Campbell University of Guelph

Southern Journal of Canadian Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1-2 (December 2012), 46-65 “Other/ed” Kinds of Blackness: An Afrodiasporic Versioning of Black Canada Mark V. Campbell University of Guelph Dr. Mark V. Campbell, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Guelph [email protected] Abstract: For centuries Canada has been home to several overlapping diasporas parCally consisCng of African Americans refugees, exiled Maroons, Black Loyalists, and many others migrant groups from various African diasporas. Accordingly, the possibility of ‘a’ Black Canadian idenCty remains illusive, due in part to conCnual inﬂuxes of members of the African diaspora into Canada. The rigidity of a single unifying idenCty and the seemingly porous nature of naonal boundaries urges us to move towards a conceptual shiL that refuses to seek a unifying discursive idenCty posiCon. Importantly, black idenCty poliCcs in Canada have beneﬁted from the rise of ConCnental African voices in Canadian hip hop music. One of the goals of this paper is to expand the conceptual terrain of overlapping African diasporas illuminated by ConCnental African hip hoppers in Canada. Thus, both the lyrical innovaons and geopoliCcal orientaons of arCsts like Shad and K’Naan highlight the overlapping nature African diasporas in Canada, opening new ways to think more expansively about Black Canadian idenCty as Afrodiasporic idenCty. Importantly, the main contribuCon of this paper is to mobilize versioning as a conceptual tool that remixes our contemporary noCons of Black Canada to highlight some of the ways in which we might trouble (or update) blackness in Canada, parCcularly paying aenCon to the kinds of idenCty intervenCons made possible by newcomer East African populaons within Canada’s diaspora space. Order is, at one and the same Cme, that which is given in things as their inner law the hidden network that determine the way they confront one another, and also which has no existence except in the grid created by a glance, an examinaon, a language; and it is only in the blank spaces of this grid that order manifests itself in depth as though already there, waiCng in silence for the moment of its expression. (Foucault 1970: xxi) Canada exist; yet Black peoples living in Black Canada does not exist, at least Canada fail to satisfy the narrow criteria not in a singular homogenous form. of a ‘nation’. A shared language, culture Black Canadians exist and Blacks in or politic, or even a certain kind of 46 Southern Journal of Canadian Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1-2 (December 2012), 46-65 ideological stability, are some of the mines the potential of versioning, a criteria by which one defines a nation. soundsystem invention from Jamaica’s From Hayti in 1804 to post-9/11 Canada, early years of indigenous music. The ‘nation’ as an ideological tool has intention of this theoretical move is consistently failed to capture the varied deliberate; it is an attempt to find new experiences of African diasporic tools, begin from unsuspecting spaces to populations. This is to say that a challenge the ways in which European bounded and unified nation/territory systems of thought dominate our cannot account for the heterogeneity of imagination and our intellectual Black histories and contemporary explorations. experiences. Within this limited understanding of nation, Black Canada Furthering how Afrosonic exists most fervently as a mechanism of innovations might be useful, this article ‘order’, a rhetorical and ideological explores the theoretical relevance of two strategy utilized by various camps of relatively new hip hop artists in Canada, scholars, activists and politicians as K’naan and Shad K. These two artists needed. Black Canada acts as a marker were born in Somalia and Kenya (that can only be temporal) that attempts respectively and were either partially or to capture a heterogeneous blackness, for fully raised in Canada. Through their the purposes of conceptualizing, lyrics, videos and interviews K’naan and defending and mobilizing people of Shad’s subjective identifications through African descent in Canada. Significantly, their art encourages us to critically the work Black Canada does is to engage with the potential of ‘order’ the heterogeneities of blackness Afrodiasporic as a conceptual tool and in Canada into a useful package capable allows for our common understandings of navigating a world more comfortable of blackness in Canada to fully engage with sameness rather than difference. its polyphonic reverberations and Black Canada abides by the terms of echoes. Methodologically, this essay’s nation, which necessarily obscures the textual and discursive analysis of both very transnational, multi-local ways in lyrics and images in hip hop culture which Afrodiasporic people live in, gesture at the excesses of diasporic beyond and between nation as a concept blackness and the deterritorialized and nation as lived reality. desires of those for whom the rigidity of a fixed notion like Black Canada is In an attempt to expand the limiting and thus continually disrupted. conceptual terrain of the idea of Black Canada, the first half of this essay takes Importantly, this paper moves up ways in which we might imagine and through two significant theoretical articulate the heterogeneity of Black interventions. First, the term Canadian life. The tools used to begin Afrodiasporic is employed and utilized this conversation are from the sonic as a conceptual tool to capture the innovations located within the African fluidity of identities in the African diaspora; more specifically this essay Diaspora. Secondly, and equally as 47 Southern Journal of Canadian Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1-2 (December 2012), 46-65 important is the centrality of thinking By combining the prefix ‘Afro’ through Afrosonic life as theoretical with the adjective ‘diasporic’, this term tools to conceptualize our present attempts to push past the new margins discursive and geopolitical moment. and blind spots of Gilroy’s Black The final section of this essay offers a Atlantic (1993). One particular blind contemporary example of how hip-hop spot of Gilroy’s Black Atlantic that culture’s intertextual and hybrid comes to mind is Black Canada. While maneuvers suggests the plausibility of numerous scholars have highlighted the Black Canadas, a temporary version of complexities involved in diasporic Black Canada consisting of overlapping populations, the prefix Afro helps orient African diasporas (Lewis 1995). By our thinking into specific realms that turning to hip hop culture this final highlight the African inheritances that section is able to enter a Black public structure the lived realities of sphere were the slipperiness of flexible contemporary Afrodiasporic populations. ethnoscapes demonstrate the varied For example, we can argue that many velocities and versions by which we diasporic populations express ‘homing might imagine Black Canadas, and the desires’ or specific notions about the polyphonic nature of heterogeneity. nature of home (Zhang 2004). For Afrodiasporic populations such concerns are exacerbated by traumas such as slavery or confinement, both historical Afrodiasporic: A New StarCng and contemporary, and on both sides of Point the Atlantic (Sudbury 2004). Afro The term ‘Afrodiasporic’ is a useful figures deeply into how Black diasporic adjective that attempts to make sense of peoples conduct themselves vis-à-vis the conditions of African populations other diasporic populations. The prefix and their descendants dispersed Afro also heightens our awareness of worldwide. A number of scholars have deep inheritances of African oral taken up the term Afrodiasporic, but the traditions which better highlight some of conditions of its use and what it attempts the cultural expressions (i.e. dub poetry) to signal remain for the most part present in the ‘new world’ but ambiguous and under theorized. For significantly indebted to the old world. example, music and youth are sometimes Afrodiasporic also attempts to capture described as Afrodiasporic, with the experiences of Nigerians in China, emphasis placed on sounds or practices an area not covered in Black Atlantic (to the detriment of thinking about the theorizing. What if the kinds of cultural ideas and conditions that nurture such practices we find amongst Nigerians in Afrodiasporic musics or youth China are not solely ‘indebted’ to the practices). For cultural and diaspora Caribbean for diasporic tools, where theorists the term Afrodiasporic operates then does our Black Atlantic analysis as a mechanism to help them arrive at move? Maybe the trauma of the Black clear understandings of the materiality of Atlantic loses importance while the kind diaspora life. of aesthetic practices and strategies 48 Southern Journal of Canadian Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1-2 (December 2012), 46-65 expressed by Nigerians in China can thought, is an organizing tool that provide insight into Afrodiasporic life. constructs homogeneity out of social If we move past the trauma, exile or difference. Diasporas continually disrupt confinement and downplay the Black the idea of the nation, importing and Atlantic’s centrality, we may be able to strategically utilizing resources from better grasp patterns of aesthetic elsewhere to inform one’s present practices or strategies that can situation. Black Canada is an idea that substantially illuminate the cultural rests on an imaginary unity, taking its ingenuity and resilience of Afrodiasporic cues from the European conception of life. Afrodiasporic as a conceptual tool nation.

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