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Notes
1 Cited in Adichie, “African Authenticity and the Biafran Experience,” 1.
2 Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, 11.
3 Some of the subtitles in this essay are borrowed from titles of or ideas in books and essays written by other scholars. For example, ‘The Politics of Location’ traces back to Rich’s ‘Notes Toward a Politics of Location’. In addition, ‘Neither Settler nor Native’ references Mamdani’s Neither Settler nor Native, while ‘The Climate of Anti-Blackness’ is a reference to an idea from Sharpe’s In the Wake.
4 Rothberg refers to a famous line by the Turkish-German writer, Zafer Senocak. See Rothberg, “Multidirectional Memory in Migratory Settings.”
5 Eastwood, British Columbia: An Untold History.
6 Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie, 1.
7 Unlike white privilege, Black privilege has more to do with class than race. See Claytor, Black Privilege.
8 Gordon, Imperialist Canada.
9 Twine and Bradley, Geographies of Privilege.
10 Cole, “The White-Saviour Industrial Complex.”
11 Ibid.
12 Black Tax, a term that originates from South Africa, is the obligatory money that middle-class Blacks provide to their (often lower-class) family members as a form of upkeep on a regular basis. The significance of Black Tax lies in the fact that many middle-class whites do not always have that burden of lifting up their families from historical impoverishment. Hence, when middle-class whites and Blacks earn the same amount of money, the middle-class white is more likely to be more financially stable and secure than the middle-class Black who has an extended family to feed.
13 Kang, The Loneliest Americans.
14 See Connell, Grearson, Grimes, “An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee,” 7-32.
15 Williams, Disorientation: Being Black in the World.
16 Bhakti, “A Demanding Relationship with History: A Conversation with Priyamvada Gopal.”
17 Ibid.
18 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators.
19 While this phrase is borrowed from Mahmood Mamdani, it is important to clarify that it is understood differently in this paper. In Neither Settler nor Native Mamdani unpacks the colonial roots of the production of minority and majority identities in postcolonial nation-states. He argues that, in addressing the problem of violence in the postcolony, these identities must be rethought and – if possible – unmade. While I am thinking in a different context and direction, Mamdani’s catchphrase, ‘neither settler nor native’, helps me to better articulate what it means to exist outside the native-settler binary in the settler colonial context of Canada.
20 Lawrence and Dua, “Decolonizing Anti-racism,” 120-143.
21 Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” 1-40.
22 Snelgrove, Dhamoon, and Corntassel, “Unsettling Settler Colonialism: The Discourse and Politics of Settlers, and Solidarity with Indigenous Nations,” 6.
23 Frazier, Darden and Henry explain that ‘differential incorporation is a concept in which the White majority differentially incorporates some non-white, non-European groups into the mainstream society to a greater extent than other groups.’ See Frazier, Darden and Henry, The New African Diaspora in the United States and Canada at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century, 5.
24 See Mamdani, “When Does a Settler Become a Native? Reflections of the Colonial Roots of Citizenship in Equatorial and South Africa.”
25 Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, p. 3.
26 See Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present.
27 See Veracini, Settler Colonialism, 18.
28 Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present, 5.
29 Settler Colonialism, 2.
30 Veracini, Settler Colonialism, 14.
31 Snelgrove, Dhamoon and Corntassel, “Unsettling Settler Colonialism,” 14.
32 Ibid.
33 In ‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor’, Tuck and Yang discuss how the settler tries to reconcile his guilt and protect his ‘settler futurity’ by evading or claiming innocence about the Indigenous displacement. They note that some of the settler’s move to innocence include his claim to nativism, colonial equivocation, fantasy of adoption and others.
34 Phung, “Are People of Colour Settlers too?” 289-298.
35 Veracini, Settler Colonialism, 20.
36 Ibid., 3.
37 Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” 18.
38 Bryd, The Transit of Empire, xix.
39 Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native.
40 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, 3.
41 Ibid., 1.
42 rosalind hampton, Black Radicalisation, 153.
43 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, 1.
44 Selasi, “Bye-Bye, Babar.”
45 Casimir, “Data Show Nigerians are the Most Educated in the US.”
46 hampton, Black Radicalisation, 73.
47 Mikdashi, “What is Settler Colonialism?,” 23-34.
48 In 2019, Chigumadzi, an America-based South African-Zimbabwean writer released a viral essay titled “Why I am No Longer Talking to Nigerians About Race.” The essay recounts Chigumadzi’s bewilderment by the lack of insight into structural racism among the Nigerians. The fact that this essay was written by a South African-Zimbabwean woman suggests, of course, that not all Africans are oblivious of how systemic racism works. Because of their history of settler colonialism as opposed to indirect rule, many people in Southern Africa have lived experiences of racial violence and are therefore able to understand African Americans as well as other Black people in the diaspora when they complain about systemic racism.
49 Atta, The Bad Immigrant.
50 Ibid., 103.
51 Ibid., 104.
52 Ibid., 316.
53 Gates in “Ending the Slavery Blame-Game” writes that ‘the sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the new world would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred’.
54 Ibekwe has argued that Africa’s petite bourgeoisie which includes lawyers, doctors, teachers, journalists, and businessmen among others was created by the colonial system. Therefore, for these men (they were mostly men), colonialism was a blessing. He notes that these men would later mobilise mass support behind their class campaign for power and right to self-governance and that ‘their commitment to mass or populist nationalism was fundamentally tenuous and opportunistic’. Ibekwe also writes that ‘after World War II, Africa’s petite bourgeoisie used militant support to hully their way into collaboration with the colonisers. Then, like the rising petite bourgeoisie in other places and at other times, as soon as they achieved what power they sought, they quickly abandoned the masses to disillusion. Their commitment to elite sacrifice would become a commitment to elite privilege. The thirst to inherit the privileges of the white conquerors would put severe distortions upon their nationalism. They wanted the jobs, education, entrepreneurial opportunities and civil liberties which, as an integral part of the colonial society, only the empire could supply. Whatever initial desires they might have had to throw out the whole imperial order were soon trimmed. They found it in their class interest not to abolish the thrall of imperialism but to reform it…the post-Casely hayford crop of petit bourgeoisie elite saw in liberal capitalism their opportunity to economically buttress their elite pretensions. Even though it created the colonialism they claimed they were fighting, they regarded the entrenchment of liberal capitalist democracy in Africa as an end far more important than the liberation of Africa from imperialist connections’. See Ibekwe, The West and the Rest of Us, 40 and 75.
55 The idea in this particular sentence comes from Hong’s Minority Feelings.
56 Sharpe offers a literal and metaphorical reading of the weather in America and the world at large. She argues that ‘the weather is the totality of our environment’, that ‘the weather is the total climate’, and that ‘the climate is anti-black’. She also shows how the weather produces a pervasive climate of anti-Blackness and conditions black death. I draw inspiration from Sharpe to argue that Canada has an anti-black climate. The interesting fact, as I show in the paper, is that, at different points in history, Black people have been denied the right to immigrate to Canada because they cannot ‘adapt to our climatic condition’. See Sharpe, In the Wake, 104.
57 Engler, The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy.
58 See Schalk, “How Canadian aid is stifling development and prosperity in West Africa”; Engler, Canada in Africa: 300 Years of Aid and Exploitation; and Van Maren, “Rebuking Canada’s African Colonialism.”
59 Engler, Canada in Africa.
60 Ibid., 135.
61 Engler, Canada in Africa, 12.
62 Engler, The Black Book.
64 Thobani, Exalted Subjects, 25.
65 hampton, Black Radicalisation, 152.
69 Snooks, “Canada’s Immigration Policy Toward Black People”, 901-912.
70 Christian in a Borderline Podcast series details the ways in which the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) is biased against applicants from Africa as well as how some African countries are often referred to as the ‘dirty 30’ among IRCC staff members (https://soundcloud.com/borderlinespodcast/67-is-ircc-systemically-biased-against-people-from-africa-with-gideon-christian). In addition, in 2021, Nigerian professors in Canada wrote an open letter to Canada’s immigration minister, Sean Fraser, urging him to investigate the decline in permit applications approval for Nigerian students (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-canada-urged-to-investigate-decline-in-nigerian-study-permit-approvals/). This same issue has been noticed in applications by Francophone African students who apply to the French speaking parts of Canada (https://www.canadim.com/news/canada-is-refusing-more-and-more-students-from-african-countries.
71 Creese, The New African Diaspora in Vancouver.
72 Williams, Disorientation, 121.
73 Eastwood, British Columbia: An Untold History.
74 Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” 30.
75 Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 8.
76 For the purpose of this essay, I draw a distinction between victimhood and victimisation. While victimhood can be a part of someone’s identity, victimisation is more of something one is subjected to. The two categories, although overlapping in meaning, do not always bear the same legal, historical, and psychological implications.
77 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, 28.
78 Flatley, Affective Mapping, 14.
79 There are many theoretical and disciplinary takes on the meaning of political subjectivity but my understanding of it is most inspired by Hakli and Kallio, who define it as ‘the constitution of the subject in relation to power and domination’. See Hakli and Kallio, “On Becoming Political: The Political in Subjectivity,” 56.
80 Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie, 1.
81 Rothberg, The Implicated Subject, 19.
82 Lawrence and Dua, “Decolonizing Anti-racism,” 123.
83 Smith, “The Colonialism That is Settled and the Colonialism That Never Happened,” 1-7.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Sakiru Adebayo
Dr Sakiru Adebayo is an Assistant Professor of African Literature in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, University of British Columbia, Okanagan. He is the author of Continuous Pasts: Frictions of Memory in Postcolonial Africa (University of Michigan Press, 2023). Email: [email protected]