Jazz, Diaspora, and the History and Writing of Black Anglophone Montreal

• Autores: Winfried Siemerling
• Localización: The Routledge Handbook of Black Canadian Literature / Andrea A. Davis (ed. lit.), Leslie Sanders (ed. lit.), 2025, ISBN 9780367742003, págs. 134-150
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Noting the omission of Black Montreal from classics of Canadian literature, this chapter opens with an account of the historical Black presence in the city. The discussion leads from slavery in New France to the industrial developments along the Lachine Canal and the arrival of railroads in the nineteenth century. Their employment of Black porters became central to the Black anglophone community of Saint-Henri in Montreal’s Southwest. The main focus of this chapter is then the period from the 1920s to the 1950s and Montreal’s jazz age, an era heavily marked by Black cultural contributions and featuring the sons of Black porters, such as Steep Wade, Oscar Peterson, Oliver Jones, and Joe Sealy. Black anglophone Montreal also produced important institutions that included Union United Church, the Negro Community Centre, the Montreal United Negro Improvement Association, the Coloured Women’s Club, and famous venues like Rockhead’s Paradise. The individual and communal experiences and cultural expressions of this community remain nonetheless absent or problematic at best in the emotional geographies of the period’s literary texts. Mairuth Sarsfield’s historical novel No Crystal Stair (1997), on the other hand, offers the example of a later Black literary response to this Montreal that some other more recent texts also evoke and remember.