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Many Black women academics feel caged in their ‘subject position[s]’ within the academy. They are challenged by lack of opportunities and mentorship, isolation, explicit racism, micro-aggressions and stereotyping. Despite the ways in which their bodies are marked by racist sexism, Black women faculty take on an inordinate amount of unrecognized, differentiated labour and service work in the academy. They tend to assist other racialized colleagues, graduate and undergraduate students to achieve academic success. There is a common thread of resiliency among these women who successfully navigate their paths in the academy through applications of the concept of Radical Black Academic Sisterhood. This is an interpretive praxis that utilizes both an oppositional stance and creates brave spaces to deal with experiences of being caged.

This article offers two unique and overlapping perspectives that explore the challenges and practices faced when teaching and researching Canada from the Caribbean and the United States. Acknowledging that curriculum, which ontologically and epistemologically influences the norms and values of the learning environment, is not a neutral document (Ross 2001, 1) the authors focus on how they enact curricula outside of Canada to discuss issues of rights and diversity as well as to challenge hegemonic narratives of white Canadian nation-building and historiography and ideas of Canada as a benevolent nation-state. Specifically, the authors examine (1) the ways in which assumptions about power and privilege play out in the classroom by either reinforcing or challenging established North/South relations; (2) how the black Canadian experience can be used to disrupt the U.S. black nationalist discourse and allow for an elaboration of the black or African Diaspora; (3) how dominant notions of gender, race and sexuality are articulated differently outside a Canadian landscape; and (4) Canadian-Caribbean relations when it comes to teaching and learning across borders through student exchange programmes.

This article investigates the efficacy of community organizing by African Caribbean migrants in Toronto, Ontario. The author argues that community organizing was an instinctive initiative of African Caribbean people. Historically, Black community organizational agenda, although owing much to its own resourcefulness and fortitude, was intimately connected to the influence and strength of the larger White population. Racism and social exclusions were the major external factors influencing the majority of African Caribbean institutional building. In recreating community, African Caribbean people were influenced by this political milieu. Nevertheless, they were also influenced by their own internal desires and dreams of a better standard of living and a better life for their children. They were also subjected by, for example, their own ideas regarding class, culture, gender roles, family ties, work ethic, and diasporic connections that influenced how they (re)negotiate community.

In trying to dismantle the hegemony of Western methodological frameworks, feminist and Black methodologies, which critique objectivity and value reciprocal engagement between researcher and subject, were used to explore research issues with African Caribbean subjects. In addition, using reflexivity, a process that is central to Black and feminist analytical frameworks, the authors interrogate and dispute the value of 'inherited western techniques' such as objectivity and the distancing of researcher from the 'researched'.

In the spring of 2010, a call for papers on constructing blackness in Canada was issued. The intent of the call was to highlight the ways in which scholars, artists and community activists were engaging with the African diaspora in Canada. What emerged from that call was more than what I expected and is remarkably illustrative of the profound ways in which many are seeking to alter how we think about blackness in Canada.

Black Canadian artists and scholars challenge racist and nationalist discourses of Canadian nationhood and citizenship that place First Nations people, people of African descent and other people of colour who are born in Canada and can claim Canadian nationality based on birth, as outsiders. By contesting the 'master narrative' of Canadian nationhood and by interrogating blackness within Canada, these artists and scholars claim "African Canada" as a convergence of multiple African diasporic voices, coming from different ethno, cultural, linguistic and national spaces, but together articulating a deliberately transgressive Canadianness.