As February is Black History Month, University of Toronto Press would like to take this opportunity to celebrate and honour the history of African Canadians and Americans.
To learn more about the history of African-Canadians, check out these recent titles from University of Toronto Press.
Moving Beyond Borders: A History of Black Canadian and Caribbean Women in the Diaspora by Karen Flynn is the first book-length history of Black health care workers in Canada, delving into the experiences of thirty-five postwar-era nurses who were born in Canada or who immigrated from the Caribbean either through Britain or directly to Canada. Flynn interweaves oral histories with archival sources to show how these women’s lives were shaped by their experiences of migration, professional training, and family life.
Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature by George Elliott Clarke is a pioneering study of African-Canadian literary creativity, laying the groundwork for future scholarly work in the field. Based on extensive excavations of archives and texts, this challenging passage through twelve essays presents a history of the literature and examines its debt to, and synthesis with, oral cultures.
Directions Home: Approaches to African-Canadian Literature by George Elliott Clarke. Building on the discoveries of his critically acclaimed Odysseys Home, Clarke passionately analyses the beautiful complexities and haunting conundrums of this important body of literature. Clarke showcases the importance of little-known texts, including church histories and slave narratives, and offers studies of autobiography, crime and punishment, jazz poetics, and musical composition.
Race on Trial: Black Defendants in Ontario’s Criminal Courts, 1858-1958 by Barrington Walker. Using capital case files and the assize records for Kent and Essex counties, areas that had significant black populations because they were termini for the Underground Railroad, Barrington Walker investigates the limits of freedom for Ontario’s African Canadians. Through court transcripts, depositions, jail records, Judge’s Bench Books, newspapers, and government correspondence, Walker identifies trends in charges and convictions in the Black population.
The African Canadian Legal Odyssey: Historical Essays, edited by Barrington Walker, explores the history of African Canadians and the law from the era of slavery until the early twenty-first century. This collection demonstrates that the social history of Blacks in Canada has always been inextricably bound to questions of law, and that the role of the law in shaping Black life was often ambiguous and shifted over time.
