Black Presence Research Articles

Snowboarding while Black: race, aesthetics, and Jamaican migrant workers

ABSTRACT How snowboarding intersects with race in a Canadian mountain resort is explored in this research note. Snowboarding is now globalised but emerged in the USA in the 1960s as an alternative lifestyle sport. Race was embedded in its birth as then, as now, snowboarding is dominated by privileged White participants who are mostly male. The White dominance is masked as whiteness is invisibilized by claims of being neutral or colour-blind. Yet, a Black presence surrounds snowboarding. The second theme examines snowboarding’s commodification of Black aesthetics. It uses Black music and urban fashion to enhance and market its supposedly radical or coolness credentials to its suburban White audience. The mining of Black aesthetics is unacknowledged and thus whitewashes the economic exploitation of Black culture. Migrant workers are the backbone of snow resorts, and the third theme examines this use of transnational labour. It probes why Australians are the visible workers on the snow-kissed slopes and front desks, while Jamaicans are the invisible labour in catering and housekeeping. The use of migrant labour is racialised and further reifies the whiteness of snowboarding. Black snowboarders, riding the snowy slopes for leisure, expose and disrupt the politics of race and place in snowboarding.

Relearning black presence in Amsterdam through guided tours: teaching beyond the classroom

Relearning black presence in Amsterdam through guided tours: teaching beyond the classroom

‘The Black Prince of Baker Street’ and the Black Presence in Britain, 1837–1849

Between 1838 and 1849 a man repeatedly visited London claiming to be ‘Louis Christophe’, seeking access to money deposited in the Bank of England by his ‘brother’ the deceased King of Haiti, Henri Christophe. By following this impostor around London and the wider Atlantic, this article makes an important contribution to understanding of the Black presence in Britain during the early Victorian period. Alongside his interactions with the Black community, it documents how ‘Louis Christophe’ was able to defraud British philanthropists, the forms of racial prejudice he received during the decade, and the legacy of the Haitian Revolution.

Reconsidering the Black Archive: It’s About Time and Black Dance in Canada

It’s About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900–1970 serves as an expository reflection on the history of Black dance and performance in Canada. As a scholar, writer, educator, and professional modern and postmodern dance artist, Seika Boye features the Black archive as a central component for understanding the experiences of Black populations in Canada. The exhibition rejects assumptions about Black invisibility and instead offers a way to view Black presence in plain sight. As such, It’s About Time brilliantly features the Black archive through images, artifacts, and public viewings of Black dancers across Canada to highlight the multiplicity of their experiences and contributions to the nation.

Book Review Unveiling hidden narratives across southern Africa Histories of wildlife filmmaking and black presence in the Kruger National Park

Book Review Unveiling hidden narratives across southern Africa Histories of wildlife filmmaking and black presence in the Kruger National Park

‘It’s Not Because It’s Not There, That It Isn’t There’: Visibility and invisibility within Black flamenco performance

Since flamenco's inception, the art form has served as an act of resilience and resistance for marginalized peoples, and now, more than ever before, Black flamenco artists are gaining greater visibility, engaging with the form as embodied activism and interrogation of present and historical injustices. Pointing to the various techniques Black flamenco artists employ to interrogate notions of visibility and invisibility within their performances, this article draws from performance studies, dance studies and Africana studies to analyse the four short films that were created as work-in-progress investigations for London-born Black flamenco artist Yinka Esi Graves's The Disappearing Act (2023). Employing Tavia Nyong'o's theory of afro-fabulation, I examine the myriad ways the piece negotiates Black presence and camouflage within spaces haunted by Spain's role in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and looks to the archive to reach into the past, collapse time and imagine futures. In framing The Disappearing Act as an act of afro-fabulation that negotiates Black presence and visibility within flamenco through a trans-temporal engagement with archival information, I argue that the work refuses the invisibilization of Blackness and Black bodies in flamenco's past, present and future. Choreographic analysis and analytical movement description allow me to examine the ways Graves's site-specific work negotiates truth and untruth within what GerShun Avilez terms spatial justice as her physical body serves as trans-temporal marker of the violence associated with histories of chattel slavery. Finally, I highlight the recently formed Black Flamenco Network – Flamencos Unidos Africanos y Afro Descendientes (BFN – FUAAD) to illustrate how contemporary Black flamenco artists are seeking greater representation via community support and online, intergenerational collaboration.

Whitewashed and Blacked Out: Counter-Narratives as an Analytical Framework for Studies of Ice Hockey in Canada

Despite a longstanding relationship with hockey, Black Canadians are typically erased from dominant histories of Canada and sport. Erasure is detrimental to Black prosperity because it encourages social death, a process that socially marginalizes and dehumanizes Black Canadians. In response to Black erasure, we detail counter-narratives that challenge the historically whitewashed account of hockey’s origin in Canada. We celebrate the impact and contributions of Black Canadians, who transformed hockey while using it as a sport-for-development vehicle in the 19th and 20th century. Given the centrality of hockey to Canadian nationalism, we suggest that Black erasure within sport and society is an attempt at Black social death within Canada. By highlighting the sport development and sport-for-development work of Black Canadians, our objective is to confront Black erasure and exclusion. That way, Black presence becomes less surprising in the grand narrative of Canada, and Black social death becomes less certain.

In the Flow

In the Flow Kimberly Juanita Brown (bio) Part revolutionary treatise, part sorrow song, and part celebration, Shana L. Redmond's American Studies Association presidential address brought the audience through the four stages of black study within American studies: inquiry, immersion, politics, and prose. Music and motion are organized around collective regard. With "The Dark Prelude" as the title of her address, Redmond reconfigured sites of communion and black presence as the calibration of the soul journeying through the life of the mind, the life of the heart. Beginning by placing herself in the chorus, hoping that as the blend of voices and octaves come together, something new can be gleaned, Redmond escorted all of us through the avenue of engagement that breathed new life into old. This is not your linear narrative, not your rallying call of a presidential address. This is the trace of blackness and presence that upends temporality. If you let it. The process is the product is the method. Redmond brought her activism, scholarly interests, subject of study, creativity, and verve to the one place that could hold it: the first in-person ASA meeting since 2019. Just observing the crowd as they gathered for the address, one could navigate the current terrain of academe through those who have entered it only recently. The same people whose research and writings have animated a whole universe previously taken for granted. Introduced by President-elect Sharon Holland, Redmond took the stage accompanied by her friend and collaborator Kwame Phillips, who provided the musical accompaniment for the talk. The combination of music and prose worked seamlessly to carry the message of interdisciplinary production that is the cornerstone of American studies writ large. Moan, Wail Redmond opened her talk with a nod to the potent directionality of emotion ("I cry a lot for what I'm learning and those things I'm being forced to acknowledge that I already knew"). To begin in this place, in the interiority of feeling and its connection to the lives and labors of study, is to orient the [End Page 225] eye and the ear in the same direction. The sound is unmistakable. As listeners followed Redmond's sonic offering, the pathways of black possibility opened up and out, enclosing much in the space of creation. We followed the trail of movement from Assata Shakur to Sandra Bland, recognizing something familiar in each pause, turn, reflection, and moment of apprehension. Here is one such pause: I'm lingering again in the discontinuities of death named by comrade Sharon Holland. I'm trying to revive the details carried to graves—to write answers to the questions we don't ask. I'm trying to become an amplifier for a chorus whose bright songs have been compressed to undertones beneath the weight of symbolism and spectacle. The presidential address as "amplifier" is one way to traverse the ebb and flow of black studies as it exists in the arena that is American studies. So the address encouraged us to join the chorus in the distance in an effort to make the fullness of sound as effective as one singular voice. We were encouraged, by example, to do what we do best. As she merged popular music playing on the radio at the time with racist confrontations with police (a whole history unto itself), Redmond intertwined the sounds of musical production with the cacophony of driving-while-black, and understanding the precarity of the endeavor. From Leon Bridges and Gladys Knight and the Pips, Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway, Tony Orlando and Dawn, the sounds of survival were articulated as guideposts letting us know where we were going. And the journey, of course, is ever fraught. Part of the particular delineation of purpose Redmond presented in the talk was her way of compelling the audience with fluid musical offerings that were juxtaposed against racialized upheavals perpetrated by the state. Though the music had a softening effect, it also managed to produce pinpricks of apprehension for those of us who know all too well how so many of those traffic stops end. Arrest, injury, escape, or death, there are no happy stories once the sirens begin. Add race...

A Literary History of Josie Craig Berry and Her Communities, 1917–1955

Abstract: Black Americans settled in Oklahoma beginning in the 1830s; the first Black settlers were often people enslaved by Native nations. Despite the long-time Black presence in Oklahoma and the establishment of All-Black towns and thriving middle-class communities in Oklahoma City and Tulsa, Ralph Ellison is the only Black writer publishing before 1940 who is commonly associated with the state. Yet Ellison’s science teacher and writing mentor, Josie Craig Berry, was a literary and journalistic powerhouse in Oklahoma City beginning in 1918. Berry published poetry, reported on cultural events, and wrote a weekly literary column for Oklahoma City’s Black Dispatch newspaper from 1937 to 1939. This essay presents Berry as an accomplished poet, a literary critic, a community-based journalist, a public intellectual, and a woman whose contributions to Black literature and Oklahoma literature are immeasurable. Berry’s writings as examined in this essay also make evident the need for further research and academic publications on Black Oklahoma writers.

Black Actors: Eighteenth-Century Cultures and Decolonial Fantasies

Black Actors:Eighteenth-Century Cultures and Decolonial Fantasies Patricia Anne Simpson Beyond the scholarly sources found in specialized archives, libraries, and bookshelves (or digitized downloads), streaming services and popular series have piqued widespread interest in a Black presence in eighteenth-century European cultures. A number of binge-worthy shows—among them Shonda Rhimes Bridgerton (2021–22), Tony McNamara's The Great: An Occasionally True Story (season 1) and The Great: An Almost Entirely Untrue Story (season 2), and La cocinera de Castamar—adapted from a novel by Fernando J. Múñez by the same name, feature Black characters whose identities are comprised in unequal parts of historical fact, decolonial fantasies, and professionally progressive color-blind casting practices. Bridgerton imagines a Regency world in which Black royalty and aristocrats coexist with tradespeople and merchants. The presence of Black courtiers in the dark dramedy that unfolds in the Russia of Catherine II (The Great) raised some viewers' eyebrows, but the historical record attests to the partial reality of this "occasionally true story."1 And Múñez's novel follows the path of the protagonist, Clara Belmonte, an agoraphobic cook who catches the eye of a widowed duke in the palace Castamar, as she navigates her affliction and the marriage intrigues that surround the hero. Her character is loosely based on a composite of historical figures—the royal kitchen of Philip V was staffed by men—the person of interest is the duke's adopted brother, Gabriel de Castamar, a formerly enslaved Black man who was educated and elevated into the family. These amalgams of fact and fiction veer into controversies about historical accuracy and the inability of fantasy to right centuries of wrong. Each story indistinctly maps a topography transversed by economic, racial, and cultural politics networking Africa, Europe, and the Americas around 1800. Much is made of Catherine's Germanness, deftly delivered by Elle Fanning, in The Great—in particular, the ability to transfer Enlightenment theory into political practice. Perhaps we can imagine a popularized version of "Frederick—The Great?," but the Forschungsstand offers compelling reading with greater gravitas, for much current German studies scholarship is engaged in the project of decolonizing the long eighteenth century. The Black Lives Matter movements galvanized anti-Black-racist activism, which directly or indirectly has an impact on the work we do: this scholarship itself has a history—Black lives have always mattered.2 Of crucial significance, scholars across disciplines and regions are collaborating to make [End Page 119] hitherto unnoticed or marginalized materials widely available. One sterling example is the website Black Central Europe (https://blackcentraleurope.com/), which argues, "quite simply, that Black people have always been a part of Central European history."3 Literary and cultural studies scholars, among them Wendy Sutherland and Obenewaa Oduro-Opuni, have examined the texts and contexts of dramas and the Sklavenstücke.4 In early December 2021, the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa hosted a symposium devoted to the work of Wilhelm Anton Amo. Professor Josephat Obi Oguejiofor gave the keynote address, arguing for the central importance of Amo's influence on contemporary African philosophy. The unveiling of an Amo memorial plaque in the Department of Philosophy enhanced the solemnity of the proceedings, dedicated to the life and work of the first Black scholar to earn a degree from the University of Halle—Oguejifor noted that it would be more than two centuries before the second. Professor Oguejiofor also honored the legacy of Amo in African philosophy, lamenting that his name has yet to become widely known. Further, he affirmed the hybridity of Amo's life and work as Afro-European and Ghanaian-German and acknowledged the importance of studies by W. E. Abraham and V. Emma-Adamah as well as translations. Presenters from Ghana, Germany, Sweden, Nigeria, France, and the United States shared work on topics that included Amo's theory of impassivity (apatheia), his Tractatus, the theory of knowledge, migration policies, and the rights of Blacks in Europe, among others.5 As Oguejifor stated, "We do not need Amo and his success to tell us that slavery and racism, that these two practices are horrendous. … "It is likely that Kant knew of...

Interrogating the Myths of Education: Dorothy Bryant'sElla Price's JournalandMiss Giardino

Interrogating the Myths of Education: Dorothy Bryant's<i>Ella Price's Journal</i>and<i>Miss Giardino</i>

The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology by Karina Vernon

Reviewed by: The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology by Karina Vernon Mahmoud Ababneh (bio) Karina Vernon. The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2019. Pp. 593. CAD $44.99. In a recent lecture, the novelist Suzette Mayr described the "electrifying" effect of reading Cheryl Foggo's Pourin' Down Rain (1990) as a Black person living on the prairies. She noted that Foggo's book brought to light the crucial and long-standing presence of Black families in Alberta. Like Foggo's biographical work, Karina Vernon's The Black Prairie Archives documents Black presence on the prairies to show that Black folks are not an anomaly but are rather part of a larger web of reciprocal social relations. To demonstrate how these relations have been forged, Vernon meticulously engages with the works of sixty-one Black authors who have produced oral literature, experimental poetry, autobiography, history, and ethnographies. Vernon explains that an archive "as blackness" is a method of engagement with these modes of writing that empowers community members "to tell the story they want to be made public" (5). This process of engagement is radically different from and in opposition to an archive "of blackness," which "constructs blackness as an object of knowledge in the European archive" (5). By gathering an archive as Blackness, she not only reminds readers of the complicated ethics of presenting stories about Black communities that require a lengthy and necessary process of securing permissions from authors but also brilliantly challenges the dominant national archives of Blackness. This distinction between archives of Blackness and archives as Blackness is a central point in Vernon's introduction to the anthology. The introduction admirably attempts to redefine the last 150 years of Black presence on the prairies. Vernon provides a fresh lens through which to scrutinize the state archives and simultaneously proposes a different archive that purposefully constructs a radical shift in the way the prairies are perceived. The prairies, she rightly argues, have been mainly imagined through a socalled "prairie realist" school of writing. Writers working within this genre, who are mostly men, and all white, have produced a "sanitized and bounded" [End Page 183] archive of the prairie that fails to mirror its Black presence. Therefore, The Black Prairie Archives radically reconstructs the imagination of the prairies at multiple levels. For example, reading Dr. Alfred Schmitz Shadd's speech to the electorate and Reverend George Washington Slater, Jr.'s article about organizing a co-op provides important knowledge of how these Black leaders were heavily engaged in policy making and journal writings that transform the way Black presence has been monolithically narrated in the state archives. Making these important stories and histories public is a crucial step in exposing the complicity of nationally run archives and museums in concealing Black activism and Black community engagement across the history of the Canadian prairies. Vernon explains how she found "virtually nothing" about Black presence on the prairies when searching literary histories and regional anthologies. She eloquently describes her mixed feelings when she discovered that there is a Black history of the prairies. To her, this realization means that she "also discovered the erasure of it" (9). She further explains the difficulties of obtaining some of the materials because they were "buried in unexpected places," archived in "out-of-the-way rural historical societies," or "hidden in plain sight" (8). Thus, the book offers a pioneering contribution that presents these documents to the public, often for the first time. Vernon sets four goals for this book. These goals vary from transforming the imagination of the prairies as a white space to establishing a Black prairie literary tradition. Another important goal is "to assist readers' close engagements with the literature, thus opening up new scholarly and pedagogical possibilities" (1). Vernon aims to establish practical guidelines to implement these critical frameworks in her introduction. The goal of learners and educators of CanLit and Canadian history should be, according to Vernon, to pry open and identify new spaces and possibilities that revitalize conversations within these fields. The Black Prairie Archives facilitates this task and further assists readers to engage with these alternative views. Vernon structures the anthology in chronological order based...

The Influence of Electrode Constituents on Hydrogen Evolution Reaction on Phosphate W- and Mo-Bronze-Based Electrodes

Phosphate tungsten bronze (WPB) and phosphate molybdenum bronze (MoPB) were synthesized and modified with rhenium. The existing phases were established by X-ray powder diffraction (XRPD), electron paramagnetic spectroscopy (EPR) and Field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM). The electroactivity of bronze samples, with and without rhenium for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) was tested. The influence of carbon black presence in the catalytic ink on the electrochemical activity was investigated. Collected results provide insight into the effects of the constituents of an electrode on its electrochemical activity.

The Blackness of the Chimney Sweep: Dickens, Illustrators, and Erasing Racial Complexity

In this article I look at how Dickens's text and his illustrators' drawings work together to erase the racially complex reality of Victorian London. I explore how the representations of the chimney-sweep in a variety of genres situate the sweep at a nexus of anxieties about race and class. By looking at the history of representing the May Day Parade, which showed Black participants, I argue that when the parade appears in Dickens's work, there is a deliberate erasure of Black presence. I then trace the sweep in Dickensian illustration to show that every time the sweep appears they carry the visual markers of the sweep – burnished cap, brush, and often bag – to comfort the (white) viewer and reader that they are not seeing a Black child on the street.

Writing Canada’s antebellum Black history: the work of Fred Landon

White Canadian historian Fred Landon (1880-1969) was a pioneer in writing the history of Black freedom-seekers in mid-nineteenth-century Canada West and noteworthy for treating the publications of both Black and white writers and abolitionists as sources for the historical record and thus as equal contributors to historical knowledge of this period. He has been an important source for nineteenth-century Black history for both American and Canadian scholars, yet no analysis of his work exists. Landon’s selectivity in citing sources, his recurrent topics, and his tone and diction together generate a sense of the Black presence in Ontario as a historical romance more than a search for equality, a romance that came to an end, and a search that was perhaps perceived to be no longer necessary once American Emancipation was secured. His work, though ground-breaking and well intentioned, orients readers to a narrative in which early ‘Canada’ saves refugees from American cruelty, and thus may have contributed to the mythology of Canada’s benevolence on white-Black race relations, a key trait of Canada’s anti-American nationalism to this day.

For the Culture

Building on the work of Hortense Spillers and others, this article uses the “yet to come” of Black culture as a lens to read the political and cultural interventions of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL). The “yet to come” also serves as an avenue to consider how, on what terms, and to what end Black political thought has evolved since #BlackLivesMatter emerged. By wielding an unapologetic Black joy as both a capacious embodiment of Black presence and a prefigurative politics that forecasts a world free of antiblackness, M4BL, and its demand for abolition, has shifted the meaning and mode of Black politics and thought. At the same time, when placed in conversation with earlier Black political-cultural formations, Black joy and abolition help crystalize the current conjuncture in Black thought as rooted in a temporality that is simultaneously now, before, and not yet. This multi-temporality follows what Margo Natalie Crawford describes as “the power of anticipation” in the Black radical tradition, facilitating a new correspondence between the Black present and the Black past, one that is attuned to historically situated racial regimes. Put somewhat differently, in its circulatory, its “back and forth flow,” Black culture and Black thought, intramural renderings of Blackness itself, builds and repurposes rather than simply breaks away. Seen through this light, I suggest that M4BL’s politics and culture are not merely pronouncements of the “yet to come” but a philosophical “return to the source”—the radicalism of the colonized and enslaved.

ROSTOS NEGROS NA ARQUITETURA E URBANISMO NO BRASIL

The following text deals with issues that cross the research “Black architects and architects around the world: Mapping the black presence in the field of architecture, urbanism and urban planning” (PPGAU FAUFBA, Salvador-BA) 1as well as its by-product the black architects website .ufba.br, now available online Focusing on the Brazil axis, it brings points such as the search for representation within the field of architecture and urbanism of black architects, professional references, reflection on the place that the black person occupies in the labor market, how to be the production of these professionals in relation to the media and academia. Important questions to contribute to the expansion of the repertoire that has been used within the field of activity and study, looking at these issues from a perspective related to reality Brazilian. &nbsp;Keywords: Architects, Negritude, Research, Brazil, World.

Description of a new hoverfly species of the genus Ferdinandea and the female of Eumerus muratovi from Tajikistan (Diptera: Syrphidae: Eristalinae)

A new species of the genus Ferdinandea Rondani, 1844 and the unknown female of Eumerus muratovi Barkalov, 2020 are described. The new species F. volkovae sp. nov. differs from all Palaearctic species of the genus in the coloration of the face, the frons and mesonotum completely covered with grey pollen, black scape and pedicel, and the details of the male genitalia. The female of E. muratovi is similar to that of E. kozlovi Stackelberg, 1952, but differs in the completely black legs, larger size and presence of brown spot on the wing.

Centering Black life in Canadian early childhood education

ABSTRACT This paper is a response to multiculturalism’s reductionist and othering constructions of Black presence in Canadian early childhood research and practice. We engage in possibilities for creating movement away from multiculturalism as the primary way of responding to anti-Blackness in Canadian early childhood education. We put forward orientations that emerge when we imagine the abolition of Canadian early childhood education pedagogies and curriculum that are shaped by neoliberal multiculturalism. We organize our abolitionist praxis in relation to what kinds of stories and modes of storytelling of Black life might be needed in early childhood education in Canada. We focus our attention on three interconnected pedagogical orientations: storying abolition geographies, storying Black ecologies, and storying Black aliveness.

Mapping Black London in World War II: A staged approach to digital spatial history

AbstractThis article suggests ways scholars may be able to deploy digital techniques in contexts without readily available quantitative data. Using the Mapping Black London (MBL) project in World War II as a case study, the article proposes ways scholars can ‘reverse engineer’ qualitative information in order to generate the data needed to make meaningful digital maps. The MBL project conducted a staged approach to digitally map the black presence in London during World War II. In contrast to other phased approaches where work typically begins with a lengthy stage of database construction and data entry followed by ‘traditional’ analysis toward the end, MBL sought to minimize the lengthy and costly lead times common to many Historic Geographic Information Systems (HGIS) projects. Work progressed through three alternative stages where the MBL team ‘mapped the topic’, before mapping selected aspects of the secondary literature and primary evidence. This article discusses the benefits drawn from such an approach, as well as suggesting some circumstances where similar methods might be deployed by others seeking to ‘reverse engineer’ qualitative sources to create digital maps.