“How is it that in the summer of 2020 we've had this racial reckoning?” she asks. “Black Canadian history is not something that happened in the past – it's constantly changing and evolving,” says Aladejebi, noting that greater knowledge of historical foundations leads to a better understanding of today’s environments. Including essays that extend from the historical to the contemporary was done deliberately to show how the history connects to – and influences – current patterns of Black settlement and belonging in Canada.

It seeks to unsettle our understandings of Canadian history and Black Canadian studies.” “It desires to unsettle the way we think about Canada as a white space both figuratively and metaphorically. “The book really does live up to its name,” says Aladejebi. More contemporary works include: “The part of you that’s Rwanda: Creating a Rwandan Diaspora Community in the Greater Toronto Area in the Early Twenty-First Century” by York University graduate student, Anna Ainsworth and “Wrestling with Multicultural Snake Oil: A Newcomer’s Introduction to Black Canada” by Daniel McNeil, a professor and Queen's National Scholar Chair in Black Studies at Queen's University. Historical essays include “Planting Slavery in Nova Scotia’s Promised Land, 1759–1775” by historian and professor Karolyn Smardz Frost, and “A Forgotten Generation: African Canadian History between Fugitive Slaves and World War I” by Adam Arenson, a professor of history and director of the urban studies program at Manhattan College. “It's meant to push boundaries, or at least force us to think about those boundaries – it’s by no means a polite representation of Canadian history,” says Aladejebi, the book’s co-editor an assistant professor in the Faculty of Arts & Science’s department of history.

The book, released this month, consists of 21 essays from a variety of scholars who explore the diverse, oppressive and often violent experiences of persons of African descent across Canada’s history. The University of Toronto’s Funké Aladejebi hopes readers find Unsettling the Great White North: Black Canadian History to be just as the title promises: unsettling.

The Blacks in Canada by Robin W. Winks