Introduction: Race Critical Theories¶
The RCT project emerges from the rhizomatic dis/junctures of race, politics, and capital engendered and cultivated through the multispectral mapping of slavery and settler-colonialism upon local, global, and transnational structures of world-building. Accordingly, the multi-situated nature of this project’s network engages the dynamic temporalities and distinct assemblages of race, racism, and racialization (with)in/through/across geopolitical contexts. An extension and reflection of the historical, (supra/inter)national, and institutional frameworks of this project’s focus and production, the RCT network is invested in actualizing the productive discomfort of contemporary racial polemics beyond decentralization alone. Solidarity in difference. The RCT project is hosted at Concordia University in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, in what is now known as the Canadian province of Québec. Originally inhabited by the Ten First Nations (Abenaki, Algonquin, Atikamekw, Cree, Huron-Wendat, Innu, Kanien’kehá:ka, Malecites, Mi’kmaq and Naskapi) as well as Inuit communities, Québec was first colonized by the French in 1608, then again in 1763 by the British. Caught in between two empires, Québec distinctly has been framed as both a settler colony and postcolonial space. During the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, the emergence of modern forms of white nationalist anxiety fostered a recalibration of francophone nationalism that would come to form strange political assemblages with Blackness in both material and symbolic ways. From early conversations on Négritude and the work of Césaire and Fanon in Parti pris (1963-1968) and Albert Memmi’s Portrait du colonisé (1963), the Québec nationalist project deeply embraced Black anti-colonial thought as a framework for their own political struggles. These intellectuals exploited the racialized marginality of Third-World and American Black peoples by colonial state apparatuses as a metaphoric equivalent for Québécois subordination by Anglo-Canadian clientelism. Often, these works entirely obfuscated the presence of Afro-Québécois communities in favor of white colonial mythology. Such rhetoric was paradoxically crystallized by the racist expression, n***** blancs. First coined in 1959 and almost a decade before Pierre Vallières’ (1968) infamous text of the same name; Raoul Roy deployed the expression to re-articulate the historical racialization of francophones by clientelist forces as akin to Black slavery in the US. Following their example, Michèle Lalonde’s (1968) activist poem “Speak White” equated language with Blackness in her summation of the “racialized” nature of francophone political and economic oppression. According to the Critical Québec Studies scholar Corrie Scott, “Blackness [w]as a sign of disempowerment, an experience of marginality, [and] a sense of collective revolt and injustice. But the revolt and the injustice conveyed in the expression[s] ‘n***** blanc’ [and ‘speak white’] stem from what Rosalind Hampton (2012) calls “the implicit premise of moral outrage over white people being treated as poorly as Black people’” (Scott 2016: 1292). As with the recalibration of their national identity from French-Canadians to Québécois during the Quiet Revolution, Québec nationalists became the arbitrators of whiteness in the province. In this process, nationalist writers exoticized and eroticized Blackness as a metaphorical political device for their white entitlement, despite routine amnesia of their own history of Black slavery and its Afro-Québécois descendants. This tactical matrix of national, (post)colonial, and globalized Blackness during the 1960s signals the complex dis/junctures that the RCT project aims to unravel and to gather together in a permanently incomplete and expanding syllabus. In the process of drawing from and gesturing toward itineraries and concepts of race on a transnational and multi-sited scale, Race Critical Theories remains all-the-while mindful of its situatedness within Tiohtià:ke/Montréal and Concordia University. More precisely, this project offers a direct response to the uniquely local ways in which the supposed defense of “academic freedom”—and the use of the n-word by white professors in particular—has sought to reinvigorate settler colonial logics and white supremacy in Quebec universities and society at large. As evidenced by its deployment during the www⁄2022 Quebec leaders debate and the passing of www⁄Bill 32, the weaponization of “academic freedom” has become a juridically-sanctioned tactic for delegitimizing the voices of Black and Indigenous scholars, students and the communities they represent. To our reader, the point might seem obvious; yet in our local context, it can never be overstated: Race Critical Theories opposes the weaponization of “academic freedom” as a form of systemic racism centered on whiteness and the maintenance of settler colonial entitlement. Accordingly, this project’s global outlook and investment in translocal forms of race and racial discourse aims to reinforce, rather than defer, our commitment to the specific forms of anti-racist and decolonial struggle demanded by our local environment. In this way, the project is an invitation for collaborative thinking and action that is at once embedded in distinct local histories and practices, and their translocal expression.
Resources¶
www⁄#Atlanta Syllabus
www⁄#BlackLivesCanadian Syllabus
www⁄#Black Lives Matter Syllabus
www⁄#BlackPowerYellowPeril Syllabus
www⁄#Care Syllabus
www⁄#CenterForCriticalRace+DigitalStudies
www⁄#Charleston Syllabus
www⁄#Charlottesville Syllabus
www⁄#Ferguson Syllabus
www⁄#Human_3.0 Reading List
www⁄#Indigenous Land and Enslaved Peoples Acknowledgement practices
www⁄#PirateCare Syllabus
www⁄#PrisonAbolition Syllabus
www⁄#RaceAtBoilingPoint event series
www⁄#ScholarsStrikeCanada
www⁄#StandingRock Syllabus
www⁄#Teaching the Radical Catalogue
www⁄#Women’sStrike Syllabus
Bibliographic Resources¶
Chandler, Nahum D. X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Goldberg, David Theo, and Philomena Essed, eds. Race Critical Theories: Text and Context. New York: Wiley, 2002. Ferreira da Silva, Denise. Toward a Global Idea of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Scott, Corrie. “How French Canadians Became White Folks, or Doing Things with Race in Quebec.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 39.7 (2016): 1280–97. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1-40.
Land Acknowledgement¶
The Race Critical Theories project assembles critical insights from scholars and activists operating through wide scopes of race, racism, racialization both within and beyond the borders of the project’s home base in Montréal. Race Critical Theories acknowledge that this project occupies the traditional lands of the Kanien’kehá:ka. The Kanien’kehá:ka are the keepers of the Eastern Door of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. The island called “Montreal” is known as Tiotia:ke in the language of the Kanien’kehá:ka, and it has historically been a meeting place for other Indigenous nations, including the Omàmiwininì or Algonquin people. Race Critical Theories acknowledge the lands, identities, subjectivities, bodies, and histories that have also been the target of violent imperial and settler-colonial conquest and subjugation, while at the same time reconceptualizing anti-racist solidarity within the context of living on stolen and occupied Indigenous land. This project acknowledges the complex and interconnected relationships to the land that we live on, depending on our ancestry, and where we sit in relationship to the struggles for justice occurring on this land. By attempting to de-territorialize knowledge, we also acknowledge the deeply ingrained settler-colonialism and white supremacy of the academic institutions in which we operate. Beyond acknowledgement the ancestral native territories we occupy, we call upon our readers to re-position themselves vis-a-vis their corporeal, intellectual, and economic relationship to the land and violence upon which it was settled. We strive to be cognizant of our settler-privilege that sanctions our participation within the anti-Black and colonial structures of the academy. We also recognize how legacies of settler-colonialism found our academic and cultural institutions through the carceral Black slave labour of trans-continental imperial capitalism.