From BlackLife: Post BLM and the Struggle for Freedom, 2019.
“In George Grant’s (1965) “Lament for a Nation: The Defeat
of Canadian Nationalism” he trades in the continued lie, or to be more
generous, the myth of the “two original peoples” who founded Canada. These two
peoples in Grant’s nationalist and ethnocentric fears he termed “French and
Catholic, British and Protestant, united precariously in their desire not to be
a part of the Great Republic; but their reasons were quite different”. One
could read Grant’s comment here as a kind of collusion – a collusion that works
against all the others. While Grant is defending Canadian-ness vis a vis
disdain for the US and its mid-twentieth century empire, his defence – his lament
– consecrates the myth of the founding of the nation as one that is both
ordained in a certain way as English and French and also destined to be so. The
logic of Grant’s claim is to place all those outside the category of (white)
English and French as adjuncts to the nation. Multiculturalism later formalizes
these adjuncts into communities, allowing for some to enter whiteness against
the block of non-white others.
Now, of course Grant is also writing against the USA. And it
would not be too trivial to suggest that blackness bears down heavily on what
is at stake for him, even when he does not directly address blackness. At the
time of Grant’s writing the civil rights movement is at its peak and the
spectre of blackness haunts his text in all kinds of ways. Thus we might also
read Grant’s fear of the US as too steeped in the fear of how blackness there
occupies a contestatory space vis a vis whiteness and its own claims of
national founding. One significant way that Grant’s lament works is to also
rhetorically deny blackness historical space in Canada. This denial that is
endemic to Grant’s text runs across the works of Canadian white male
philosophers like Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan too.
A Canada that cannot or refuses to conceptualize its
relation to transatlantic slavery and its formation, as a part of the
post-Columbus slave-world is a Canada that will continually have difficulty
with Black people. This argument goes beyond making the evidence of slavery in
Canada appear and be present and a part of our conservation, to also suggest
that Canada’s own place in the Atlantic world is imbued with slave logics; the
evidence of slavery’s existence here is but only one part of a larger history,
dynamic and consciousness. We think, for example, of Canada’s historic trade in
salted cod used to feed those enslaved in the Anglo-Caribbean as one example of
the suppression of Canada’s deep imbrication in the Atlantic world of slavery,
its practices, its economies, its ideologies and its logics. Indeed, Grant and
Innis, in particular, in their attempts to produce a political philosophy that
centres Canada as a nation-state have both failed, one might argue, or
deliberately decided to engage Canada’s place in the slave-holding Atlantic
world as central to its founding and thus its ongoing existence.
The myth of two original peoples then allows for others to
be imagined in the nation as always recent, as always having just arrived, just
migrated. And it simultaneously allows white settlers to claim a natural
belonging and to have a history of arrival at the same time. Indeed, to inhabit
a history of arrival and to offer reconciliation is a masterful political move.
In that move a new compact is being created; it is a compact that [not only] asks
Indigenous peoples to enter Canada (…) but also to enter a Canada that was
founded to always already exclude them. (…) [R]econciliation is not much
different from Bartolomé de las Casas in his decree that Indigenous peoples had a
soul and therefore should not be enslaved, but Africans were fair game for the
brutal subjugation of mining and plantation slavery. Reconciliation, then,
still demands an Indigenous less-than-human-self that might be rescued, but it
is a self nonetheless. Black selfhood remains in this moment still outside the
category of European Man. In this moment the question is one of how national
institutionality responds to reconciliation from multiple sites of guilt,
privilege and power to exactly state what reconciliation looks like. And, we
should be clear that reconciliation is not transformation, remaking and
decolonization.
Flowing from this, Canadian (literary, cultural, social and
political) Studies’ liberal multicultural approaches to Black Canada remain
steeped in (anti-)blackness as only constituting the example to and for
something else. In real terms, then, Black people and their gifts are still
commodified in service of producing whiteness and white people in an unbroken
relation to slavery (with their adjuncts now sometimes more included). How many
of you are working to institute forms of Black knowledges and their production,
meaning Black thinkers, into your various institutions? How might it be in this
moment of white reconciliation that white people, especially white scholars,
speak a “we of settlers,” meant to enfold Black people in that plurality? How
is the thought, the idea, even possible, if Grant’s thinking is still not in
some way underwriting what Canada is and means? And if Black people’s
enslavement remains out of the purview of the definition of colonization being
used? We pose these as dead serious questions because in this moment of
reconciliation, white desires, demands, and order of knowledge continue to
proliferate. We pose these as questions seeking to ask how might Black
knowledges show up as more than possessions for white performative identity
making? We pose these as questions because we see continually who moves across
our institutions, who matters to them, who gets the call for the interview, who
gets the job. We are exhausted by Canadian (literary, cultural, social and
political) Studies’ anti-blackness posing as engagement with Black people and
their expressive cultures. One might make the analogy between the use of Black
literary products and knowledges as not unlike the historic trade in salted
fish and rum. White folks profit, once sugar is king, until no longer needed;
bounty then, now obsolete. And in that process from profit to obsolescence the
story of Black people’s relation to the formation of Canada goes missing. We
are exhausted by a Canadian (literary, cultural, social and political) Studies
that prefers Black products minus Black people; as Dionne Brand states, “Our
inheritance in the Diaspora is to live in this inexplicable space”. Such an
inexplicable space is one in which Black people get folded into the category of
settler by white people and some Indigenous people, but never do Black people
get others to account for the theft of our subjectivity as the enslaved in the
Americas. How do you reconcile that?"
