Fear of a Black Nation Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal by David Austin🍁

256 pages

In the 1960s Montreal was a center of Black Power and the Caribbean left. There, the ideas of C.L.R. James, AiméCésaire, Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, and Malcolm X found expression alongside Pierre Vallières, Gaston Miron, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. The 1968 Congress of Black Writers gave expression to Black politics during this moment as prominent Black figures from Canada, the US, Africa, and the Caribbean—C.L.R. James, Stokely Carmichael, Miriam Makeba, Rocky Jones, and Walter Rodney—converged in Montreal. Within months of the Congress, a Black-led protest at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia) raised state security fears that Montreal was becoming the centre of international Black radical politics.

The public political presence of Blacks in Montreal dramatically influenced events in Quebec, English Canada, and the Caribbean. By examining the interrelated dynamics of gender, class, sex, and security during this period, David Austin provides insight into the legacy of this little-known history and suggests that the persistence of race continues to haunt us in ways that inhibit possibilities of genuine human solidarity and freedom.