Black in the city: on the ruse of ethnicity and language in an antiblack landscape

ABSTRACT

Montreal, a city delimited by a French-speaking East and an English-speaking West, is often used as an example of how language can organize urban landscapes. That said, examining Black life in Montreal complicates that tidy narrative by illustrating how race, not language, configures the city. Broadly, this study examines the way racial and linguistic divisions play out in the geography of the city. More specifically, as it is grounded in Black geography and cultural geography, this paper highlights how Black activists in the 1990s made explicit the many ways in which Blackness in Montreal was rooted in a history and a geography that exceeds urban and national boundaries. Contesting an ethnicization that marked their Haitianness as outside Blackness, these activists also bridged smaller-scale divisions: those inscribed at the scale of the city that placed Haitians in the East and Black anglophone people in the West.

KEYWORDS:

• Antiblackness
• Black geographies
• Blackness
• cultural geography
• ethnicity
• language

Acknowledgments

My deepest gratitude to Nathalie Batraville, Darryl Leroux and Ted Rutland for their insightful questions and comments on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Blackness can mean different things to different people; it can be grounded in culture or history or politics – or some mixture of all of these. The participants to this research expressed slightly different versions of Black identity (even as this identity was thought to embrace Black people around the world in all of their diversity).

2. What is often omitted in these narratives are the efforts to ensure that Creole is integrated into all public and private institutions in Haiti. After living and organizing in Montreal for two decades, an important part of Adeline Magloire Chancy’s work once she returned to Haiti has been the valorization of Creole. In 2014, she became one of the founders of the Akademi Kreyol Ayisyen, the country’s language regulator for Haitian creole (Le Nouvelliste December 4 2014).

3. Montreal has among the oldest chapters of the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Leo W. Bertley’s (1980) doctoral dissertation on the history of the Montreal chapter of the UNIA from 1917 to 1979 offers an in-depth look at the radical politics of the Black anglophone community in the city. Undoubtedly, for white Quebecers, the UNIA’s presence and work in Montreal has been an illustration that Black anglophone people embrace a competing nation-building project.

4. For different hypothesis on what may have happened to the descendants of Black people who were enslaved in Quebec, see Black sociologist Daniel Gay’s (2004) important study on the history of Black people in Quebec from 1629 to 1900.

5. The Quiet Revolution (‘La Révolution tranquille’) refers to the period that span from the 1950s to the early 1970s in Quebec. Those years were marked by sweeping government reforms, including the secularization of Quebec society and the creation of a welfare state. The economic boom and the realignment of political ideas from therein emboldened the French Quebecois push for independence from Canada.

6. This is actually false, since Ariel Deluy is Haitian-born and two other former AKAX leaders I spoke to in 2016 are also of Haitian descent. LAM’s misstatement – intentional or not – stems from an assumption that AKAX members must all be anglophone since a majority were students at Concordia University or McGill University. In actuality, for reasons that are beyond the scope of this article, enrolment of (Black) francophone students in those two institutions increased significantly in the 1980s and 1990s (Montreal Gazette March 4 2016).

7. ‘Jamaican’ seems to have become a generic category in the literature that encompasses Black anglophone youth from various parts of the Caribbean. My sense is that it serves as a trope that signifies criminality and violence, and thus, an uncontrollable Blackness (Davis 2017).

8. The 1996 national census reported that only a third of Black people in Montreal were bilingual at the time, compared to 50% of the city’s general population. That was a reality unique to Montreal and Quebec as a whole. Just 0.7% of Black people in the rest of Canada spoke only French (MCESSP 2001, 27).

9. I understand nationalism in Quebec in its broadest terms, and not simply in relation to political independence. Quebec nationalism is founded in the belief that as a member of the family of liberal western societies, Quebec embraces ‘values’ such as diversity, democracy, secularism, and so on.