Abstract
This article considers the ways in which some of Austin Clarke’s writings might be understood as an expressive and intellectual blueprint for the activism of Black Lives Matter (BLM). Clarke’s radical politics can be seen in the ways he reconceptualizes Canadian citizenship and Black activism, and in the ways his fiction and nonfiction writing interrogates respectability politics in order to take seriously the full range of emotions – including rage – experienced by Black people and Black communities in the face of ongoing state violence and police brutality. Clarke’s refusal of respectability politics in particular anticipates some of the concerns of BLM, such as its reinvigoration of grassroots resistance, direct action, and confrontation politics, and the ways the movement writes alternate narratives through which to read dominant representations of the victims of state-sanctioned violence. Clarke’s writing also suggests that these reimaginings are particularly urgent in a Canadian context shaped by settler-colonial discourses of so-called “politeness” and “civility.” His work, instead, lays bare the long history and everyday pervasiveness of anti-Black racism, “anti-Black sanism” (Meerai, Abdillahi and Poole 2016), and police brutality in Canada, in ways few other writers have.
Published Version
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