rights. Canada, Foster argues, sought to position different peoples from around the world according to “external and objective” factors of citizenship and belonging, and thus constructed Blackness as an ethnicity. Foster wants to answer such questions what constitutes Blackness as consciousness, and is it possible to engage with such consciousness apart from the bodies that are thought to carry and represent it? A second aim is to engage with the question of citizenship: “is citizenship always a state of being, or is it one of becoming? Is it changeable or unchangeable, idealistically perfectly White or simply a state of Blackness?”
Rinaldo Walcott (ed.). Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism. Insomniac Press, 2000.
Walcott’s anthology of Black Canadian cultural criticism seeks to reinstate Black narratives in the context of nation-state that has tended to erase them. Rude describes itself as an “engaged insubordination”, a collection of “rebellious essays” that seek to articulate the nation’s confrontations with Black culture, thereby challenging the idea of Canada itself, understood “neither as sacred, innocent nor free from critical engagement and debate – indeed, in some cases, harsh critique”. The essays combine academic approaches with personal, lived experience that give them a vital energy that underlines the urgency of their call for a better, fundamentally more moral Canada.
Njoki Nathani Wane and Notisha Massaquoi (eds.). Theorizing Empowerment: Canadian Perspectives on Black Feminist Thought. Inanna Publications and Education, 2007.
Wane and Massaquoi’s edited collection seeks to reignite critical theory in Canada by confronting contemporary feminist projects with personal, academic, and practical issues raised by Black feminists. In particular, the essays in the collection attempts to challenge and correct the absence and marginalization of Black feminist scholars from Canadian feminist theorizing. As such, this collection is understood not only as a contribution to theory but as a direct form of collective action. “It is our celebration of Black Canadian women’s lives, it is the situation of those lives, it is giving context and meaning to those lives”, with a view to creating a space of empowerment rather than marginalization and erasure.
Winfried Siemerling. The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: Black Canadian Writing, Cultural History, and the Presence of the Past. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015.
Referring explicitly to Paul Gilroy’s groundbreaking The Black Atlantic (1993), Siemerling seeks to recover the lost or obscured history of Black culture in Canada. “Readers are often surprised to learn that black writing in what is now Canada is over two centuries old,” Siemerling writes. This book is a multi-faceted attempt at restoring anglophone and francophone Black experience to the Canadian cultural-historical record, in particular the interrelationships between past and present and the creation or discovery of a “counter-modernity” which challenges the hegemonic story of Canada itself.
W.E.B. du Bois. Black Reconstruction in America: Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880.
First published in 1935, this is du Bois’ magisterial account of Black life and culture in the aftermath of the Civil War. Challenging accepted views of Reconstruction at the time, du Bois uncovered and articulated the role Black workers played in the post-war United States, as well as the way race and class identities were played off against one another to the benefit of landowner and capitalist alike. Both Whiteness and Blackness are specific constructs of this period, du Bois argues, and racism was the mechanism by which white workers benefited from their position with respect to Black workers. A vitally important book with retains important lessons for societies structured in dominance today.
Stuart Hall. Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands. Duke University Press, 2017.
One of the main figures of cultural studies, Stuart Hall was born in Jamaica in 1932 and emigrated to England in 1951, where he became an important thinker, writer, journalist, and scholar of the New Left. Familiar Stranger applies Hall’s analytical rigour and his compassionate understanding to his own experience growing up in Jamaica and then as a stranger in a new country, as part of a significant diasporic influx of colonized subjects into the United Kingdom. Hall’s account of the political tenor of the 1950s and 1960s are useful lessons to those engaged in struggles over identity and social justice today.
C.L.R. James. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. Vintage Books, 1989.
In fast-paced, narrative style less like an academic history than a novel, political philosopher and activist CLR James dramatizes the Haitian revolution, the effects of which continue to be felt not only in Haiti, but in the Haitian diaspora in Canada. In James’ view, the Haitian revolution was the first great and successful revolution of Enlightenment liberalism, predating both the American and French Revolutions and, unlike these later revolutions, eventually falling prey to the combined forces of imperial racism. A fascinating account of an often-forgotten moment in world history.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Haymarket Books, 2016.
Scholar and activist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor produced one of the central books of the BlackLivesMatter movement, looking primarily at structural mechanisms of inequality and oppression such as mass incarceration and police brutality, redlining, targeted unemployment, and the long trajectory of Black lives in the United States. Taylor argues passionately for maintaining the impetus behind BlackLivesMatter with a view to achieving Black liberation more broadly.
Cedric J. Robinson. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
Robinson challenges the Eurocentrism of Marxist thought while underscoring the importance of some of Marxism’s central concepts, such as Marx and Engels’ historical materialism and Lenin’s notions of imperialism and revolutionary vanguard. Robinson sees Marxism as fundamentally “a Western construction – a conceptualization of human affairs and historical development” that arose out of the specific experience of Western European capitalism. Robinson argues that the early Marxist engagement of W.E.B. du Bois, CLR James, and Richard Wright proved important but insufficient until “in time, events and experience drew them toward Black radicalism and the discovery of a collective Black resistance” which was able, for the first time, to full articulate the Black struggle for justice and emancipation.
Chimwemwe Undi, Scientific Marvel: Poems. House of Anansi, 2024.
The City of Winnipeg’s third poet laureate and Canada’s 11th Parliamentary Poet Laureate, Chimwemwe Undi’s first collection of poems explores Winnipeg cultural landmarks both physical (like the Golden Boy) and symbolic (like escapologist Dean Gunnarson) while at the same time confronting the reality of otherness and objectification on the prairie. The former home of Scientific Marvel Beauty School, which ran from 1916 to 2017, can still be seen at the corner of Portage and Kennedy, not far from UWinnipeg.
Part of the University of Winnipeg Library’s Winnipeg Poet Laureate Collection.
