Routledge Handbook of Black Canadian Literature

The Routledge Handbook of Black Canadian Literature offers a comprehensive overview of the growing and increasingly significant field of Black Canadian literary studies. Including historical and contemporary analysis, this volume is an essential text that maps the field over the almost 200 years of its existence across a range of genres from slave narratives to prose fiction, poetry, theatre, and dub and spoken word. It presents Black Canadian literature as encompassing a diverse set of viewpoints, approaches, and practices, touching every aspect of Canadian territory and life, and as deeply influencing debates and understandings of Black peoples far beyond its borders. This Handbook employs an interdisciplinary framework that incorporates literary, historical, geographical, and cultural analysis. This book comprising 32 chapters is organized into five sections that chart the literature’s development into a recognizable canon, trace Black literary geographies across Canada from east to west, delineate the literature’s various genres and expressive forms, and honor the writers and thinkers who have influenced the growth of the field. This volume’s range of subject and plurality of perspectives provide an excellent resource for teachers, researchers, and students from multiple disciplines, including Canadian studies and literature, Caribbean studies, global Black studies, hemispheric studies, diaspora studies, history, and cultural studies.

Andrea A. Davis is Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies and Associate Vice President: Equity Diversity, and Inclusion at Wilfrid Laurier University. Prior to this, she was Professor of Black Cultures of the Americas at York University where she founded the Black Canadian Studies Certificate. Co-editor of the Journal of Canadian Studies, she has published widely on the literary productions of Black women in the Americas and is the author of Horizon, Sea, Sound: Caribbean and African Women’s Cultural Critiques of Nation (2022). Her current book project is an autofictional exploration of women’s journeys in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries across the Atlantic Ocean and Sargasso Sea.

Leslie Sanders is University Professor Emerita in the Department of Humanities at York University. She is the author of The Development of Black Theater in America (1988), a general editor of the Collected Works of Langston Hughes: Gospel Plays, Operas, and Later Dramatic Works (2004), and editor for two volumes of plays. She has published on such Black Canadian writers as Austin Clarke, Dionne Brand, M. NourbeSe Philip, Claire Harris, George Elliot Clarke, Maxine Tynes, and Djanet Sears. She created African Canadian Online, the first available database of African Canadian artists and their work in literature, film, music, dance, theatre, and visual art.