Twenty years ago, Rinaldo Walcott's groundbreaking study of black culture in Canada, Black Like Who?, caused such an uproar upon its publication that Insomniac Press has produced a special 20th anniversary edition. With its incisive readings of hip-hop, film, literature, social unrest, sports, music, and the electronic media, Walcott's book not only assesses the role of Black Canadians in defining Canada, it also argues strenuously against any notion of an essentialist Canadian blackness. ...

What does it mean in the era of Black Lives Matter to continue to ignore and deny the violence that is the foundation of the Canadian nation state? BlackLife discloses the ongoing destruction of Black people as enacted not simply by state structures, but beneath them in the foundational modernist ideology that underlies thinking around migration and movement, as Black erasure and death are unveiled as horrifically acceptable throughout western culture. With exactitude and celerity...

Now available after over four decades, the first collection of short fiction from bestselling author and Barbadian-born Canadian luminary Austin Clarke — winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and the Trillium Book Award for his novel The Polished Hoe — is a vital, lyrical, and provocative exploration of the Black immigrant experience in Canada.Originally issued in 1971, Austin Clarke’s fir...

In The Long Emancipation Rinaldo Walcott posits that Black people globally live in the time of emancipation and that emancipation is definitely not freedom. Taking examples from across the globe, he argues that wherever Black people have been emancipated from slavery and colonization, a potential freedom has been thwarted. Walcott names this condition the long emancipation—the ongoing interdiction of potential Black freedom and the continuation of the juridical and legislative sta...

Critical conversations and reflections about lessons learned at the intersection of social movements and artist production.Diversity of Aesthetics collects powerful and timely conversations among leading cultural critics, artists, and organizers to connect the threads between some of the most pressing social struggles and conflicts of our time: policing, war, borders and migration, economic crisis.Across three themes—infrastructure, migration, and ...

Four Alchemists. One book. A constellation of ideas.In November 2022, the first annual Alchemy Lecture took place at York University in Toronto, bringing four deep and agile writers from different geographies and disciplines into vibrant conversation on a topic of urgent relevance: humans and borders. Now, in these pages, that conversation is captured and expanded in insightful, passionate ways.Architect, artist, and urban theorist Dele Adeyemo (UK/Nigeria) ...

A special 20th anniversary edition, with a new foreword by Rinaldo Walcott.When an elderly woman calls the police to confess to a murder, the result is a shattering all-night vigil bringing together elements of the African diaspora in one epic sweep. Set on the post-colonial West Indian island of Bimshire in 1952, the novel unravels over the course of twenty-four hours but spans the lifetime of one woman and the collective experience of a society informed by slaver...

Canada likes to present itself as a paragon of gay rights. This book contends that Canada’s acceptance of gay rights, while being beneficial to some, obscures and abets multiple forms of oppression to the detriment and exclusion of some queer and trans bodies.Disrupting Queer Inclusion: Canadian Homonationalisms and the Politics of Belonging seeks to unsettle the assumption that inclusion equals justice. The contributors detail how the fight for acceptance engenders compli...

Nominated for the Heritage Toronto Book Award • Longlisted for the Toronto Book Awards•A Globe and Mail Book of the Year•A CBC Books Best Canadian Nonfiction of 2021From plantation rebellion to prison labour's super-exploitation, Walcott examines the relationship between policing and property.That a man can lose his life for passing a fake $20 bill when we know our economies are flush with fake money says something damning...

Beyond Homophobia: Centring LGBTQ Experiences in the Anglophone Caribbean aims to disrupt the conventional rendering of the Caribbean as uniquely and deeply homophobic by focusing on the experiences and agency of LGBTQ people in the region.Presenting a wide range of perspectives and approaches, this book grew out of presentations at two groundbreaking events on the Jamaican campus of the University of the West Indies: a symposium discussing LGBTQ experiences and research ...

At the end of a century of unfathomable suffering, societies are facing anew the question of how events that shock, resist assimilation, and evoke contradictory and complex responses should be remembered. Between Hope and Despair specifically examines the pedagogical problem of how remembrance is to proceed when what is to be remembered is underscored by a logic difficult to comprehend and subversive of the humane character of existence. This pedagogical attention to practices of ...

From plantation rebellion to prison labour’s super-exploitation, Walcott examines the relationship between policing and property.That a man can lose his life for passing a fake $20 bill when we know our economies are flush with fake money says something damning about the way we’ve organized society. Yet the intensity of the calls to abolish the police after George Floyd’s death surprised almost everyone. What, exactly, does abolition mean? How did we get here? And ...