"Ebony Roots, Northern Soil" is a powerful and timely collection of critical essays exploring the experiences, histories and cultural engagements of black Canadians. Drawing from postcolonial, critical race and black feminist theory, this innovative anthology brings together an extraordinary set of well-recognized and new scholars engaging in the critical debates about the cultural politics of identity and issues of cultural access, representation, production and reception. Emerging from a national conference in 2005, the book records, critiques and yet transcends this groundbreaking event. Drawn from a range of disciplines including Art History, Communication Studies, Cultural Studies, Education, English, History and Sociology, the chapters examine black contributions to and participation within the realms of popular music, television and film, the art world, museums, academia and social activism. In the process, the burning issues of access to cultural capital, the practice of multiculturalism, definitions of black Canadianness and the state of Black Canadian Studies are dissected. Attentive to issues of sexuality and gender as well as race, the book also explores and challenges the dominance of black Americanness in Canada, especially in its incarnation as hip hop. Acknowledging a differently constituted and heterogeneous black Canadianness, it contemplates the possibility of an identity in dialogue with, and yet distinct from, dominant ideals of African-Americanness. "Ebony Roots" also explores the deficit in Black Canadian Studies across the nation's universities, drawing a line between the neglect of black Canadian populations, histories and experiences in general and the resulting lack of an academic disciplinary infrastructure. Poignant blends of the personal and the political, the chapters are both scholarly in their critical insights and rigour and daring in their honesty. "Ebony Roots" defiantly foregrounds the often-disavowed issues of institutional racism against blacks in Canadian academia, education and cultural institutions as well as the injurious effects of everyday racism. In so doing, the book challenges the myth of Canada as a racially benevolent and tolerant state, the 'great white north' free from racism and the legacy of colonialism. Instead the very definitions of Canada and black Canadianness are unpacked and explored. "Ebony Roots" is a necessary history lesson, a contemporary cultural debate and a call to action. It is a momentous and overdue contribution to Black Canadian Studies and a must read for academics, students and the general public alike. (from Amazon)

Part I. Call and response : analyzing Ebony roots -- Panel #1 response : visual culture and institutions. Inside out : production and reception in Canadian cultural institutions / Charmaine A. Nelson -- Panel #2 response : Popular culture. Identity, capitalism and the mainstream : towards a critical practice of Black Canadian popular culture / Charmaine A. Nelson -- Panel #3 response : institutional racism. Visible minorities, invisible racism : racism and academic institutions / Yumma Siddiqi -- Panel #4 response : Nation, politics, belonging. Out of northwhere : nation, politics and belonging / Jenny Burman -- Panel #5 response : cultural production, media and representation. Theorizing Canadian blackness : place and cultural production in the Black diaspora / Kai Mah -- Part II. From the personal to the collective : practicing history and narrative as social critique -- Ignoring the pool : de-mystifying race in Canada through practice / Anthony Stewart -- The question of the question is the foreigner : the spectre of blackness and the economy of hospitality in Canada / Awad Ibrahim -- Our disappointments / Dolores Sandoval -- All roads led to Montreal : Black power and the Black radical tradition in Canada / David Austin -- Part III. Multi-culturing blackness : questions of identity, difference and belonging -- Towards a methodology for reading hip hop in Canada / Rinaldo Walcott -- 'Connect the T.dots' : remix multiculturalism : after Caribbean-Canadian, social possibilities for living difference / Mark V. Campbell -- (Up)rooting claims to legitimacy : blackness and the Canadian national imaginary in Djanet Sears's Adventures of a Black girl in search of God and Afua Cooper's Negro cemeteries / Sharon Morgan Beckford -- Keeping it real : Blacks and multiculturalism -- the search for recognition and authenticity in Canada / Cecil Foster.