Urban Entanglements in Three African Canadian Plays: Lorena Gale’s Angélique, George Boyd’s Consecrated Ground, and Andrew Moodie’s Riot

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which three African Canadian plays—Andrew Moodie’s Riot, Lorena Gale’s Angélique, and George Boyd’s Consecrated Ground—rehearse moments of racism regarding theAfrican Canadian diaspora. I explore the in/visibility and hyper-visibility of blackness in three plays that are set in a past which connects directly to contemporary politics: Angélique takes place in 1734 Montreal and the present, Consecrated Ground is set in Nova Scotia’s Africville in 1965, and Riot looks back to Toronto in 1992. Yet rather than just documenting points on a visibility continuum, the plays also raise the prospect of establishing alternative— albeit metaphoric—definitions of ‘belonging.’ Using Avtar Brah’s concept of “diaspora space,” I argue that by exploring a compromised form of diaspora space as a means of locating African Canadian subjects, the plays provide an abstract alternative to ‘belonging’ in their urban narratives, in the wider community, and the larger nation. The performance of diaspora spaces, even if compromised, helps make visibleAfrican Canadian identities, as the plays renegotiate the nature of Canadian landscape, history, and identity at large.