"Are African Canadians Always and Only Marginals and Transients?" The Politics and Poetics of Fanon's Children

Abstract

Robin Winks's The Blacks in Canada (1971) is advertised as the only historical survey that covers all aspects of the Black experience in Canada, from the introductioon of slavery in 1628 to the first wave of Caribbean immigration in the 1950s and 1960s. However, its depiction of African Canadians as inauthentic Blacks and aberrant Canadians has been critiqued by intellectuals such as George Elliott Clarke. This paper draws on material from the Robin Winks archives at Yale University in order to substantiate Clarke's charges against the small-l liberal, American bias of Winks's account. In doing so, it contends that Clarke can be read as one of 'Frantz Fanon's children', i.e. one of the 'honest intellectuals' born circa 1952 (the first publication of Fanon's Peau noire, masques blancs) and 1961 (the original publication of Fanon's ties Damn