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IDEA BRIEF
Reimagining Peoples
Ruptures, Refusal and Relation: (Re/Dis)Orienting Canadian Studies
As an interdisciplinary field, Canadian Studies has sought to make sense of Canada’s histories, identities and social formations. It has, over the past several decades, been shaped by periodic reflection and redirection as scholars have considered the field’s stakes, grammars, and commitments. At the same time, Black, racialized, and Indigenous scholars have critiqued the field for its failure to adequately attend to the regimes of domination that produce Canadian national identity.
Black Studies scholars who have written about “Canada” have consistently argued that anti-Blackness is not exceptional, but constitutive of Canada as a modern nation-state (Cooper 2006; Maynard 2017; McKittrick 2006; Walcott 2003; Walcott & Abdillahi 2019). Rather than simply a historical fact, slavery concretized an anti-Black structural condition, the logics of which persist into our contemporary and present moment. The formal abolition of slavery marked a transition into new methods of domination that preserved Black subjugation and positioned Black life in Canada as precarious and disposable. These logics are foundational, not peripheral, to modern life and the production of white settler subjectivity in Canada. In this sense, anti-Blackness and Canada are inextricable.
Similarly, scholars in Indigenous studies have shown that settler colonialism is not a past historical event but an ongoing structure oriented toward the dispossession and elimination of Indigenous peoples (Coulthard 2014; Scribe 2017; Simpson 2017; Wolfe 2006). Indigenous peoples are positioned as obstacles to settler futurity, and so the state’s existence depends on their ongoing erasure and containment. In collaboration, Black and Indigenous scholars have suggested that anti-Blackness and settler colonialism are interlocked, mutually reinforcing formations that provide the foundation upon which Canada can exist as a nation-state, and as an object of study (King, 2019; Latty et. al, 2016; Tuck et. al, 2014;).
What, then, is Canadian Studies’ relation to these peoples and fields of thought?
Too often, the relation has been extractive and premised on tenuous relations of collaboration and solidarity – relations in which Black and Indigenous peoples are not setting the terms and as such have little to gain. Black and Indigenous knowledges are seen as resources to draw upon at best, and a source of agitation at worst. However, Black studies and Indigenous studies are not simply reservoirs of insight for the renewal of Canadian Studies. Our experiences must not be subsumed under the umbrella of multiculturalism or pluralism. Black and Indigenous studies are both more-than fields of thought with their own intellectual, political and institutional commitments, many of which cannot neatly align with Canadian Studies’ desires for coherence, synthesis or continuity.
Last year, I co-edited (with Dr. Janelle Joseph) a special issue of the Journal of Canadian Studies. The special issue emerged out of the Black Canadian Studies Association’s (BCSA) 2021 conference theme and was titled ‘Nah’, On the Possibilities of Ongoing Refusals in Black Canadian Studies’ (Joseph & Latty 2024). It explored how Black Canadian scholars, artists and activists refuse the status quo through resistance, creative practice, and world-making. The special issue highlighted how together, Black peoples create possibilities for otherwise ways of being in relation to one another that are not premised on the logics of anti-Blackness and settler colonialism. The special issue and the work of the BCSA signal that a different kind of (anti-)Canadian Studies is already underway – one premised on a different set of terms, and one that refuses the nation-state as the primary horizon of meaning.
The special issue gestured toward a different kind of relationality, which raises a broader provocation relevant to the field of Canadian Studies. Rather than seeking alignment or synthesis, what might a relationship premised on refusal and incommensurability look like?
Being in relation means not collapsing difference or aiming to forge a unified field. It requires accepting contingency, partiality and boundaries. More importantly, it means contending with what it might really look like to co-conspire with Black and Indigenous communities toward our ongoing refusals. It might mean rethinking what ‘renewal’ actually entails.
One way to think about the relation between Canadian studies and Black life in Canada is to think with the concept of rupture. In ‘A Map to the Door of No Return’, Dionne Brand (2001) does the careful work of thinking through anti-Blackness, Black diasporic life, and what it means to live in the wake of transatlantic slavery. She traces how the past continues to shape the present and how Black dispossession is lived and felt in intimate and everyday ways. The door Brand describes is both material and symbolic: the literal door through which enslaved Africans passed, marking their transformation from human beings into property and also as the enduring rupture produced by the transatlantic slave trade – a violent theft of body, history, sociality and relation.
The Door of No Return marks a rupture of belonging, a wound inflicted in a still-unfolding moment, and an interminable grief that continues to haunt both the Black diaspora and the white socio-political imaginary as well. “Black experience in any modern city or town”, Brand (2001) writes, “is a haunting. One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes. History is already seated in the chair in the empty room when one arrives.” (p. 25). Rupture here, names the sanctioned space between self and history, self and place, self and home. It is an unspeakable violence that remains deliberately illegible within dominant epistemes.
So, can Canadian Studies be capacious enough to hold this?
The thing about ruptures is that they are not only sites of loss. Brand (2001) writes, “This dreary door which I’ve been thinking about, though its effects are unremitting, does not claim the human being unremittingly (p. 42). While violent, ruptures also create shared conditions that might allow for the possibility of imagining worlds otherwise, in refusal of subjugation. Living with this rupture demands new relational modes and a fugitive remapping of social life. Thinking from rupture means staying with tension, and holding both the violence of the wound and, at the same time, setting out new terrains of livingness.
To think with rupture may not solve the problem of a Canadian Studies in crisis. It might, in fact, do the opposite, since staying with rupture requires a different relation to time, space, origin and historicity. Perhaps a different map and clock altogether. Taken seriously, such a relationship would require Canadian Studies to co-conspire with Black, Indigenous, racialized, queer, and disabled scholars and communities toward refusal and toward becoming undisciplined. It would mean disrupting the stability of Canada as a coherent object of study, and rethinking collaboration in ways that refuse extraction and exploitation. It would also require confronting the possibility that interrupting Canada as a white settler colonial state premised on dispossession might entail the necessary interruption of Canadian Studies, too.
Thinking with rupture is meant to be a transformative project, that might lead us to an (anti-) Canadian Studies that can reckon with the wound of anti-Blackness and its interlocking regimes. Starting from rupture means undoing and destabilizing seemingly coherent and ordinary ways of knowing, and calling into question that which was previously taken for granted as known and understood in Canadian Studies. Starting from rupture, perhaps Canadian studies can remake – or unmake – itself from a place of embracing incommensurability and incoherence, not as failures, but as necessary conditions of ethical relation between people.
Works Cited
Brand, D. (2001). A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. Vintage Canada: Toronto.
Cooper, A. (2006). The hanging of Angelique: The untold story of Canadian slavery and the burning of old Montréal. HarperCollins.
Coulthard, G. S. (2014). Red skin, white masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. University of Minnesota Press. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/torontomu/detail.action?docID=1793913
Joseph, J., & Latty, S. (2024). Nah! On the Possibilities of Ongoing Refusals in Black Canadian Studies. Journal of Canadian Studies, 58(3), 447–455. https://doi.org/10.3138/jcs-2024-1204
King, T.L. (2019). The Black Shoals: Offshore formations of Black and Native studies. Duke University Press.
Latty, S., Scribe, M., Peters, A., and Morgan, A. (2016). Not Enough Human: At the Scenes of Indigenous and Black Dispossession. Critical Ethnic Studies, 2(2), 129–158. https://doi.org/10.5749/jcritethnstud.2.2.0129
Maynard, R. (2017). Policing Black lives: State violence in Canada from slavery to the present. Fernwood.
McKittrick, K. (2006). Demonic grounds: Black women and cartographies of struggle. University of Minnesota Press.
Scribe, M. (2017). Pedagogy of Indifference: State Responses to Violence Against Indigenous Girls. Canadian Woman Studies, 32(1–2), 47–57.
Simpson, L. B. (2017). As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. University of Minnesota Press.
Tuck, E., Guess, A., and Sultan, H. (2014). Not nowhere: Collaborating on selfsame land. Decolonization: indigeneity, education and society, 26(June), 1-11.
Walcott, R. (1997). Black like who?: Writing Black Canada. Insomniac Press.
Walcott, R., and Abdillahi, I. (2019). BlackLife: Post-BLM and the struggle for freedom. ARP Books.
Wolfe, Patrick. (1999). Settler colonialism and the transformation of anthropology: The politics and poetics of an ethnographic event. Cassell.
