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© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 30, no. 2, 2000 Introduction Richard Almonte, David Chariandy, and Jennifer Harris In June 1999, at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences held at Bishop’s University in Quebec, we attended the first-ever conference devoted exclusively to African American Rhetoric.1 As members of a relatively small Canadian contingent, we were aware not only of our numerical under-representation but of the irony that the first conference of this kind was being held in Canada . This was not the first time that Canada has served as a place for the meeting and discussion of African American culture and concerns. Indeed, as Rinaldo Walcott has demonstrated, in 1905 the Niagara Movement, forerunner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), convened on the Canadian side of the Niagara River, apparently because it was unable to find suitable facilities in the US. Significantly, Black Canadians and their organizations were not invited to participate. This exclusion is particularly noteworthy given that so many of Canada’s Black organizations were in fact founded by African Americans who had relocated north of the forty-ninth parallel, as well as by their descendants (Walcott 18). In both Fort Erie in 1905 and Quebec in 1999, the crossing of a border inaugurated a debate. The conference at Bishop’s happened appropriately at a time when there is an increased interest in the possibilities and challenges of rethinking borders and their meanings. These interests are linked to the current political and economic climate, which is characterized by increased transnational migration, heightened cultural interaction, and the emergence of an electronic culture that subverts existing borders. The result of these phenomena is the emergence of new and challenging ways of conceiving of identity (no longer simply national, cultural, racial, sexual) and the emergence of new approaches to academic disciplines and paradigms of knowledge. The aim of this special issue of the Canadian Review of American Studies is to explore the unique perspective that African American and Black Canadian border crossing can bring to these topics. In choosing the pieces for this issue, we were guided by the work of scholars such as Carole Boyce Davies and Paul Gilroy. As two of the leading scholars of the Black diaspora, they both argue that a new way is necessary for reading cultural Canadian Review of American Studies 30 (2000) 124 influence and political commitment, one that is not contained by national boundaries. For Carole Boyce Davies, the practice of border crossing creates solidarity among women of African descent and thus assists in overcoming various impediments (national, cultural, social) that keep Black women atomized and isolated. For Gilroy, notions of ethnic and national purity can no longer be the theoretical basis for exploring Black culture. While these two scholars offer compelling paradigms for thinking about the exchanges across borders and nations, neither refers to the space of Canada. This is particularly notable in Gilroy, who describes Martin Delany as the American father of Black Nationalism, yet does not address the reality that significant portions of Delany’s work were produced during his stay in Canada. In Canada itself, recent scholarship addresses the implications of Canada ’s place in this new discussion of borders and border crossing. The work of Rinaldo Walcott is explicitly concerned with the limits of nation and how cross-border exchanges challenge the way we think about Black communities as discrete national entities. In contrast, George Elliott Clarke accepts the fact of the border as a fixed entity and posits that a cross-border flow of cultural influence results in a type of particularity for Black Canadians (56–71). Furthermore, the recent explosion of Black literature in Canada demonstrates the fluidity of borders and their creative potential. In much of their awardwinning work, authors and poets Dionne Brand, Claire Harris, Lawrence Hill, and Marlene Nourbese Philip explore the problematics of identity and location for the transnational subject. This list is in no way exhaustive. Nor are the tensions in the different ways of negotiating or understanding the border that various authors and critics undertake necessarily reconcilable. While this issue will attempt to provide...

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