“Material Acts in a Material World”: Black Bibliography, Book History, and Print Culture in Canada

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

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

I purchased my first Black self-published book, Ruth Ann Shadd’s Breaking Loose: A History of African-Canadian Dance in Southwestern Ontario, 1900–1955, on a road trip to Chatham, Ontario, in the summer of 2014. I have been sitting with it, the implications of Black self-published books by Black writers and independent scholars like Ruth Ann Shadd, and the cultural significance of Chatham, a critical node of the Underground Railroad located a little over an hour away from the Windsor-Detroit border, for years, ever since. Work like Shadd’s often falls far outside the interests of mainstream Canadian readership. And yet, its cultural and literary significance is profound even in the face of wider shifts in Canada’s literary landscape. Black books and the stories they tell are not as marginal to Canada’s self-understanding as they once were. Nevertheless, many foundational questions persist about the formation of Black Canadian literature, particularly as it pertains to book history and print culture in Canada. How have the social and material conditions of Canadian publishing impacted Black Canadian writers, for example? Is there a Black Canadian literary aesthetic that can be linked to the means of book production? Are there forms specific to Black Canadian print culture? How could such forms trouble our sense of Canadian nationalism?

In this forum, my colleagues and I explore such questions within the context of ongoing debates about Black Canadian literature. In their introduction to Canadian Literature and the Business of Publishing, the 2000 special issue of Studies in Canadian Literature, John Clement Ball and Jennifer Andrews claim, “It is fair to say that without our indigenous [read: Canadian] publishers, and the companies and authors they have nurtured, we would have nothing like the Canadian literature we know today” (2). This celebratory view of Canadian publishing is echoed in works like Ruth Panofsky’s The Literary Legacy of the Macmillan Company Canada: Making Books and Mapping Culture (2012) and Toronto Trailblazers: Women in Canadian Publishing (2019). Such studies contribute greatly toward illuminating the history of Canadian publishing and its indebtedness to the cultural nationalism of the 1960s. Yet Winfried Siemerling notes that, while Canada’s Black population grew exponentially during the 1960s, and although the years leading up to and following Canada’s 1967 centennial were a time of intense focus on the development of Canadian cultural identity, “not many black [Canadian] writers were able to publish—and especially reach a wider audience—during this period of Canadian cultural nationalism and excitement” (9). In the introduction to one of the earliest bibliographies of Black Canadian literature, The Bibliography of Literary Writings by Blacks in Canada (1986), Lorris Elliott explains that “Blacks have continually encountered great difficulty in getting their works published here.” George Elliott Clarke supports this view in his milestone 2002 study, Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature, when he notes “the reluctance of mainstream Canadian publishers to handle black writers (until recently)” (333). That was then; this is now.

The intersecting problems presented by race and publishing are still never far from the surface for Black writers in Canada. In her 2017 essay “Race-Baiting and the Writer’s Union of Canada,” NourbeSe Philip argues: “Writing and publishing are material acts in a material world, pace Madonna, and racism, sexism and all the other harmful practices impact negatively on those acts” (114). What does this mean for the form and function of Black books in Canada today? Here, Clarke and my other esteemed contributors consider the past, present, and future of Black print culture in Canada in ways that are clarifying, even as the forum pushes us to consider the relationship between Black books and Black freedom in new ways.

Works Cited

Ball, John Clement, and Jennifer Andrews. “Introduction: Beyond the Margins.” Canadian Literature and the Business of Publishing, special issue of Studies in Canadian Literature, vol. 25, no. 1, 2000, pp. 1–11. Érudit, https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/scl25_1art01.

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

Elliott, Lorris, editor. The Bibliography of Literary Writings by Blacks in Canada. Williams-Wallace Publishers, 1986.

Panofsky, Ruth. The Literary Legacy of the Macmillan Company Canada: Making Books and Mapping Culture. U of Toronto P, 2012.

—. Toronto Trailblazers: Women in Canadian Publishing. U of Toronto P, 2019.

Philip, M. NourbeSe. “Race-Baiting and the Writers’ Union of Canada.” Blank: Essays and Interviews, Book*hug, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://coilink.org/20.500.12592/v4pk5d.

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

Kristin Moriah is an associate professor of English at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, where she is a Canada Research Chair in Black Feminist Technologies and Artistic Praxis. Moriah is one of the founders of the Black Studies Summer Institute, a joint initiative between Queen’s University and the University of Toronto, which seeks to advance Black Studies in Canada at the graduate level. She is the editor of Insensible of Boundaries: Studies in Mary Ann Shadd Cary (2025), the first collection of scholarly essays about radical Black feminist editor and activist Mary Ann Shadd Cary. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada, the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, and the Bibliographic Society of Canada.