“Against the South”: The Mississippis of Black Writing in Canada

Abstract

Building upon recent work by Zandria Robinson, which explores how African American publics are often constituted “[i]n and through the idea of the South” (35), as well as work by Jade Ferguson, which demonstrates how white Canadians, at key historical moments, have likewise exhibited strong social and psychological investments in an imagined black South, this essay analyzes fiction by black writers residing in Canada during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It argues that black Canadian writers have represented the black US South for several distinct but overlapping reasons: to assert a broader or “unified” New World black experience; to distinguish the political, cultural, and affective landscapes of Canada; and, finally, to contest the myth of a color blind or “post-racial” Canada. In a robust yet still under-recognized current of black hemispheric thought, Canada stands polysemously “against” the South, exhibiting both opposition to and intimacy with the more prominent discursive space of blackness, while simultaneously illuminating the conflicting and mutually constitutive scripts of national identity and diasporic identification.