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Reviewed by:
  • Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal by David Austin
  • Jean-Philippe Warren
Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal. David Austin. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2013. Pp. 256, $34.95

The sixties in Montreal can no longer be summed up by telling the romanticized story of the peaceful rise of the francophone neo-nationalist movement. In those tumultuous days, other groups were also mobilizing and protesting. The black community was particularly active on the Montreal scene, integrating the ideological influences of black Canadians, West Indians and Antilleans, African Americans, and continental Africans. Two events confirm the place of Montreal as an important intellectual and activist scene for blacks: The Congress of Black Writers, held at McGill in October 1968, and the Sir George Williams Affair, which culminated in the destruction of the school’s computer centre on 11 February 1969. These remarkable events shattered for good the myth of a supposedly egalitarian and just Canadian society.

Focusing scholars’ attention on these episodes, David Austin wants to open a “reflection on the politics of race as a central part of the prevailing social, economic, and political hierarchy that shapes our daily lives” (5). The topic is fascinating, the intention laudable. Yet there seems to be a growing propensity in English-Canadian historical circles to write on Quebec without consulting French-language scholarship. Following in this vein, Austin’s Fear of a Black Nation does not engage with French-speaking scholars and almost entirely neglects French-language sources. When it comes to work published by Quebec intellectuals in French, Austin cites Marcel Chaput (Pourquoi je suis séparatiste), Léandre Bergeron (Petit manuel d’histoire du Québec), and Pierre Vallières (Nègres blancs d’Amérique) – three books all available in English translation. The only other reference to Vallières is a paper that appeared in the English-language journal Monthly Review. In all, I counted fewer than twenty references to scholarly works or documents in French out of a total of over 300 bibliographic references.

The result is not innocuous. For one thing, it means Austin demonstrates only a partial understanding of the Quebec context. What are we to think of an author who believes that André (sic) Ferretti, the passionate female leader of the Rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale is … a man? What are we to make of a monograph that focuses on the Sir George Williams riot without saying a word about the occupation of the École des Beaux-Arts in October 1968, or the occupation, a month later, of the McGill computer centre by francophone activists fighting the racist and anti-French policies of McGill University? [End Page 306]

Certainly, the general absence of French historical sources weakens the book’s arguments. The hypothesis that blacks in the sixties remained “visible but not acknowledged and not recognized by either the dominant English minority or the French majority in Montreal” (40) is harder to maintain if you consult the relevant French sources. For example, Austin does not mention the appearance of Stokely Carmichael at the Centre social de l’Université de Montréal on 23 February 1968, a visit covered by the French student paper Le Quartier latin. On this occasion, the flamboyant president of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who was introduced as a “well-known figure on the Montreal campus,” apologized for not being able to deliver his speech in French.

In fact, contrary to what Austin suggests, there were many connections between neo-nationalists and black activists in the sixties. One reason for these close ties was the common usage of the epithet “nègre” to designate all those who were oppressed. Pierre Vallières said it best in his book Nègres blancs d’Amérique (1968); according to Vallières, French Canadians and American blacks were identical in every respect except for their place of origin and the colour of their skin. Such an association was common at the time – one thinks of Jerry Faber’s essay, “The Student as Nigger,” first published in 1967 – because “nigger” had become the metric with which to measure the wretched of...

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