Black Grammars: On Difference and Belonging

Black Grammars: On Difference and Belonging examines Blackness and difference from my perspective having come to Canada as part of the wave of Ethiopians and Eritreans that migrated to the West in large numbers in the 1980s and 1990s. In this dissertation, I make sense of growing up and living Black in Canada alongside and among other Black communities who have already settled and have been living in Canada for generations. This moment in the 80s and 90s and the emerging diaspora from the Horn of Africa coming to the West encountering Black communities already living here from previous waves of Black migration grounds the dissertation.

Black Grammars opens by analyzing Black and East African student groups in university as one site of this encounter of Black diasporas but also as a point of departure from which to examine how Black difference is thought and engaged in academic study. I draw on my own experiences growing up and attending school and university in Toronto. This project begins by analyzing Black and East African student groups in universities in Canada, and examines the space between these two identities and identifications that our presence opens up for theorization and analysis. I demonstrate how the limits of the conceptual terrain and the constraints represented by and between those two student groups come to be reproduced across Black Studies literature and normative research done on East African diasporas. This conceptual space forms the terrain and point of departure for this study.

As part of the method of this dissertation, I lay out a set of Scenes that lay out how Blackness and Black difference gets taken up in social and communal settings among Black people and how that same Black(ness) difference gets taken up in academic study. I cite incongruities, shortcomings and gaps that are left wanting. I conclude that Blackness and Black difference is taken up in much more engaging and complex ways amongst Black people in the everyday than academic study has heretofore been able to account for. Put differently, the ways Black Studies and African Diaspora Studies come to be constituted form the terrain on which the need and space for a concept like Black Grammars emerges. Attentive to this conceptual terrain and prevailing constraints, I posit Black Grammars as a theory of relationality that attempts to bring Black diasporas into sociality and conversation with each other.

The central question Black Grammars engages: how might we think Black difference otherwise? How do we account for and attend to the multiplicities of Blackness made ever more complex by the various trajectories that make up the fullness of the Black diaspora? Black Grammars is an analytic that attends to these gaps and inconsistencies and also centers ways Black people relate to each other in everyday contexts that is rooted in Black Diasporic Sociality. As a heuristic device, Black Grammars centers Blackness and Black difference and posits a theory of Black relationality that is anchored in the ways Black people play, politic and perform difference amidst and amongst themselves.