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© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 30, no. 2, 2000 Rude Necessity David Chariandy Rinaldo Walcott, ed. Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism. Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2000. Pp. 219. Rinaldo Walcott has already been rude. His 1997 Black Like Who?: Writing Black Canada, the first book-length work devoted to the critical analysis of Black Canadian culture, elbowed its way into the Canadian cultural debate in a truly unexpected manner. If most mainstream discussions of Black culture were previously forced to adopt the format, analytic depth, and readability of a newspaper human interest story, and if most academic discussions of Blackness were geared towards the recuperation of Black history or the formation of anti-racist policy, then Black Like Who? was indeed troubling. Walcott was deeply theoretical in his book. He sought to understand Black culture in Canada not through officially sanctioned Canadian frameworks but against the “circuitous routes of Black diasporic cultures ” (17); yet, on the other hand, he criticized the writings of certain fairly well regarded Caribbean Canadian authors for being too often “shrouded in the nostalgic longing for a past” (39). In general, Walcott challenged those who claimed to possess true or authoritative notions of Blackness by describing Blackness as a “sign” that is loaded with “particular histories and resistance and domination,” but is also “never closed and always under contestation” (xiv). In doing so, this young, dreadlocked professor, acting in an informed and thoroughly refreshing manner, kicked up dirt. Walcott’s latest book, Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism, is a collection of essays by various scholars who have their own provocative things to say about Black Canadian culture. The title of the collection refers to two of Walcott’s latest concerns. Rude is named after Clement Virgo’s 1995 film, which also “opened up the space for thinking about Canada as a racialized space, and more specifically, a Black Space” (7). Virgo’s Rude is seen to mark the new flourishing of Black Canadian literature, theatre, music, and visual arts, as well as critical commentary; for Walcott, this leads in turn to the second premise or intent of the collection: “Rude … intends to undermine or at least trouble notions of the nation—that is, the Canadian nation-state—when it encounters a self-assured Blackness” (7). Walcott pursues this line of thought by rhetorically asking the Canadian Review of American Studies 30 (2000) 238 following: “when will those who shape the dominant cultural taste of the Canadian imaginary deal seriously with the apparent outpouring of contemporary Black Canadian expressive culture?” (10). Needless to say, many of Rude’s contributors themselves “deal seriously” with Black Canadian expressive culture, and their work is proof that informed discussions of Black culture in Canada continue to occur. Together, their work demonstrates vividly Walcott’s argument that the “not-quite citizen ” status of Blackness in Canada—produced either by the nation’s open disavowal of Black presence or through the nation’s selective recruiting of Black presence to bolster its own self-image—means that “it is necessary to be insubordinate to the nation” (8). Rude begins with an essay by Richard Almonte that exposes Canada’s rapport with Blackness in some rather unexpected texts. Almonte’s essay, entitled “Treason in the Fort: Blackness and Canadian Literature,” arises from the author’s experience as a researcher in early Canadian literature, particularly nineteenth-century Black Canadian literature. Almonte demonstrates that there is “a long-standing fascination with Blackness within early Canadian literature” (14), an assertion he supports by analysing frequently canonized texts such as Wacousta, The Clockmaker, Roughing It in the Bush, and Les anciens Canadiens, as well as the much more recent The Loved and the Lost. Almonte alerts us to the comparable observations of Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark, which exposes “the discernible function of Blackness in white American literature” (14). Thus, Almonte confirms that, in these “early” and even officially instituted written forms of the Canadian imaginary, Blackness is conspicuous; like Morrison, he points this out not to soothe us with examples of cosy multiculturalism but to raise the disturbing possibility that the nation’s dialogue with “Blackness” is historically deep...

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