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398 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 different topics reflecting annual feminist caucus panels from 1990 to 1993. There are a number of places where editing could have been stronger; these include proofreading glitches, the achronological order of the second section of the book, and an insufficiently clear editorial framework for the structural, contextual, and topical separation between the two halves of the book. As it stands, the second half has no unifying theme and seems somehow random and oddly appended to the first half. While I am aware of the limited budget and volunteer time underpinning such an endeavour, I wonder if future volumes might be stronger if they were coedited. There are some imaginative pieces on women poets= relationship to memory from the >Reinventing Memory= panel in the second half, particularly those of Anne Szumigalski, Sarah Klassen, and Neile Graham. What is striking but perhaps not surprising in each of these is the shared sense of memory as ancestral, a preservation of relationship in the present to mothers and foremothers, both familial and collective. This book is in the end about memory, a memory of a particular time and dynamic connection between women, passionately corresponding over the possibilities of women in relationship to the theoretically charged, daily, socially defined, and intimately reshaped languages we use. Bronwen and Erin set a benchmark for an exchange on what matters greatly to us. May the women who follow continue to be inspired and mentored by their example. (BRENDA CARR) Rinaldo Walcott, editor. Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism Insomniac Press. 222. $19.99 Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism, directed by York University humanities professor Rinaldo Walcott, is a would-be Decalogue of essays by five professors and five ABDs (primarily York-based). It is never rude or >insubordinate= (the editor=s chic adjective), merely opinionated and rudimentary. The editor allows B in his own work and in that of some collaborators B half-truths and butchered grammar. Walcott hopes that his anthology will >undermine or at least trouble notions of the nation B that is, the Canadian nation-state B when it encounters a self-assured Blackness.= The rhetoric is chaotic, but Walcott=s only example of a >self-assured= African Canadian is the nineteenth-century abolitionist journalist Mary Anne Shadd Cary, who was vital, beautiful, and determined, but no revolutionary, and who supported British North America against the slave-holding United States. Of course, no essayist in Rude analyses moments of truly destabilizing black activism in Canada: the burning of Montreal by Marie-Josèphe Angélique in 1734; the organization of the Underground Railroad; the burning of the computer centre at Sir George Williams University in 1969; et cetera. Walcott=s arguments are suspicious, his spelling atrocious. Thus, we read HUMANITIES 399 that Canada=s >founding narrative ... occludes Aboriginal peoples,= when >excludes= is the appropriate term. Walcott says his >principle impetus is not to prove that racism exists,= but this stance should not be a primary principal of anyone with progressive principles. Later, he uses >ex-patriot= for >expatriate,= and it is impossible to presume his choice is deliberate. Richard Almonte reminds us that white British North American writers of the Victorian Age use a discourse of race to demarcate whiteness from >savage= or >treasonous= (Almonte=s preferred term) racial others. Yet, in his study of Haliburton=s work, Almonte selects the less noxious sketches, where blacks are figures of >comedy,= not potential agents of treason B or terror. (Too, Almonte=s notion that Tory Haliburton opposed United States slavery is simply a canard.) Joy Mannette writes beautifully of Acadian, Africadian (Black Nova Scotian), and African connections in Nova Scotian history. Annoying errors hurt the work, however. For instance, Jamaican Maroons did not alone >construct the Halifax Citadel.= Nor did >Thomas Hall= win the Victoria Cross for >valour in the Crimea.= Rather, William Hall received it for breaking the Sepoy Rebellion in India. (And why not discuss >Afro-Acadien= Paul F. Brown=s arguments regarding Acadians and African slavery?) Gamal Abdel Shehid wants to forge a link between >Black Hockey in Canada= and the ideas of Dionne Brand. The problem is, he finds nothing really relevant by her to support...

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