Black Bibliography’s Pasts in Canada and George Elliott Clarke’s Legacies

To download or cite the full forum, please visit our OJS site.

This piece is part of issue 264’s forum on Black Bibliography, Book History, and Print Culture in Canada.

 

Among the many wonderful contributions that George Elliott Clarke has made to the study of African Canadian literature is his extensive bibliography, “Africana Canadiana: A Select Bibliography of Literature by African-Canadian Authors, 1785–2001, in English, French, and Translation,” which appears as the last segment of Odysseys Home.¹ Given that Clarke conducted his research for this bibliography at a time when library catalogues did not identify authors as Black, his project—like those of earlier African American bibliographers, such as renowned Howard University librarian Dorothy Porter Wesley—was to make “Black literature legible as an object of inquiry” (Helton 28). Or, to be more precise and to cite Clarke himself, his project was to make Black Canadian literature legible as a “distinctive canon . . . of cultural (and ‘national’) tradition, accents, and languages” (“A Primer” 337). Spanning over one hundred pages, Clarke’s bibliography dares anyone to feign surprise that African Canadian literary history is so plentiful—to rehearse what Andrea A. Davis identifies as the Canadian penchant for “naming blackness always in terms of wonderment and surprise” (1). Those of us working today in Black Canadian bibliography who turn routinely to the last section of Odysseys do so to find not just new information about Black Canadian literary history, but also new ways of conceiving of the field and new ways of understanding the legacies and futures of Black intellectualism and Black aesthetics. In other words, Clarke’s contributions are not relegated to the pragmatic work of identifying texts and delineating categories. Yes, his bibliography makes key categorizing moves in its inclusion of historical texts, as opposed to only works conventionally identified as literary, as well as French-language texts. It also importantly expands the parameters of CanLit, with Clarke’s advocacy for considerable flexibility when it comes to the affiliation Canadian and his recognition of undervalued forms of print culture, like convention meeting minutes (which have only become a broadly recognized focus of study recently, with initiatives like The Colored Conventions Project).² Yet there is also a larger question at stake in Clarke’s bibliographical decisions and the political and theoretical work that informed them, a question about what Autumn Womack has called “the imaginative labor the Black past is recruited to perform” (775).

In her important essay “Reprinting the Past/Re-Ordering Black Social Life,” Womack compares the often-unrealized promises of various Black bibliographical projects. She critiques the Arno Press’ 1968 “The American Negro: His History and Literature” reprint series for evoking “the Black past . . . in the name of political freedom” in a way that functioned, ultimately, to limit the rich and revolutionary tradition of African American literature to “a narrative of progressive liberalism” (776). By contrast, William Still’s 1872 The Underground Rail Road Records—a text Clarke describes as “a miscellany of primary information relating to the famous slave-escape network” that is “rich with Canadian lore” (“A Primer” 329)—contains, according to Womack, “formal innovations [that] provide the workings of a Black historiographical method” (766). In particular, Still’s book puts forward a “liberatory outlook [that] depends on a rich archival record”—one that is “multigeneric” and that asks “readers to understand the project of emancipation as an inherently collective enterprise” (766).

Inspired by Womack, my aim here is to recognize the significance of Clarke’s bibliographical efforts, not by identifying subsequent work in Black bibliography that Clarke inspired, but instead by asking who might be among his predecessors. I’m not just talking about Clarke’s immediate predecessors, like S. K. Jain, who published The Negro in Canada: A Select List of Primary and Secondary Sources for the Study of the Negro Community in Canada from the Earliest Times to the Present Days in 1967, or Flora Blizzard, who published West Indians in Canada: A Selective Annotated Bibliography in 1970.³ Nor am I talking about others Clarke cites in his “Primer of African-Canadian Literature”: Dorothy Bell, who, along with Pat Jasion, Karen Myers, and Stephen Day, compiled the Canadian Black Studies Bibliography in 1971, or the late McGill professor Lorris Elliott, who published two bibliographies in the 1980s, one under the “Multiculturalism” imprint of the Department of the Secretary of State of Canada.⁴ These are important instances of Black bibliography—Clarke dedicates his work to Elliott—but I want to go back even further in time and locate antecedents to Clarke’s work in two mid-nineteenth-century Black Canadian-authored pamphlets: Israel Lewis’ Crisis in North America! Slavery, War, and the Balance of Power, published in Montreal in 1846, and Osborne Perry Anderson’s A Voice from Harper’s Ferry, a first-hand account of the 1859 seizure of an arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), printed “for the author” in Boston in 1861.

These texts are not bibliographies, but they display a bibliographical impulse insofar as both devote several pages to reprinting the minutes of political meetings. This reprinting of meeting minutes was a commonplace practice for Black newspapers, including in Canada. For example, the first-ever issue of Henry Bibb’s periodical Voice of the Fugitive printed minutes of “a large convention of the people of color” that took place in the town of Sandwich in Canada West (now Ontario), on November 11, 1850 (Henson and Gool 3). Full minutes of some coloured conventions, as they were called, were also routinely published in pamphlet form. However, the appearance of meeting minutes between the covers of a volume that presents itself as a monograph is a less common use of “the Black past” in print, one that has its own unique historiographic, imaginative, and, I argue, bibliographic resonances.

Lewis’ Crisis in North America! begins with the minutes of a “meeting of the Consultation Committee of Coloured People of Montreal,” where attendees passed a resolution to petition “Her Majesty [Queen Victoria] to allow the organizing of 100,000 Coloured Men from all parts of the world, to assemble at Niagara for the purpose of putting an end to Slavery” (3). In an appendix following the minutes, Lewis discusses the so-called Oregon question and his conviction that “the great Battle must sooner or later be fought on this continent” to determine American or British rule in North America (10). In its title and content, Lewis’ text anticipates Clarke’s resounding assessment that African Canadian literature “began in crisis, matured in crisis, and exists in crisis” (“A Primer” 327), and Anderson’s A Voice from Harper’s Ferry similarly locates itself in the midst of political struggle, even though it was written long after the Harpers Ferry incident.

A Voice has been celebrated by contemporary readers—including Mumia Abu-Jamal, who wrote a foreword to the Workers World Press 1999 edition—especially for its foregrounding of the substantive but underappreciated role that Black participants played in the armoury raid. By the time Anderson wrote it, he already had experience in the world of print culture, having worked as a printer for Mary Ann Shadd Cary’s The Provincial Freeman. The Shadds had long-term connections with the Andersons, dating back to a time when both families lived in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and Henry A. Wise, who was governor of Virginia at the time of the raid, “accused” Shadd of “playing a substantial role” in the actual writing of Anderson’s account as well (Siemerling, Black Atlantic 143).⁵ The text begins with references to the 1858 abolitionist convention in Chatham, Canada West, which Anderson indicates was one set of meetings, among others, at which the Harpers Ferry raid was planned.⁶ The minutes he reproduces in the pamphlet, however, give very little information at all about the raid; they speak only of “the plan” (10–11). Anderson addresses this aporia in his preface, specifying that his book is “not a compendium of the ‘plans’ of Capt. Brown; for as his plans were not consummated, and as their fulfillment is committed to the future, no one to whom they are known will recklessly expose all of them to the public gaze” (4). He goes on to note that while other “insurrections,” including those of Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Gabriel, and Madison Washington, “all had conference meetings” in secret, “John Brown reasoned of liberty and equality in broad daylight, in a modernized building, in conventions with closed doors, in meetings governed by the elaborate regulations laid down by [Thomas] Jefferson, and used as their guides by Congresses and Legislatures” (7–8). Furthermore, he stipulates that the only minutes he includes in his volume are those “which were dragged forth by marauding Virginians from the ‘archives’ at Kennedy Farm,” the once-secret base of Anderson and his fellow insurrectionists in southern Maryland (8). It’s no wonder that the minutes left behind were those that offered very little information beyond the names of the meeting’s participants and officers (not to discount the significance of this naming). However, in their lack of detail about the plan, these minutes also happen to corroborate Martin Delany’s claim that the raid on Harpers Ferry was never discussed at the Chatham meetings. As Winfried Siemerling explains, Delany reported that Brown spent these meetings merely seeking “support for a ‘Subterranean Pass Way’ for fugitives that would end not in Canada but in Kansas, to test principles of American freedom there” (“Black Activism” 290).⁷ In any case, in the absence of detail, and with different possible referents for “the plan”—Harpers Ferry or the Subterranean Pass Way—what we are left with in Anderson’s pamphlet are minutes that foreground the people who collectively took part in the discussions and details of the procedural governance of the Chatham meetings. What’s important to Anderson, and what he provides for readers, is the value of the meetings themselves—meetings that he declares made insurrection a “highly organized, formidable, and to very many, indispensable institution for the security of freedom” (8).

Anderson is not only marshalling the minutes from the Chatham meetings to serve as documentary proof of Black activism. His is a text that seems to anticipate Womack’s point that “summoning the past as evidence reduces Black historical life to mere information” (772). Rather, Anderson is interested in the liberatory power the minutes amass by featuring the attendees as a “highly organized” collective. While his book does, to some extent, contribute to the hagiographic view of the raid’s much celebrated leader, John Brown, it also emphasizes many of the other participants. In that respect, Anderson’s text, on the whole, works to establish a through line from the collective nature of the meetings to the collectively oriented design of the raid itself, thereby serving as a good example of P. Gabrielle Foreman’s observation that the “conventions advanced collectivity as a way of militating for rights and actualizing community” (24).

This emphasis on collectivity is one key feature enhanced by the inclusion of the meeting minutes in Anderson’s and Lewis’ texts that I consider to be the result of a bibliographical impulse. Another has to do with the unique temporal valences that the meeting minutes help establish. It’s important that the texts reproduce the actual meeting proceedings: motions are tabled, members are elected to executive positions, committees are struck, articles are adopted. As a result, readers are privy to contemporary, first-hand accounts of the meeting participants discussing and deciding upon revolutionary antislavery actions. Yet these accounts are still couched within somewhat more abstract and temporally removed genres: the political treatise, in Lewis’ case, and the autobiography, in Anderson’s. Therefore, the temporality of these works is both of-the-moment, on the one hand, and of a much broader and less definitive historical span, on the other. The contents of the texts are also highly anticipatory—not just in the sense of recording action items, as when Lewis’ text includes a motion to secure support for a meeting of 100,000 Black men and a declaration of the inevitability of war around the “Oregon question,” but also in the sense of foreshadowing, as when Anderson’s text records discussion of the still-to-be-realized revolutionary plans that had been hatched in Chatham. Insofar as Anderson’s text saw the “fulfillment” of Brown’s plan to be “committed to the future” (4), A Voice calls to mind John Ernest’s point about African American periodical literature: “the press allowed active involvement with the events of the day in the service of a historical vision that looked necessarily to the future” (Ernest 278; see also Womack 762). For Ernest, “the periodical press was uniquely suited to the task of telling the story of African American history—because the story it could tell would be marked by narrative disruption and because, in telling the story, the press could only be multivocal and multiperspectival” (279).

Lewis’ and Anderson’s texts mobilize comparable potentialities in their inclusion of meeting minutes, and I contend they may be even more disruptive than newspapers, which are always compilations of different authors’ writings. Crisis and A Voice are, at least as advertised on their title pages, single-authored pamphlets: an author’s own retrospective account and analysis of events in the context of a larger political picture, presented in book(let) form. With their inclusion of meeting minutes, these texts still showcase their authors’ “active involvement with the events of the day.” Further, if the publications of meetings that supplemented actual gatherings of people produced, according to Derrick R. Spires, a “complex interaction between print and embodied action” (11), then in Lewis’ and Anderson’s texts, the complexity proliferates with their additional highly embodied contents—Anderson’s account of experiencing the raid, including his witnessing of his comrades becoming fatally injured—and enhances the contrast between these descriptions of especially corporeal incidents and those of a more cerebral nature, like political commentary. In addition, the presence of the meeting minutes is in itself an instance of historiography—historiography enacted through the identification and reproduction of these different types of texts of the past, which might just be another way of saying bibliography. Through these manoeuvres with and multiplications of time in print (and time as print), Crisis in North America! and A Voice from Harper’s Ferry document powerful anticipations of collectively imagined emancipatory futures through their text-based and temporally complex uses of “the Black [Canadian] past.”

 

Notes

1. The bibliography was initially published in Canadian Ethnic Studies in 1996.
2. See Colored Conventions Project in Works Cited. See also Barrington Walker’s emphasis on the significance of the colored conventions in Canada in his recent essay “Critical Histories of Blackness in Canada.”
3. Both bibliographies were published by Canadian university libraries: Jain’s at the Regina Campus Library at the University of Saskatchewan and Blizzard’s at the University of Guelph Library as the first in their “Bibliographic Series.” Flora Blizzard—later Flora Francis—was a librarian at the University of Guelph Library. Her bibliography was much expanded and (re)published by Ottawa-based Pan-African Press in 2000, attributed to Flora (Blizzard) Francis, with a foreword by Rita M. Cox. Many thanks to Jade Ferguson for introducing me to Blizzard through her paper “The Pedagogy of Anti-Black Racism in the Archives,” which she presented at the Black Archives in Canada Conference at the University of Ottawa in October 2025. Thanks also to Kristin Moriah for suggesting that I mention Blizzard here.
4. Elliott’s is one of a number of twentieth-century bibliographies on Black Canadian studies and, more broadly, “human rights” literature published by Canadian federal and provincial governments, a fact that calls to mind Womack’s caution about nationalizing frameworks that cause Black literary history to become “absorbed into a national origin story whose horizon is assimilation” (769). Some of these government-sponsored Canadian bibliographies are listed in Richard Newman’s well-known Black Access: A Bibliography of Afro-American Bibliographies (1984). Newman indicates in his preface that he decided to include Canadian entries but to “exclude bibliographies on the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa” (ix).
5. Wise was governor of Virginia from 1856 to 1860.
6. Shadd Cary was barred from attending the Chatham meetings, which were open to men only.
7. Siemerling cites Frank A. Rollin’s Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany (1868), which includes extensive quotations on the matter from Delany. “Frank” was the assumed, masculinized name of Frances Rollin Whipper, a Black woman activist from South Carolina. In addition to her important biography of Delany, Rollin Whipper is known for having successfully sued a Charleston steamboat captain for denying her access to a first-class cabin.

 

Works Cited

Anderson, Osborne Perry. A Voice from Harper’s Ferry. Boston, 1861.

Clarke, George Elliott. “A Primer of African-Canadian Literature.” Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature. U of Toronto P, 2002, pp. 325–38.

Colored Conventions Project. Centre for Black Digital Research, Penn State University, https://coloredconventions.org. Accessed 20 Mar. 2026.

Davis, Andrea A. “Introduction: Black Canadian Literature and the World.” The Routledge Handbook of Black Canadian Literature, edited by Davis and Leslie Sanders, Routledge, 2025, pp. 1–11.

Ernest, John. Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794–1861. U of North Carolina P, 2004.

Foreman, P. Gabrielle. “Black Organizing, Print Advocacy, and Collective Authorship.” The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Foreman, Jim Casey, and Sarah Patterson, U of North Carolina P, 2021, pp. 20–71.

Helton, Laura E. “Black Bibliographers and the Category of Negro Authorship.” African American Literature in Translation, 1900–1910, edited by Shirley Moody-Turner, Cambridge UP, 2021, pp. 23–47.

Henson, Josiah, and Thomas J. Gool. “Fugitive Slaves in Canada West.” Voice of the Fugitive, edited by Henry Bibb, vol. 1, no. 1, 1 Jan. 1851, p. 3. ProQuest, https://proquest.com/archival-materials/fugitive-slaves-canada-west/docview/2522678330/se-2.

Lewis, Israel. Crisis in North America! Slavery, War, Balance of Power, and Oregon. Montreal, 1846.

Newman, Richard. Preface. Black Access: A Bibliography of Afro-American Bibliographies, Greenwood Press, 1984, pp. ix–xv.

Siemerling, Winfried. “Black Activism, Print Culture, and Literature in Canada, 1850–1865.” African American Literature in Transition, 1850–1865, edited by Teresa Zackodnik, Cambridge UP, 2021, pp. 271–306.

—. The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: Black Canadian Writing, Cultural History, and the Presence of the Past. McGill-Queen’s UP, 2015.

Spires, Derrick R. The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States. U of Pennsylvania P, 2019.

Walker, Barrington, “Critical Histories of Blackness in Canada.” Unsettling the Great White North, edited by Michele A. Johnson and Funké Aladejebi, U of Toronto P, 2022, pp. 31–49.

Wesley, Dorothy Porter. Afro-Braziliana: A Working Bibliography. G. K. Hall, 1978.

Womack, Autumn, “Reprinting the Past/Re-Ordering Black Social Life.” American Literary History, vol. 32, no. 4, 2020, pp. 755–80. Oxford Academic, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajaa033.

 

Jennifer Blair is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa. Her main research areas are early Canadian literature and queer literature and cultural studies.