Introduction

In June 1999, at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences held at Bishop’s University in Quebec, we attended the first-ever conference devoted exclusively to African American Rhetoric.1 As members of a relatively small Canadian contingent, we were aware not only of our numerical under-representa­tion but of the irony that the first conference of this kind was being held in Can­ada. This was not the first time that Canada has served as a place for the meeting and discussion of African American culture and concerns. Indeed, as Rinaldo Walcott has demonstrated, in 1905 the Niagara Movement, forerunner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), con­vened on the Canadian side of the Niagara River, apparently because it was una­ble to find suitable facilities in the US. Significantly, Black Canadians and their organizations were not invited to participate. This exclusion is particularly note­worthy given that so many of Canada’s Black organizations were in fact founded by African Americans who had relocated north of the forty-ninth parallel, as well as by their descendants (Walcott 18). In both Fort Erie in 1905 and Quebec in 1999, the crossing of a border inaugurated a debate. The conference at Bishop’s hap­pened appropriately at a time when there is an increased interest in the possibili­ties and challenges of rethinking borders and their meanings. These interests are linked to the current political and economic climate, which is characterized by increased transnational migration, heightened cultural interaction, and the emer­gence of an electronic culture that subverts existing borders. The result of these phenomena is the emergence of new and challenging ways of conceiving of iden­tity (no longer simply national, cultural, racial, sexual) and the emergence of new approaches to academic disciplines and paradigms of knowledge. The aim of this special issue of the Canadian Review of American Studies is to explore the unique perspective that African American and Black Canadian border crossing can bring to these topics.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.