Afro(Americo)centricity in Black (American) Nova Scotia

Abstract

A few families rose to prominence [in Baptist churches in Nova Scotia], created an aristocracy of the faith, and often held the church to more than ordinarily frozen and conservative theological and social positions. Winks 346 Winks’s reading of African-Canadian history exhibits, purely, a small-l liberal, American bias. I would need an entire book to amend—one by one—his false precepts ... African-Canadian ‘progress’ must be read against Canadian cultural norms, not American ones. Clarke,Odysseys Home 63^4n9 Preamble In formulating a vision of The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy makes sorties against anti-essentialists who ignore the appeal of a ‘‘power­ful, populist affirmation of black culture,’’ ‘‘racial conservationists who veer between a volkish, proto-fascist sensibility and the misty­eyed sentimentality of those who would shroud themselves in the supposed moral superiority that goes with victim status’’ (100, 101). Canadian scholars have found Gilroy’s work instructive. In Odysseys Home, George Elliott Clarke insists upon the ‘‘necessary attractiveness of cultural nationalism for any minority that feels itself downtrodden and disrespected’’ while warning of the ‘‘hazards of nationalism—its tendency to decay into fallacious myths, misty romanticisms, and blood-rite fascism’’ (183, 184). Yet Clarke does not only condemn the ‘‘liberal lies’’ of Robin Winks—the ‘‘American’’ (30, 124n9, 189) or ‘‘US’’ (155) author of The Blacks in Canada—and ‘‘those wanna-be black nationalists who suspect mixed-race or light-skinned blacks of being congenital .