"Other/ed" Kinds of Blackness: An Afrodiasporic Versioning of Black Canada

Abstract

For centuries Canada has been home to several overlapping diasporas partially consisting of African Americans refugees, exiled Maroons, Black Loyalists, and many others migrant groups from various African diasporas. Accordingly, the possibility of 'a' Black Canadian identity remains illusive, due in part to continual influxes of members of the African diaspora into Canada. The rigidity of a single unifying identity and the seemingly porous nature of national boundaries urges us to move towards a conceptual shift that refuses to seek a unifying discursive identity position. Importantly, black identity politics in Canada have benefited from the rise of Continental African voices in Canadian hip hop music. One of the goals of this paper is to expand the conceptual terrain of overlapping African diasporas illuminated by Continental African hip hoppers in Canada. Thus, both the lyrical innovations and geopolitical orientations of artists like Shad and K'Naan highlight the overlapping nature African diasporas in Canada, opening new ways to think more expansively about Black Canadian identity as Afrodiasporic identity. Importantly, the main contribution of this paper is to mobilize versioning as a conceptual tool that remixes our contemporary notions of Black Canada to highlight some of the ways in which we might trouble (or update) blackness in Canada, particularly paying attention to the kinds of identity interventions made possible by newcomer East African populations within Canada's diaspora space.