A Poetics of the Contemporary Black Canadian City: Charting the History of Black Urban Space in Fiction and Poetry by Black Canadian Writers

This study analyses literary depictions of the Canadian city in representative contemporary (twentieth- and twenty-first-century) English-Canadian short fiction and poetry by black Canadian writers Austin Clarke, Wayde Compton and Dionne Brand. Although their generic and aesthetic approaches as well as the specific historical contexts out of which they emerge vary considerably, the works in this study each exhibit what douard Glissant, in his eponymously titled book, calls a poetics of relation between the past and the present (42). Their work challenges our understanding of the contemporary city by drawing attention to and dismantling enduring hegemonic and homogeneous representations of the Canadian metropolis and by rearticulating the city through a black gaze and sensibility. Clarke's, Compton's and Brand's representations of black city spaces, places and peoples probe the entrenched historical and ideological systems and legacies that continue to influence black urban geographies and the ways they are portrayed in and by various media, institutions and the collective imagination. Their politically charged and socially relevant literary inquiries lead to complex, layered, hopeful and often contradictory, ambivalent and vexing visions of the contemporary Canadian city. Each depiction of the city confronts and complicates the ongoing material and theoretical erasure of black urban spaces and places in the nation and the national literary corpus that helps define it. Importantly, these idiosyncratic fictional and poetic portraits both invoke and dispel dominant notions of black city dwellers, black spaces and black places as socially and culturally monolithic harbingers of violence, disorder, disease and death and thus ask us to re-evaluate our own assumptions about contemporary Canadian metropolitan life. The present analysis approaches the topic of the contemporary black Canadian city in literature through a compelling theoretical perspective that argues for a direct, ongoing and contiguous relationship between the colonial plantation and the contemporary metropolis. Specifically, this project examines literary representations of the contemporary city under the rubric of plantation futuresa spatial-temporal conceptual device that reads contemporary black urban spaces through and against the history of the colonial plantation and the distorted logics that arose from the perverse culture of plantation slavery (McKittrick, Plantation Futures 2).