Black in the City: On the Ruse of Ethnicity and Language in an Antiblack Landscape

Type of resource
Author/collaborator
Title
Black in the City: On the Ruse of Ethnicity and Language in an Antiblack Landscape
Abstract
The author notes that Montreal, a city delimited by a French-speaking East and an English-speaking West, is often used as an example of how language can organize urban landscapes. That said, she argues, examining Black life in Montreal complicates that tidy narrative by illustrating how race, not language, configures the city. Broadly, her study examines the way racial and linguistic divisions play out in the geography of the city. More specifically, as it is grounded in Black geography and cultural geography, her paper highlights how Black activists in the 1990s made explicit the many ways in which Blackness in Montreal was rooted in a history and a geography that exceeds urban and national boundaries. Contesting an ethnicization that marked their Haitianness as outside Blackness, these activists also bridged smaller-scale divisions: those inscribed at the scale of the city that placed Haitians in the East and Black Anglophone people in the West.
Publication
Identities : Global Studies in Culture and Power
Date
2018
Volume
Vol. 26
Issue
no. 6
Pages
631-648
URL
Citation
Mugabo, Délice. “Black in the City: On the Ruse of Ethnicity and Language in an Antiblack Landscape.” Identities : Global Studies in Culture and Power Vol. 26, no. 6 (2018): 631–648. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1070289X.2018.1545816#abstract.
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