Fire in the Mainframe

The 1969 Sir George Williams computer centre occupation has always felt like a secret, or underground, history, with whose protection Black Montreal has been entrusted. It is underground because it is often buried by mainstream Quebec history. When the FLQ (Front de libération du Québec), Quebec nationalism, and the October Crisis of 1970 are discussed, little or no reference is made to the occupation. That omission is telling, because people of my generation have grown up hearing about those events as centrepieces of “recent” Canadian history, and because, at the very least, the occupation shares the timeline. The occupation, in fact, preceded the October Crisis, and there is anecdotal evidence of a kind of cultural overlap. As a Black writer in Quebec, I am attracted to minor characters and suppressed histories, and this informs part of my interest in the occupation.

In the Legacy of Marronage: The Sir George Williams Affair and Acts of Refusal, Protest, and Care

At its core, this article is concerned with the relationship between Black life and the university. It is focused on those working and studying in and at the interstices of the university—those for which the university itself was made to exclude; those for whom the university cannot begin to know how to include. By attending to the events of the 1969 Sir George Williams Affair, which took place in Montreal, Canada, as well as the events preceding it, I consider how the occupation of the ninth floor computer centre by the university’s Black students operated within a legacy of refusal that can be traced back to an earlier history of resistance, specifically, to acts of marronage. Moreover, this article will seek to advance how the siting of spaces for protest, resistance, and solidarity by Black students illustrates how a lineage of marronage is at once a continuance of a project and practice of an ethics of care.

The Colour of Our Skin

“The Colour of our Skin” is an aggregate collection of excerpts from a work in progress memoir that the author is writing about her Indo-Trinidadian Canadian immigrant father and their interconnected experiences of race, abuse and chronic illness. The vignettes in this essay are linked through their connection to the author's father's lived experiences of racism and his own expression of Afro-Asian racism.

“Why Me?”– Questions of Racial Equity and Institutional Racism in Academia

Beginning with the necessary question “Why me?,” I look at a system which bars BIPOC bodies and theory. In her open letter to the US Black Studies academic community, Sylvia Wynter (1994 ) spoke about the problem of “no human involved” (“NHI”) in the policing and incarceration of Black bodies as being pertinent for how Black studies was positioned institutionally. This same white supremacist governance and surveillance “NHI” exists in universities on both sides of the Atlantic. There is something very wrong with the system of which I am a part that persistently and consistently bars BIPOC bodies and theory and only avails our presence and thought a marginal position on the proviso that the status quo of whiteliness ( Yancy 2008 ) is not disturbed. Nothing really changes in terms of anti-BIPOC racism. Rather, it remains strangely the white supremacist (settler) colonial same within Canadian race-evasive multiculturalism and UK ‘post-race’ racism.

I Call This Institutionalized Rape

I once wrote a statement to make clear that I didn’t consent to involuntary injections. Against the institutional power that included the threat of increased force—at each encounter with the psychiatric nurse, security staff on the ready, week after week—I read aloud this statement asserting that my submission should in no way be understood as consent. At its end I explained that one day I would write and publish an essay titled “I Call This Institutionalized Rape.” This is that essay.

Unsettling Memories of Japanese Migrant Sex Workers: Carceral Mobilities of the Transpacific Underground at the Turn of the 20th Century

Between 1908 and 1909 and in 1912, Vancouver-based journalist Shohei Osada published a two-part series entitled “Exploration of Devil Caves” in a local Japanese language newspaper, detailing the lives of Japanese migrants involved in the sex trade in Canada. The series showcases the presence of underground networks that extended across the continent and the Pacific, or what I call the “transpacific underground.” Many characters in Osada’s series are transient migrants, who did not settle in any one specific nation but continued moving on across multiple borders seeking new opportunities, or sometimes, last resort for survival. By reading Osada’s writing closely, this article develops the notion of the transpacific underground as method to engage the history of migrant sex workers and understand it from a carceral space of migration regulated by multiple imperial and colonial forces, gendered nationalist ideologies, and human trafficking, making migrant women’s movements forced but also transgressive and open-ended.