February is Black History Month 2020

In celebration of Black History Month, here is a selection of new and important resources in our collection, including books, articles, databases, and more. For assistance in accessing or using these or any resources in the Laurier Library collection, contact us through the "Ask Us" chat window and contact info in the right side bar on this page, or visit us in person! Also, take a look at previous year’s lists: 2018 and 2019.

Books: Print and Electronic

Science, race relations and resistance : Britain, 1870-1914

"The long accepted pattern of Victorian perspectives on race, as historians of nineteenth century imperialism will know, is one of a transition from monogenetic civilisational superiority to polygenetic scientific determinism. However, the assumption that the foundations of racism switched from Christian to scientific with the emergence of polygenesis advocates like Robert Knox in the 1850s has been questioned and contested in more recent histories of Victorian racism. This contribution from Douglas Lorimer seeks to add nuance to the debate by exploring both the proponents of the new scientific racism and those who continued to resist them in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." (From Stan Neal’s 2014 review.)

Written by Douglas A. Lorimer, WLU Professor Emeritus, and published by Manchester University Press.

We have one print copy of this 2013 book in our Waterloo location.

Beyond respectability : the intellectual thought of race women

This book "... forcefully argues that race women and their intellectual contributions to society need to be taken seriously and viewed beyond the scopes of the culture of dissemblance and politics of respectability. Cooper, who was recently awarded the Merle Curti Intellectual History Award by the Organization of American Historians, creates a genealogy of race women and brings to light their contributions to Black women’s intellectual thought. Race women advocated for recognition of Black woman’s experience to which Cooper unfolds their centrality to early and modern discourse on race politics. She urges readers not only to frame race women as intellectual scholars, but to dig further into the content of their work to examine how they reframe the dialogue of Black women as capable of producing quality theorists, who strategically stationed themselves at the forefront of major political movement in the United States."(From Martasia Carter’s 2019 review.)

Written by Brittney C. Cooper, and published by University of Illinois Press.

We have one print copy of this 2017 book in our Waterloo location.

Frontiers : essays and writings on racism and culture, 1984-1992

"A suitable subtitle for this volume might be 'Handbook and Guide to Struggle against Unexamined Institutional Paradigms.' In these essays, letters, and reviews, originally published between 1986 and 1992, Philip's targets include colonial education, Canadian racism, white middle - class feminism, the aesthetics of modernism, the Royal Ontario Museum's Into the Heart of Africa exhibition, the 'whitewash' of multiculturalism in Ontario's arts funding system, the underrepresentation of African, Asian, and First Nations Canadian writers at the fifty - fourth PEN Congress, the politics of not publishing 'minority' writers, TVOntario's interviewing policies, the use by the dominant white society of writing by people of colour, the politics of the Gulf War, and the dismissal of the problem of racism in the debate over appropriation of voice and 'freedom of the imagination.'" (From Carol Morrell’s 1993 review.)

Written by Marlene Nourbese Philip and published by Mercury Press, in Stratford, Ontario.

We have one print copy of this 1992 book in our Waterloo location.

Articles

Sometimes Clocks Turn Back for Us to Move Forward: Reflections on Black and Indigenous Geographies

"In the 1950s two kinds of dispossession in Jamaica and British Columbia occurred through a transnational mining operation and remain in the shape of tailings ponds and a smelter -- co-constituting a 'networked isolation'. A quest to reveal the joint impact anchors this 'contra-histoire' in an attempt bridge the divide between Black Studies and Indigenous Studies. Moving counter-clockwise through time, I weave Black Caribbean and Indigenous literature and academic texts with an embodied sense of geography and belonging to undo what I call 'the afterlife of an introduction through white colonial disciplinarity'." (This is the abstract of the article.)

Written by Nadine Chambers and published in "Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies" (ISSN 2254-1179), by the University of Huelva, Spain.

This 2019 article is available online for free.

Black Life and Death across the U.S.-Canada Border: Border Violence, Black Fugitive Belonging, and a Turtle Island View of Black Liberation

"In the late winter of 2017, the lifeless body of Mavis Otuteye, a fifty-seven-year-old Ghanaian grandmother, was found in a drainage ditch near a farmer's field in Minnesota, less than a kilometer from the border town of Emerson, Manitoba. The official cause of her death was hypothermia, yet the reason for her death was far from natural. Otuteye's was just one of over ten thousand displaced Black migrants who had made the treacherous land crossing into Canada at "unauthorized" places in the past two years. These migrants have evaded formal crossings due to the Safe Third Country Agreement, a 2004 bilateral agreement between Canada and the United States dictating that, with a few exceptions, those seeking asylum through the official U.S.--Canada border will be immediately returned." (This is a quote from the introduction of the article.)

Written by Robyn Maynard, for the Journal of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, published by University of Minnesota Press.

This 2019 article is available online through our subscription to Gale’s Academic OneFile.

Beyond the colonial divide: African diasporic and Indigenous youth alliance building for HIV prevention

African diasporic and North American Indigenous communities have both been greatly impacted by the colonization of the Americas. Historic and contemporary relations between these communities have been fraught with complex commonalities, contradictions and conflicts. These communities have remained connected across time and space through their shared and distinct histories of resistance and oppression. Both communities have suffered the embodiment of systemic violence in the form of elevated rates of communicable and chronic diseases such as HIV. This paper examines the decolonizing potential of collaboration between these two communities in their response to HIV. It begins by unpacking the history of racialized subjugation faced by Indigenous and African, Caribbean and Black communities in the Americas, with a focus on Canada. This background contextualizes empirical findings of an arts-based intervention that explored notions of identity, resistance and solidarity building between young people in these groups. (This is the abstract of the article.)

Written by Ciann L. Wilson, Sarah Flicker and Jean-Paul Restoule, and published in the journal “Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society” (ISSN 1929-8692).

This 2015 article is available online for free.

Multimedia (video, audio, etc.)

Deeply rooted

"Filmmaker Cazhhmere is a seventh-generation black Canadian. Despite this deep history, she’s constantly asked to explain where she’s from — even though the answer is always ‘Canada.’ Cazhhmere is a proud Canadian. Her ancestors were among the first black settlers to come to Canada — her family has spent hundreds of years weaving itself into the fabric of our nation. Despite this deep history, Cazhhmere is constantly questioned about where she is originally from. In Deeply Rooted, Cazhhmere will change your perception of what a multi-generational Canadian family looks like. In a country that is widely known for being a ‘global melting pot,’ our nation can easily forget that not every person of colour is a newcomer to Canada." (From Curio.ca.)

Written and directed by Cazhhmere, and produced by John Nadalin.

This 2016 "CBC Doc" documentary is available online through Curio.ca.

Seeking salvation : a history of the black church in Canada

"The history of black people in Canada has sometimes been sketchy, caught up and trampled in the rush of French, British, Irish and Scottish stories written in the early years of exploration and settlement. The documentary Seeking Salvation: A History of the Black Church in Canada illuminates an essential part of the black experience in this country: its relationship with Christianity." (From Solange De Santis’ 2005 review.)

Directed by Phillip Daniels, written by Lawrence Hill, and produced by S. Wyeth Clarkson and Phillip Daniels, through Travesty Productions.

This 2004 film is on DVD in our Waterloo location.

Older Stronger Wiser

In this short documentary, five black women talk about their lives in rural and urban Canada between the 1920s and 1950s. What emerges is a unique history of Canada’s black people and the legacy of their community elders. Produced by the NFB’s iconic Studio D. (This is the description text from NFB.ca.)

Directed by Claire Prieto, written by Dionne Brand, produced and edited by Ginny Stikeman, and narrated by Marva Jackson.

Though we have a subscription to NFB.ca, this 1989 video is available online on the site for free.

Databases and Reference Works

Black Women in America

"The second edition of Black Women in America, edited by Darlene Clark Hine, provides expanded coverage of the achievements and contributions of African American women."

"Winner of the Dartmouth Medal for Outstanding Reference Publication of 1994, the first edition of Black Women in America broke new ground—pulling together for the first time all of the research in this vast but underrepresented field to provide one of the strongest building blocks of Black Women’s Studies. Hailed by Eric Foner of Columbia University as "one of those publishing events which changes the way we look at a field," it simultaneously filled a void in the literature and sparked new research and concepts regarding African American women in history. Since the first edition was published, a new generation of American black women has flourished, demanding this landmark reference be brought up to date. Women such as Venus and Serena Williams, Condoleezza Rice, Carol Moseley Braun, Ruth Simmons, and Ann Fudge have become household names for their remarkable contributions to sports, politics, academia, and business. In nearly 600 entries, Black Women in America celebrates the remarkable achievements of black women throughout history, highlights their ongoing contributions in America today, and represents the new research the first edition helped to generate." (These two paragraphs are the description text from the Oxford Reference site.

Edited by Darlene Clark Hine, and published by Oxford University Press.

This 2005, second edition reference work is available online through our subscription to various Oxford Reference titles.

Black Drama

"Black Drama contains approximately 1200 plays from the mid-1800s to the present by more than 200 playwrights from North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. Some 440 of the plays are published here for the first time, including a number by major authors. The plays themselves have been selected using leading bibliographies and with the editorial advice of James V. Hatch, co-author with Errol G. Hill of A History of African American Theatre and a leading expert in this area." (This text is from the description from the resource itself.)

This collection of plays is available online through our subscription through Alexander Street Press.

Handbook of Black Studies

"The increasing demand for information about the field of Black Studies, variously referred to as African American Studies, African Diaspora Studies, Africana Studies, and Africology, has made a source book, more advanced than the ordinary text book, imperative. Thus, the idea behind this volume is to present a work of scholarship that is more focused than scattered periodical pieces yet a work that is not too pedantic to be read and understood by advanced undergraduates in the field. In most cases, a handbook is a source for scholars and graduate students in a particular area of study, and although this remains the primary audience of the present volume, it is only one of our audiences. A field such as ours requires works that can be read and understood across disciplines because so many of our scholars are still working in disciplines other than Africology." (This is the first paragraph from the preface to the book.)

Edited by Molefi Kete Asante and Maulana Karenga, and published by SAGE Publications, Inc.

This 2006 reference work is available through our subscription to various Sage Knowledge reference works.