Whiteout: How Canada Cancels Blackness

by George Elliott Clarke

In Whiteout:  How Canada Cancels Blackness, his new and essential collection of essays, George Elliott Clarke exposes the various ways in which the Canadian imagination demonizes, excludes, and oppresses Blackness. Clarke’s range is extraordinary: he canvasses African-Canadian writers who have tracked Black invisibility, highlights the racist bias of our true crime writing, reveals the whitewashing of African-Canadian perspectives in universities, and excoriates the political failure to reckon with the tragedy of Africville, the once-thriving, "Africadian" community whose last home was razed in 1970. For Clarke, Canada’s relentless celebration of itself as a site of “multicultural humanitarianism” has blinded White leaders and citizens to the country’s many crimes, at home and abroad, thus blacking out the historical record. These essays yield an alternate history of Canada, a corrective revision that Clarke describes as “inking words on snow, evanescent and ephemeral.”

340 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2023

About the author

A seventh-generation Nova Scotian, George Elliott Clarke was born in 1960 in Windsor Plans, Nova Scotia. He is known as a poet, as well as for his two-volume anthology of Black Writing from Nova Scotia, Fire in the Water. Volume One contains spirituals, poety sermons, and accounts from 1789 to the mid-twentieth century; Volume Two collects the work of the Black Cultural Renaissance in Nova Scotia, which, in Clarke's words, "speaks to people everywhere about overcoming hardships and liberating the spirit." Currently on faculty at Duke University, he is now writing both a play and an opera on slavery in Nova Scotia, a reformulation of Shelley's The Cenci. He has won many awards including the 1981 Prize for Adult Poetry from the Writers Federation of Nova Scotia, he was the 1983 first runner-up for the Bliss Carman Award for Poetry at the Banff Centre School of Arts and 1991 winner of the Archibald Lampman Award for Poetry from the Ottawa Independent Writers.

Books: Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues (Pottersfield, 1983); Whylah Falls (Polestar, 1990, 2000); Provencal Songs (Magnum Book Store, 1993); Lush Dreams, Blue Exile: Fugitive Poems, 1978-1993 (Pottersfield, 1994); Provencal Songs II (Above/ground, 1997); Whylah Falls: The Play (Playwrights Canada, 1999, 2000); Beatrice Chancy (Polstar Books, 1999); Gold Indigoes (Carolina Wren, 2000); Execution Poems (Gaspereau, 2001); Blue (Raincoat, 2001); Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (UofT Press, 2002)

Reviews

[Roslin Sinclair · Rating 4 out of 5]

CW: racism, negrophobia, murder, colonialism, institutional racism

3.5 rounded up

A little dry at times (a collection of academic essays that don't read as academic essays, so laypeople can understand them), but overall, I'd say a pretty important piece of work that more people should familiarize themselves with.

[Bushra Boblai]

Dnf