Overview

The Routledge Handbook of Black Canadian Literature offers a comprehensive overview of the growing and increasingly significant field of Black Canadian literary studies. Including historical and contemporary analysis, this volume is an essential text that maps the field over the almost 200 years of its existence across a range of genres from slave narratives to prose fiction, poetry, theatre, and dub and spoken word. It presents Black Canadian literature as encompassing a diverse set of viewpoints, approaches, and practices, touching every aspect of Canadian territory and life, and as deeply influencing debates and understandings of Black peoples far beyond its borders. This Handbook employs an interdisciplinary framework that incorporates literary, historical, geographical, and cultural analysis. This book comprising 32 chapters is organized into five sections that chart the literature’s development into a recognizable canon, trace Black literary geographies across Canada from east to west, delineate the literature’s various genres and expressive forms, and honor the writers and thinkers who have influenced the growth of the field. This volume’s range of subject and plurality of perspectives provide an excellent resource for teachers, researchers, and students from multiple disciplines, including Canadian studies and literature, Caribbean studies, global Black studies, hemispheric studies, diaspora studies, history, and cultural studies.

Full Product Details

Author:   Andrea A. Davis ,  Leslie Sanders
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Routledge
ISBN:  

9780367742089

ISBN 10:   036774208
Pages:   562
Publication Date:   22 June 2026
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Table of Contents

Introduction: Black Canadian Literature and the World Andrea A. Davis PART ONE: ESTABLISHING A CANON 1. The Code That Limits: Black Canadian Anthologizing and Anthologies Sharon Morgan Beckford 2. Black Small Press Literary Publishing in English Canada Stephen Cain 3. Palimpsests of Nation & Diaspora: Black Writing in Canada and Canadian Literatures Paul Barrett 4. Afropolitanism and the African Immigrant in the African-Canadian Literary Canon Amatoritsero Ede PART TWO: BLACK LITERARY GEOGRAPHIES 5. Black Maritime—Africadian—Literature: An Introduction George Elliott Clarke 6. Black Canadian Literature in Francophone Quebec Susan Ireland and Patrice J. Proulx 7. Jazz, Diaspora, and the History and Writing of Black Anglophone Montreal Winfried Siemerling 8. Writing Toronto Darcy Ballantyne 9. From Absence to Abundance: Recovering the Black Prairie Archive, 1872–2023 Karina Vernon 10. ‘It Is Arrogant to Disappear:’ A Humble Re-Visioning of Black Literature in British Columbia David Chariandy PART THREE: GENRE AND MODES OF WRITING 11. Slave Narratives as a Transnational Genre Nele Sawallisch 12. Post-Slavery and the Making of the Black Canadian Novel, 1850s–1990 Jennifer Harris 13. African-Canadian Poetry in English: 1890–2000 George Elliott Clarke 14. Black Canadian Children’s Literature: Evolution, Writers, and Impact Janet Seow 15. Writing Black Canada: An Unfinished Project of Freedom Andrea A. Davis PART FOUR: PERFORMANCE AND VOICE 16. Speak OurStory! 12 Poet-to-Poet Conversations on the Legacy, the Now, and Future of Black Canadian Dub Poetry and Spoken Word Wendy Motion Brathwaite 17. National and Diasporic Dialogues: Black Canadian Drama and Theatre Jacqueline Petropolous 18. Rising, Lifting, Resisting: A History of Black Dramatic Feature Filmmaking in Canada Andrea Medovarski PART FIVE: MAJOR WRITERS OF INFLUENCE 19. Marie-Célie Agnant Susan Ireland and Patrice Proulx 20. “The Abacus of her Eyelids”: Dionne Brand’s Poetics Christina Sharpe 21. Dionne Brand: Ambivalent Novelizations Eshe Mercer-James 22. After Canadian Multiculturalism: David Chariandy Rinaldo Walcott 23. Austin Clarke’s “Out-a-Order” Poetics and the Archiving of Black Lives Michael A. Bucknor 24. George Elliott Clarke: A Biocritical Examination Joseph J. Pivato 25. Wayde Compton: From Archive to Innovation in the Black British Columbian Lived Imaginary Heather Smyth 26. Esi Edugyan: Black Fugitivity and the Possibility of a Second Life Pilar Cuder-Domínguez 27. Lawrence Hill’s Critical Aesthetics of Cultural Resilience Ana María Fraile-Marcos 28. “Magic in the Real”: The Speculative Engagements of Nalo Hopkinson Maureen Moynagh 29. Dany Laferrière Claire Reising 30. The Multiplicities of Émile Ollivier: Haitian Tragedies and Montreal Crossroads Amanda Perry 31. Disturbing the Peace, Caring for the Word: M. NourbeSe Philip Kate Siklosi 32. Makeda Silvera: Prioritizing Marginalized Voices Eshe Mercer-James

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Author Information

Andrea A. Davis is Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies and Associate Vice President: Equity Diversity, and Inclusion at Wilfrid Laurier University. Prior to this, she was Professor of Black Cultures of the Americas at York University where she founded the Black Canadian Studies Certificate. Co-editor of the Journal of Canadian Studies, she has published widely on the literary productions of Black women in the Americas and is the author of Horizon, Sea, Sound: Caribbean and African Women’s Cultural Critiques of Nation (2022). Her current book project is an autofictional exploration of women’s journeys in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries across the Atlantic Ocean and Sargasso Sea. Leslie Sanders is University Professor Emerita in the Department of Humanities at York University. She is the author of The Development of Black Theater in America (1988), a general editor of the Collected Works of Langston Hughes: Gospel Plays, Operas, and Later Dramatic Works (2004), and editor for two volumes of plays. She has published on such Black Canadian writers as Austin Clarke, Dionne Brand, M. NourbeSe Philip, Claire Harris, George Elliot Clarke, Maxine Tynes, and Djanet Sears. She created African Canadian Online, the first available database of African Canadian artists and their work in literature, film, music, dance, theatre, and visual art.

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