Fragments of a Circulatory Life

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

 

In her introduction to Black Writers Matter, Whitney French reflects: “Maybe it is unfair to say—or too fair to say—that collecting bits of things, gathering, and amassing is a process that feels particular to the Black Canadian experience” (xvi). This meditation on gathering names something that I have been circling around about how Black Canadian literary history often appears in fragments: bits of things that refuse to cohere into a singular narrative but, when gathered in different arrangements, reveal alternative narrative possibilities that can be read against and alongside one another. In my encounters with Black Canadian literature, I am drawn to questions of how a text moves from shelf to shelf or is passed from hand to hand, how texts become reanimated in bibliographies or works of scholarship that connect them across decades and geographies, and how texts ultimately finds readers across networks that exceed institutional frameworks. These acts of gathering and circulating Black Canadian literature work against teleological constructions of Black Canada, that is, the idea that there is a clear progression of Black Canadian literature that is tied to a singular Black Canadian past. Such teleological framing displaces a more complicated and fragmented history that is fissured by the tectonic legacies of settler colonialism, slavery, and forced migration. To read along its fragments requires attending to how Black Canadian literature has circulated and been sustained while resisting the gravity of national enclosure.

While scholars have documented Black literature’s contradictory position within Canada’s national literary imaginary, I am interested in the relational practices through which Black literary workers have refused institutional erasure while sustaining literary production on their own terms.¹ Black Canadian literary workers have developed creative strategies to work within and around the constraints of institutionalization and literary canonization, such as organizing gatherings, developing independent presses, and establishing library collections and archives dedicated to the preservation of Black Canadian literature and history. When we attend to these alternative networks of literary communion and exchange, circulation emerges as a method of gesturing to the non-linear movements, encounters, and dissemination patterns through which Black Canadian literary expression has been sustained, shared, and imagined otherwise. Circulation, as I use it here, names knotted networks through which books, ideas, and cultural objects move across and between borders, communities, and readers, functioning as a constitutive element of literary life. Whereas linear chronology organizes literary history through mythic origins and teleological expressions of progressive development, circulation reveals a different logic that accounts for dispersals, regatherings, temporalities, and spatial mobilities that exceed national containment.

Too Much Has Been Made of Origins

If scatteredness reveals the limits of linear organization, then it is worth examining what drives our attachment to chronology in the first place. Chronology depends on origins, framing history as unfolding from a foundational moment. Yet in A Map to the Door of No Return, Dionne Brand exposes this as a violent fiction for Black diasporic subjects. She discusses the arbitrariness of origin stories, the cruelty of the myth of some determinate or originary source of history, and the agonizing pursuit of the starting point that would narrate our beingness into solidity. “All origins are,” as she states, “arbitrary” (64), and yet origin stories can be sites of creation that have the power to legitimize nation-states, glorify tyranny, romanticize belonging, and produce mythic narratives that stabilize our understanding of the world and our places in it. In Canada, Brand suggests, “we are all implicated in this sense of origins” through the violence of our desire for belonging, founded in a national identity (64). The origin story of the Canadian nation-state has its own narrative force that naturalizes what is constructed and makes contingent histories appear inevitable. And so Brand offers a necessary corrective, asserting: “Too much has been made of origins” (64).

Similarly, Katherine McKittrick examines how the “originary logic of multiculturalism” temporalizes a contradictory framework that positions Black Canadians as simultaneously absent from national history and yet ever-present as subjects in the liberal narrative of multicultural modernity (244). This mythologization produces gaps in a teleological expression of national history, invoking mythic temporalities that abject Black presence, where Blackness is rendered as both a past that Canada has moved beyond (historical slavery) and a future that is perpetually promised and deferred (multicultural inclusion) (245). More particularly, Karina Vernon draws a connection between the temporalities of Black Canadian literatures and the Black Atlantic, contending that Black Canadian literary production “does not necessarily occupy the singular present within a unified ‘now’ or a shared ‘then’” (“Beyond” 95). For Vernon, dominant modes of “narrating national literary histories” have often placed Blackness inside what she calls the “time of the nation-state,” such that the copresence of multiple historical temporalities becomes absorbed into a Canadian literary canon that is both a nationalizing project and homogenizing temporal order (96). If, as Vernon suggests, Black Canadian literatures have been sutured into the singular temporality of the nation that forecloses this temporal multiplicity, then how do we organize its history (96)? For example, the bibliography can be read for chronology, but what it also reveals is a gathering of names and titles that exist in relation to one another through possible networks of affinity, ambivalence, encounter, and circulation that move in unpredictable directions across time and space.

Circulation as Method

In a 1986 article in Fuse Magazine, M. NourbeSe Philip, discussing Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, observes how Black literature, more broadly, is seldom considered a part of the mainstream, or even as a literature at all, with works like Walker’s instead treated as archeological artifacts “truly distanced in time, isolated from their source, lacking a nexus” (20). Philip’s critique illuminates a persistent pattern wherein Black culture is reduced to an “exotic appendage” of broader American and Canadian national cultures (Philip 19), dismissed as an anachronism or, as Rinaldo Walcott puts it, “reduced to surprise” (qtd. in Ballantyne et al.). Black Canadian literature and Black Canadians thus occupy similar contradictory positions within the nation’s cultural landscape. While often flattened within a reified notion of national literature, Black Canadian literature, with its regional cultures and cross-border circuits of exchange, exceeds the organizing logic of a coherent canon by appearing everywhere and nowhere at once, thus “mak[ing] a lie of too many national myths” (Walcott 46).

The production and circulation of books in Canada involve an interconnected network of institutional actors including literary agents, publishers, printers and distributors, editors and reviewers, private literary prizes, federal and provincial granting agencies, libraries, and reading publics. This network is at once constrained by its small domestic market and animated by structures of racial exclusion. As John K. Young argues, authorship is a social process that “expands . . . [the publishing] network beyond its local participants (author, editor, printer, publisher) to the broader social dimension that informs the particular exchanges involved in textual production” (7). If authorship takes place within a complex network of social relations—namely, the publishing industry—then I am interested in how Black literary workers have established formal and informal infrastructures to circulate literature outside of the hierarchal mechanisms of mainstream publishing from which they were excluded. These networks constituted vital infrastructures that expanded the presence and possibilities for Black literary life in Canada.

Black literary workers in Canada have long engaged in alternative intellectual, infrastructural, and historiographical efforts that refute the publishing industry’s conditions of systemic erasure and the devaluation of Black authors’ work and audiences. Denied full access to mainstream publishing’s circuits of legitimation, Black literary workers have improvised with the resources available to them, building and strategically sustaining alternative networks, managing unstable budgets and debts, sustaining press operations, and developing complex distribution systems through bookstores, libraries, gatherings, and transnational exchanges. This resourcefulness has established a Black literary presence in Canada on the workers’ own terms. The emergence of Black presses, anthologies, book collectors, and bibliographies thus represents deliberate and often itinerant practices that have sustained the production and dissemination of Black Canadian writing despite persistent underfunding. As Phanuel Antwi and David Chariandy observe, anthologies have functioned as critical technologies of circulation for Black Canadian writing, enabling writers, poets, publishers, and scholars to forge “vital environs for discussion” through acts of gathering—both on and off the page—that elude the cultural whiteness pervading the broader national literary imaginary (35).

Sister Vision Press exemplifies independent Black publishers’ critical role in giving these acts of gathering institutional expression. Established by Makeda Silvera and Stephanie Martin in 1985, Sister Vision was Canada’s first press dedicated to publishing writing by and for feminist and queer Black women and women of colour. Silvera and Martin constructed a self-governing distribution network that circumvented mainstream publishing, thereby ensuring literature and poetry written by Black authors could circulate beyond the institutional circuits that had systemically excluded their work. The small indie press published numerous anthologies, including Some Black Women: Profiles of Black Women in Canada (1993), establishing a market for itself and forging “deep solidarities of relation between Black and Indigenous women, [and] working-class women of colour” (“Sister Vision”). Yet sustaining this work required constant improvisation and meant having to “contend with an unstable fiscal base, juggling many debts” through fundraising and “word of mouth and telephone trees” (Silvera 149). Silvera recalls how promotion transformed into a communal effort, as community members volunteered to walk long distances together, postering and attending local events to distribute flyers by hand (149). Despite the financial instability of sustaining a small press, Sister Vision published prolifically, forging what Silvera describes as a shared project oriented toward “building a community with people and words” (149). Anthologies became central to the press’ orienting vision as a method of nurturing first-time writers and bringing their stories together on the page (149–50). These tactics simultaneously fostered alternative forms of sociality, particularly writing workshops, through which minoritized writers could gather (149).

Publishers like Anne Wallace, who co-founded the independent Williams-Wallace Press, were also instrumental in the circulation of Black literature in Canada. They drew on their Black diasporic social connections to create improvised distribution networks, strategically increasing the number of Black titles available in Canada by distributing books through libraries, moving them through mailing lists, and advertising them via newspapers, journals, and booksellers. Beyond this, Wallace herself has emphasized the significance of social gatherings as a tool for sharing literature, noting that by hosting gatherings and parties, readings at schools and universities, and publishing newsletters that brought together writing and commentary from the community, Black literature could reach readers otherwise excluded from traditional literary circuits (38). What distinguishes the critical efforts of Wallace, Silvera, and Martin from those of mainstream publishers is their embrace of diasporic networks and acts of gathering as essential to circulating Black literature. Sister Vision and Williams-Wallace offer compelling models that expand how Black Canadian literature and literary life can be imagined and through what networks they could be sustained. Today, Hush Harbour Press, a Black feminist queer press cofounded by Alannah Johnson and Whitney French, carries forward this tradition. As one of the few Black-owned presses still operating in Canada, Hush Harbour demonstrates the persistence of this work.

On Keeping Things Moving

What does it mean to study Black Canadian literature as an ongoing practice of circulation? There is a relative scarcity of bibliographic material on Black Canadian writing, as witnessed in gaps in the archive, collapsed presses, out-of-print works, and works that move through informal networks, leaving few institutional traces. Yet the infrastructures I have described recast the fragmentary nature of Black Canadian literary histories, whereby fragmentation signifies the continuous movement of books, people, and knowledge across borders and generations. To study Black Canadian literature through its networks of circulation is to attend to what Antwi and Chariandy call the “authorly fellowships” and “diasporic relations” that have sustained Black literary production outside of institutional recognition (35).

The collective efforts of Black workers illustrate an alternative literary history to that of mainstream CanLit, built through persistent collecting and organizing across the uncontainable networks that keep Black Canadian literary expression alive and moving. To privilege circulation over chronology teaches us to read history against the grain of linearity, to honour the diffuse networks of affinity, abrasion, and exchange that can influence how a book by a Black Canadian author makes it onto a shelf, into a library, onto a syllabus, or into national history at all. These are the lessons that circulation teaches: that literary life persists through the ongoing work of keeping books moving, gathering to read and exchange ideas, and sustaining networks of relation. From this vantage point amid a knotted web of literary origin stories, circulation emerges as a condition of Black Canadian literary life.

 

Note

1. For formative work on Black Canada, and Black Canadian literature and cultural production, see Walcott; Chariandy; Clarke; Compton; and Siemerling and Phillips. For more recent interventions, see Hudson and Kamugisha; and Vernon, “CanLit.”

 

Works Cited

Antwi, Phanuel, and David Chariandy. Introduction. Writing Black Canadas, special issue of Transition, edited by Antwi and Chariandy, no. 124, 2017, pp. 32–37.

Ballantyne, Darcy, et al. “The Unbearable Whiteness of CanLit.” 26 July 2017. The Walrus, 30 Apr. 2021, https://thewalrus.ca/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-canlit.

Brand, Dionne. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. Vintage Canada, 2001.

Chariandy, David. “‘The Fiction of Belonging’: On Second-Generation Black Writing in Canada.” Callaloo, vol. 30, no. 3, 2007, pp. 818–29. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/cal.2008.0022.

Clarke, George Elliott. Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature. U of Toronto P, 2002.

Compton, Wayde. After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing, and Region. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010.

French, Whitney, editor. Black Writers Matter. U of Regina P, 2019.

—. “Introduction: The Act of Gathering.” French, pp. xiii–xvi.

Hudson, Peter James, and Aaron Kamugisha. “On Black Canadian Thought.” The CLR James Journal, vol. 20, nos. 1–2, 2014, pp. 3–20. Philosophy Documentation Center, https://doi.org/10.5840/clrjames201492216.

McKittrick, Katherine. “Wait Canada Anticipate Black.” The CLR James Journal, vol. 20, nos. 1–2, 2014, 243–50. Philosophy Documentation Center, https://doi.org/10.5840/clrjames2014984.

Philip, M. NourbeSe. “The Color Purple: A Site Report.” Fuse, vol. 9, no. 6, May-June 1986, pp. 18–23.

Siemerling, Winfried, and Sarah Phillips, editors. Canada and Its Americas: Transnational Navigations. McGill-Queen’s UP, 2010.

Silvera, Makeda. “Sister Vision: Black Women of and Women of Colour Press.” French, 147–51.

“Sister Vision Press Marks 40 Years of Legacy.” The Caribbean Camera, 24 Sept. 2025, https://thecaribbeancamera.com/sister-vision-press-40th-anniversary-symposium.

Vernon, Karina. “Beyond National Time: Black Atlantic Temporalities and the Time-Space of Black Canadian Cultural Studies.” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, vol. 8, no. 1, 2021, pp. 94–97. Cambridge Core, https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2020.32.

—. “CanLit as Critical Genealogy.” In “60th Anniversary Forum.” 60th Anniversary, special issue of Canadian Literature, no. 239, 2019, pp. 13–17, https://doi.org/10.14288/cl.vi239.192377.

Walcott, Rinaldo. Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada. Rev. 2nd ed., Insomniac Press, 2003.

Wallace, Anne. “New World Voices: An Interview with Anne Wallace.” Interview conducted by M. NourbeSe Philip. Fuse, vol. 8, no. 4, Nov.–Jan. 1985, pp. 35–38.

Young, John K. Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-Century African American Literature. U of Mississippi P, 2006.

 

Muna Dahir is a PhD candidate in gender studies at Queen’s University, where she also completed her MA. She also earned a BA in anthropology from the University of Toronto, Scarborough. Drawing on Black studies, Black feminist thought, and anticolonial critique, her research constellates Black feminist methods of archiving, documenting, and creative production in order to explore narratives of the past, historical authorship, intellectual genealogies, cultural memory, power, and resistance.