White like Me? Reading the Room at Mikinaakominis/TransCanadas 2017

Abstract

At the Mikinaakominis/TransCanadas conference held at the University of Toronto in May 2017, Rinaldo Walcott described Canadian literature as being as white then as it was when Insomniac Press published his Black like Who? twenty years prior. This essay responds to Walcott’s critique with a personal ethnography that describes Canadian literature as a field of study, that pays particular attention to the internal fractures that belie the field’s whiteness, and that considers students’s self-governance within neo-liberal universities. Beyond Canadian post-secondary education’s anti-Black structural barriers, graduate-level studies in the humanities depend on students’ access to financial and social credit. In turn, credit limits who can afford to study Canadian literature. Academic labour’s growing precarity further redlines non-professional fields of study, intensifying racial divisions within Canadian post-secondary education.