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BlackLife: Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom
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, Idil Abdillahi and Rinaldo Walcott pull from local history, literature, theory, music, and public policy around everything from arts funding, to crime and mental health—presenting a convincing call to challenge pervasive thought on dominant culture's conception of Black personhood. They argue that artists, theorists, activists, and scholars offer us the opportunity to rethink and expose flawed thought, providing us new avenues into potential new lives and a more livable reality of BlackLife.
122 pages, ebook
First published June 1, 2019
About the author
Rinaldo Walcott
23 books36 followersRinaldo Walcott is a Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto, author of Queer Returns: Essays on Multiculturalism, Diaspora, and Black Studies, and coauthor of BlackLife: Post-BLM and the Struggle for Freedom.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
October 15, 2020
“how is it not clear to those who work for a different world that a focus on inequality through the evidence and experience of Black people would have to be the foundation upon which radical and actual transformative change is possible?”
this book while really short, encapsulates the implications of canada continuing to project “multiculturalism” while failing to address both the historical record suggesting otherwise as well as today’s cultural politics that continue to marginalize Black lives.
PS: when you see me adding every book i’m reading in school rn towards my goodreads reading challenge....please mind your business. i’m not about to fail my challenge again this year.
this book while really short, encapsulates the implications of canada continuing to project “multiculturalism” while failing to address both the historical record suggesting otherwise as well as today’s cultural politics that continue to marginalize Black lives.
PS: when you see me adding every book i’m reading in school rn towards my goodreads reading challenge....please mind your business. i’m not about to fail my challenge again this year.
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August 31, 2020DNF 14%
Sadly I’m not able to read this. It desperately needs some proofreading. Run on and repetitive sentences, topics jumping all over, and excessively academic language all make for a confusing reading experience. It’s a shame.
Sadly I’m not able to read this. It desperately needs some proofreading. Run on and repetitive sentences, topics jumping all over, and excessively academic language all make for a confusing reading experience. It’s a shame.
September 8, 2020
As many people complain/notice, the first chapter is confusingly written in academic language with bad grammar. The second and third chapters are more of a smooth read. I value what I learned from this book, including hyper local black history of Toronto neighbourhoods and refreshingly personal takes on formative texts. If nothing else, read the intro and conclusion.
March 13, 2021
The actual content of this book is valuable, but it appears to have never seen an editor. It’s very hard to get through for that reason alone
June 16, 2020
Being Toronto-focused, I wanted to understand more about the Canadian Black Lives Matter perspective.
Not terribly well written - “The reality is that BlackLife in Canada finds itself being expressed and circumscribed by the demand from Black people that it be a full life and resisted by a set of forces, structures and people that it be something less than a full life.” This is a book that would benefit greatly from additional editing and proofreading. Often complex words are used when simpler ones would have similar impact. Sentences run on far too long - taking me away from the book. In fact, the first chapter takes three paragraphs to explain what its going to be about. Unnecessary.
Passages like this just feel like word soup: “Since 1492, the globe has been embroiled in a conception of the human driven by European man-human conceptuality, understandings and categorizations of the world and thus the globe.”
A topic I genuinely wanted to read about given the local context, but the book did not hold my attention. Perhaps this was overly academic in nature and best served for that audience.
Not terribly well written - “The reality is that BlackLife in Canada finds itself being expressed and circumscribed by the demand from Black people that it be a full life and resisted by a set of forces, structures and people that it be something less than a full life.” This is a book that would benefit greatly from additional editing and proofreading. Often complex words are used when simpler ones would have similar impact. Sentences run on far too long - taking me away from the book. In fact, the first chapter takes three paragraphs to explain what its going to be about. Unnecessary.
Passages like this just feel like word soup: “Since 1492, the globe has been embroiled in a conception of the human driven by European man-human conceptuality, understandings and categorizations of the world and thus the globe.”
A topic I genuinely wanted to read about given the local context, but the book did not hold my attention. Perhaps this was overly academic in nature and best served for that audience.
February 21, 2021
If you're looking for a short, academic read focused on post-BLM, then I would recommend this book to you. It's definitely not going to be for everyone as it reads like a scholarly article, but I found it intriguing and impressive.
I appreciate the critique of the liberal left's agenda and the segment concerning racism rooted in capitalism. I don't agree with their bold assertion that, "whatever the economic, social or cultural markers are, Black people find themselves definitively at the bottom rungs of them, and in Canada always alongside Indigenous peoples" (93). I've studied Canadian history and the history of Indigenous peoples in Canada, have friends who work as addictions counsellors and teachers who work directly with people from different Indigenous communities, and considering the continued trauma that is inflicted on those communities, I strongly disagree with Walcott's theory. That's not to say that structural racism against black people in Canada doesn't exist, but it's not the same as the racism that Indigenous people have faced and continue to face. The ramifications of genocide, residential schools and reserves, the erasure of Indigenous culture is not the same as the racism that black people have experienced or experience today. Up until that point in the text, I felt that this was a strong read.
Many thanks to the London Public Library for bundling books and displaying them in the foyer where patrons were able to view and subsequently borrow them!
[Physical, borrowed from library]
I appreciate the critique of the liberal left's agenda and the segment concerning racism rooted in capitalism. I don't agree with their bold assertion that, "whatever the economic, social or cultural markers are, Black people find themselves definitively at the bottom rungs of them, and in Canada always alongside Indigenous peoples" (93). I've studied Canadian history and the history of Indigenous peoples in Canada, have friends who work as addictions counsellors and teachers who work directly with people from different Indigenous communities, and considering the continued trauma that is inflicted on those communities, I strongly disagree with Walcott's theory. That's not to say that structural racism against black people in Canada doesn't exist, but it's not the same as the racism that Indigenous people have faced and continue to face. The ramifications of genocide, residential schools and reserves, the erasure of Indigenous culture is not the same as the racism that black people have experienced or experience today. Up until that point in the text, I felt that this was a strong read.
Many thanks to the London Public Library for bundling books and displaying them in the foyer where patrons were able to view and subsequently borrow them!
[Physical, borrowed from library]
December 1, 2021
I i gave this book a 4/5 star rate because in the beginning its a Amazing book started of with lots of racism and hate on the black people . what the author was trying to show was how people will treat other people that are black differently then everyone else . so what the author was trying to show was how black people will live how they will get treated and it was all in a story .The only reason why I gave the star rating a 4/5 then 5/5 because the ending of the story it is horrible shooting is happening also watched the movie of it . And lots of people died , family crying and the hate of black people kept going .
August 10, 2020
Small but powerful book. Highly academic, some errors but don't let that stop you from reading it. Though, there is so much to unpack and expand upon this could have been a full length book.
I do think it's important as people embark on their anti-racist reading that Canadians read more books about what is happening in our own country (and that others read about what is happening in Canada) but this isn't the book to start with. Starting with a few other books like Policing Black Lives and The Skin We're In before this one is what I recommend.
I do think it's important as people embark on their anti-racist reading that Canadians read more books about what is happening in our own country (and that others read about what is happening in Canada) but this isn't the book to start with. Starting with a few other books like Policing Black Lives and The Skin We're In before this one is what I recommend.
June 16, 2020
BlackLife is a brief but powerful little book that offers up vital views on BlackLife in Canada, particularly in the ways that Canadian institutions (particularly cultural institutions) continue to fail Black people in Canada. This is a great starter book for anyone looking to understand racism and antiracism in a Canadian context. The language is often on the academic side, but it's worth working your way through if you can. Definitely recommended!
January 7, 2021
I'm white
BTW THIS IS A JOKE PLS DONT CANCEL ME
BTW THIS IS A JOKE PLS DONT CANCEL ME
March 5, 2022
This is a highly academic survey of Black scholarship in Canada. On its own, it feels like merely an invitation to explore other works that it references.
September 15, 2024
Why Ronaldo spell his name wrong⁉️⁉️😂😂😭😭😯😯😯😂🤨
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August 1, 2019A short, sharp book exploring what is necessary in Canada, in this era of Black Lives Matter, to transform dominant conceptions of Black personhood – which is to say, dominant denials of Black humanity – and all of the knowledge, imagination, liberal and left political organizing, and fundamental features of social organization that are based on those conceptions. Covers a lot of ground in very few pages, and can feel a bit scant and scattered at moments. However, given that the tendrils of anti-blackness and Black resistance that it follows reach into so many different domains, it makes sense that the book should as well – though, honestly, I wouldn't've minded one bit if the book was two or three times its current length.
Despite its brevity, it includes a range of insightful specifics that were new to me. For example, I knew the basics of the occupation of the Sir George Williams University computer centre in Montreal in 1969, but even though this book deals with it in only a few pages, I feel like it gave me a much better sense of the occupation's events and significance than I'd ever had before. Or to give another example, I had some awareness of the upsurge in Black organizing in Canada in the '80s and '90s, but not particularly of the cultural side of that upsurge (which this book focuses on) and I didn't really appreciate that moment as a high point, which intertwined neoliberalism and anti-blackness have since largely undone. And to give yet another example, the idea that anti-blackness is so woven through the cultural and material bases of modernity that it can only begin to be adequately addressed through radical social transformation was not new to me, but this book adds to the relatively short list I've encountered that explore that idea with Canada specifically in mind.
And yet, despite those learnings and more, and the breadth of ground covered, there is also the sense in the book that the authors are wearily making some basic political points that are more or less variants on things that activists, organizers, writers, and scholars in the Black radical tradition have been saying in Canada for generations. They even open Chapter Two by writing, "We are bored with Canada. We are bored with the ongoing attempts to make Canada right" (49). There is a prodigious capacity in white Canada, when we aren't ignoring white supremacy and anti-blackness entirely, to treat them each time they are forced onto the agenda by Black, Indigenous, and people of colour organizing as somehow novel, a surprise, an unexpected intrusion that we really do need to be given a grace period to adequately understand and respond to. Indeed, the book makes a very important link between this sense of perpetual novelty, including the dominant rhetoric of Blackness and Black people as a late arrival to Canada via the post-Second World War migrations, and the ongoing erasure of the presence of Black people in northern North America since the earliest moments of the colonial encounter. But of course undoing that erasure would make it much harder to avoid the foundational violences upon which Canada is based.
Given all of that, I feel like I should have something insightful to say in response to this book about how it can be taken up in social movement and left contexts, but I'm not sure that I do. Near the end of the book, they talk about what they call the "Black Test," which proposes that before any policy proposal or movement demand is taken up, it must be assessed and found to clearly lead to materially improving the lives of Black people in Canada. Which in a certain sense is a very simple and straightforward suggestion. But if taken seriously, it would require far-reaching changes in dominant ways of doing things in white-dominated liberal, left, and movement circles, and I certainly would not want to underestimate the powerful inertia of "liberals' and the left's banal commitments to white supremacy" in this country (94). We truly do require "a new imaginary structure and logic," and "a transformation of what is imagineable by the liberal and left political logics of our day is urgently necessary" (94). As they write to close the book, "Black intellectuals have been leading us to this new imaginary for a long time, in a sustained fashion since our arrival in the Americas. We are now fully faced with the challenge of how to hear them and institute their knowledges for continued global life" (95). May this book be an opportunity for such listening that many more of us take up and take seriously.
Review also published on my blog: https://scottneigh.blogspot.com/2019/...
Despite its brevity, it includes a range of insightful specifics that were new to me. For example, I knew the basics of the occupation of the Sir George Williams University computer centre in Montreal in 1969, but even though this book deals with it in only a few pages, I feel like it gave me a much better sense of the occupation's events and significance than I'd ever had before. Or to give another example, I had some awareness of the upsurge in Black organizing in Canada in the '80s and '90s, but not particularly of the cultural side of that upsurge (which this book focuses on) and I didn't really appreciate that moment as a high point, which intertwined neoliberalism and anti-blackness have since largely undone. And to give yet another example, the idea that anti-blackness is so woven through the cultural and material bases of modernity that it can only begin to be adequately addressed through radical social transformation was not new to me, but this book adds to the relatively short list I've encountered that explore that idea with Canada specifically in mind.
And yet, despite those learnings and more, and the breadth of ground covered, there is also the sense in the book that the authors are wearily making some basic political points that are more or less variants on things that activists, organizers, writers, and scholars in the Black radical tradition have been saying in Canada for generations. They even open Chapter Two by writing, "We are bored with Canada. We are bored with the ongoing attempts to make Canada right" (49). There is a prodigious capacity in white Canada, when we aren't ignoring white supremacy and anti-blackness entirely, to treat them each time they are forced onto the agenda by Black, Indigenous, and people of colour organizing as somehow novel, a surprise, an unexpected intrusion that we really do need to be given a grace period to adequately understand and respond to. Indeed, the book makes a very important link between this sense of perpetual novelty, including the dominant rhetoric of Blackness and Black people as a late arrival to Canada via the post-Second World War migrations, and the ongoing erasure of the presence of Black people in northern North America since the earliest moments of the colonial encounter. But of course undoing that erasure would make it much harder to avoid the foundational violences upon which Canada is based.
Given all of that, I feel like I should have something insightful to say in response to this book about how it can be taken up in social movement and left contexts, but I'm not sure that I do. Near the end of the book, they talk about what they call the "Black Test," which proposes that before any policy proposal or movement demand is taken up, it must be assessed and found to clearly lead to materially improving the lives of Black people in Canada. Which in a certain sense is a very simple and straightforward suggestion. But if taken seriously, it would require far-reaching changes in dominant ways of doing things in white-dominated liberal, left, and movement circles, and I certainly would not want to underestimate the powerful inertia of "liberals' and the left's banal commitments to white supremacy" in this country (94). We truly do require "a new imaginary structure and logic," and "a transformation of what is imagineable by the liberal and left political logics of our day is urgently necessary" (94). As they write to close the book, "Black intellectuals have been leading us to this new imaginary for a long time, in a sustained fashion since our arrival in the Americas. We are now fully faced with the challenge of how to hear them and institute their knowledges for continued global life" (95). May this book be an opportunity for such listening that many more of us take up and take seriously.
Review also published on my blog: https://scottneigh.blogspot.com/2019/...
February 26, 2020
i ABSOLUTLEY LOVE IT!~!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
October 20, 2019
Rating this entirely for its content—a very worthwhile read.
That said, the production is a little on the embarrassing side. This is a short-ass short book (95 pages, not counting references) and is *filled* with tiny copy editing errors and mix-ups on practically every page. This thing was rushed out the door, which is a shame as its authors and subject matter deserved far better. If a copy editor was in fact hired for this, the publisher should get their money back.
That said, the production is a little on the embarrassing side. This is a short-ass short book (95 pages, not counting references) and is *filled* with tiny copy editing errors and mix-ups on practically every page. This thing was rushed out the door, which is a shame as its authors and subject matter deserved far better. If a copy editor was in fact hired for this, the publisher should get their money back.
September 2, 2019
Very quick and insightful read on the very under-explored subject of anti-black racism in Canada.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews