Teaching Through Race: Teaching Caribbean (and Caribbean-Canadian) Literature in the Canadian Classroom

While trade, movement, and cultural exchange long predate the event, Canada and Jamaica only formally established diplomatic relations in 1962. This was also the year that Canada officially ended its race-based immigration policies (that highly prioritized white immigrants), leading to a wave of emigration that dramatically altered the demographics of the country. Jamaican-Canadians now number 309, 485 (amongst 749, 155 Caribbean-Canadians; 2016 Census), or over a third of all Black Canadians. Amongst this population, that now spans multiple generations, is a dynamic set of authors who documented this transition and established leading reputations in Canada. Collectively, they have expanded the possibility of literary expression in the country. These authors include luminaries such as Lillian Allen, Trey Anthony, Malcolm Gladwell, Nalo Hopkinson, d’bi.young anitafrika and Olive Senior. It must be noted that Miss Louise Bennett-Coverley (Miss Lou) also spent her final years in Toronto. Read as part of a wider Caribbean-Canadian field, thus alongside authors such as Austin Clarke, Dionne Brand, David Chariandy, Esi Edugyan, and M. NourbeSe Philip, the cultural impact of this group has been inarguably transformative. But what does that transformation actually look like and how do we work from that change? My talk will focus on the particular problems and opportunities that arise from teaching Caribbean-Canadian literature in the Canadian classroom. As Fred Wah notes, the field of Canadian Literature has been slow to incorporate race as a positive valence. Events like the publication of Philip’s “Discourse on the Logic of Language” (1989), Brand’s No Language is Neutral (1990), and the “Writing Thru Race” conference (1994), amongst other key texts and events, precipitated a necessary shift in the discourse of Canadian literature. In response to this growing body of work, as Cyril Dabydeen writes, “The rubric ‘Canadian Literature’ naturally becomes elastic and simultaneously dynamic” (231). And indeed, Canadian Literary frames of interpretation have shifted from monocultural to multicultural and, more recently, to diversity. As Guyanese-Canadian author and critic Arnold Itwaru effectively points out in The Invention of Canada (1990), Canada’s official state policies of multiculturalism in 1988 and 1991 place the burden of representation on citizens, limit the dynamism of cultural expression and immobilize particular systemic critiques of the nation-state. Multiculturalism asks individuals to serve as representatives of their cultural heritage, but only recognizes them when they represent their cultures in specific ways. Looking in particular at the revolutionary Dub poetry of Lillian Allen and d’bi young, my presentation will consider how Caribbean Literature in the Canadian classroom is conducive to teaching diversity, which stems (in contrast to multicultural approaches) from a more basic recognition of difference, be that by culture, religion, body/ability, race, gender, sexual orientation, or otherwise, and insists upon a fundamental tolerance and respect of difference. Diversity as a pedagogical approach does not read texts as representations of cultures, but rather as complicated networks of experience, history, and insight. Caribbean-Canadian Literature helps to open Canadian Literature up to a necessary conversation about aesthetic, political, and social value