Nuances of Blackness in the Canadian Academy : Teaching, Learning, and Researching While Black

The essays in __Nuances of Blackness in the Canadian Academy__ make visible the submerged stories of Black life in academia. They offer fresh historical, social, and cultural insights into what it means to teach, learn, research, and work while Black. In daring to shift from margin to centre, the book’s contributors confront two overlapping themes. First, they resist a singular construction of Blackness that masks the nuances and multiplicity of what it means to be and experience the academy as Black people. Second, they challenge the stubborn durability of anti-Black tropes, the dehumanization of Blackness, persistent deficit ideologies, and the tyranny of low expectations that permeate the dominant idea of Blackness in the white colonial imagination. Operating at the intersections of discourse and experience, contributors reflect on how Blackness shapes academic pathways, ignites complicated and often difficult conversations, and reimagines Black pasts, presents, and futures. This unique collection contributes to the articulation of more nuanced understandings of the ways in which Blackness is made, unmade, and remade in the academy and the implications for interrelated dynamics across and within post-secondary education, Black communities in Canada, and global Black diasporas. Cover 1 Half Title Page 2 Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Contents 6 List of Figures and Tables 10 Preface: The Nuances of Blackness – A Genesis and Outline 12 Acknowledgments 22 Introduction: A Meditation on the Nuances of Blackness in the Canadian Academy 26 Part One: Blackness: What’s in a Name? 38 Commentary on Part One: Why the Study of Blackness Is Critical at This Historical Juncture 40 1 The Awkward Presence of Blackness in the Canadian Academy 46 2 Exposed! The Ivory Tower’s Code Noir 68 3 The Precariat African-Canadian Academic: Problematic Historical Constructions, Perpetual Struggles for Recognition 86 4 What Have Deleuze and Guattari Got to Do with Blackness? A Rhizomatic Analysis of Blackness 100 5 Dancing with the Invisibility/Inaudibility: Nuances of Blackness in a Francophone Context 111 Part Two: Blackness and Academic Pathways 132 Commentary on Part Two: Blackness in the Canadian Academy: Challenges, Contestations, and Contradictions 134 6 Hidden Figures: Black Scholars in the Early Canadian Academy 146 7 Committed to Employment Equity? Impediments to Obtaining University Appointments 176 8 Black Gay Scholar and the Provocation of Promotion 191 9 “Certain Uncertainty”: Phenomenology of an African Canadian Professor 204 10 Socio-Cultural Obligations and the Academic Career: The Dual Expectations Facing Black Canadian Academics 227 Part Three: Blackness: A Complicated Canadian Conversation 246 Commentary on Part Three: “Killing Us Softly” – with Questions 248 11 Fitting [Out-Fitting] In 254 12 The Caged Bird Still Sings in Harmony: The Academy, Spoken Word Poetry, and the Making of Community 267 13 States of Being: The Poet & Scholar as a Black, African, & DiasporicWoman 278 14 Intersectionality in Blackface: When Post-racial Nationalism MeetsBlack Feminism 295 15 Re-spatializing the Boundaries of Belonging: The SubversiveBlackness of Muslim Women 314 Part Four: Black Pasts, Black Futurity 332 Commentary on Part Four: Surviving Anti-Blackness: Vulnerability, Speaking Back, and Building Black Futurity 334 16 (Re)situating Black Studies at York University: Unsilencing the Past, Locating the Present, Routing Futures 342 17 Community Service Learning and Anti-Blackness: The Cost of Playing with Fire on the Black Female Body 368 18 Blackness and the Limits of Institutional Goodwill 395 19 Leadership in Neoliberal Times: A Road to Nowhere 409 20 Vocation of the Black Scholar in the Neoliberal Academy: A Love Story 424 21 The Changing Same: Black Lives Matter, the Work of History, and the Historian’s Craft 440 22 Charting Black Presence and Futures in the Canadian Academy 454 Contributors 484 "The essays in Nuances of Blackness in the Canadian Academy make visible the submerged stories of Black life in academia. They offer fresh historical, social, and cultural insights into what it means to teach, learn, research, and work while Black. In daring to shift from margin to centre, the book's contributors confront two overlapping themes. First, they resist a singular construction of Blackness that masks the nuances and multiplicity of what it means to be and experience the academy as a Black body. Second, they challenge the stubborn durability of anti-Black tropes, the dehumanization of Blackness, persistent deficit ideology, and the tyranny of low expectations that permeate the dominant idea of Blackness in the White colonial imagination. Operating at the intersections of discourse and experience, contributors reflect on how Blackness shapes academic pathways, ignites complicated and often difficult conversations, and re-imagines Black pasts, presents, and futures. This unique collection contributes to the articulation of more nuanced understandings of the ways in which Blackness is made, unmade, and remade in the academy and the implications for interrelated dynamics across and within post-secondary education, Black communities in Canada, and global Black diasporas."-- Provided by publisher