Blackening Canada: Diaspora, Race, Multiculturalism by Paul Barrett

Abstract

Paul Barrett. Blackening Canada: Diaspora, Race, Multiculturalism. Toronto: U Toronto P, 2015. Pp. vii, 240. CAD$29.95. Paul Barrett's Blackening Canada: Diaspora, Race, Multiculturalism interrogates anti-black within multicultural Canada via an analysis black literature. According to Barrett, aesthetics blackening--as practiced by authors Dionne Brand, Austin Clarke, and Tessa McWatt--challenge Daniel Coleman's notion Canadian civility and [Frances] Henry and [Carol] Tator's theory democratic racism found in public policy and news media (104, 106). Building on W. E. B. Du Bois, Rinaldo Walcott, and Lily Cho, Barrett describes as both a process invidious racialization and a set critical, practices. In other words, while blackening produces double-consciousness by racially discriminating against non-white subjects as foreign or criminal, its capacities for process, performance, and by black authors engender resistance to Canadian multiculturalism as a colour-blind discourse inclusion. It does so by resignifying time, space, and movement in (13), where whiteness is at centre and writers can inhabit [the nation] on their own terms (190). Barrett's introduction challenges commonplace assumptions that multiculturalism promotes diversity. Assessing government documents from 1960s onward, he shows how white supremacy undergirds Canadian multiculturalism by eradicating questions race (4). Arguing that Canadian multiculturalism promotes assimilationist premised on civility, Barrett rejects diversity discourses as a state strategy for managing and containing difference, emphasizing rather the significance histories in formation multicultural identities (5). Accordingly, Barrett calls for a rethinking literary criticism and its role in institutionalization Canadian multicultural literature. Barrett's opening chapters discuss works Brand and Clarke. Chapter One offers invigorating close readings Brand's A Map to Door No Return: Notes on Belonging (2002), thirsty (2002), and Bread out Stone (1994), discussing how her activist poetics challenge colonialist notions national time and unity. Where some critics find Brand's work pessimistic, Barrett suggests that Brand rejoices ... in unraveling fixed forms (64) with a focus on diasporic time and analepsis (41). Moreover, he finds that Brand's image door and actions leaning, delaying, and interrupting in her poetics help innovate Canadian long poem. Conversely, in Chapter Two Barrett finds Clarke's Sometimes, a Motherless Child (1992), The Origin Waves (1997), The Polished Hoe (2002), and More (2008) to be less optimistic. Focused on locations where blackening has and still occurs, Clarke rewrites the chronotopes ship, train, and automobile, revealing continuities between spaces plantation, colony, city, and nation (69); Canada becomes not site arrival or origins but a place of movement and transition within broader patterns (86). Although Barrett is careful to distinguish between two authors' works, he finds commonality in their commitments to blackening as voice, accent, idiom, diction, register, and genre (102). Chapter Three shifts focus and method to critique mainstream news media sources that reported on case Albert Johnson, a black Jamaican immigrant who was shot and killed by white Toronto police officers in 1979. While such an analysis is a welcome addition to study, it is altogether clear why Barrett focuses solely on Johnson rather than a broader history Canadian in relation to policing--except, perhaps, that both Brand and Clarke have responded to Johnson's life in their writing. Nonetheless, this chapter helps to ground work Brand and Clarke in realities Canadian anti-black racism. …