Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California:

For the Australian geographer, Kay Anderson, Vancouver's Chinatom provides a laboratory in which she 'attempts to demonstrate mpirically the workings of the racialization processes' (3) in order 'to expose the susceptibility of racial beliefs to change and challenge and the potential there for their ultimate annulment' (7). As she frankly admits, she is using 'historical material with a view to presenting a sociological rgument' (4). She contends that the idea of racial type was a social constraint rather than a biological fact (44) but, while criticizing Marxist explanations and the psychological interpretation espoused by Peter Ward, she sensibly concludes that 'the complex relationship that exists in capitalist societies between racial consciousness and economic forces needs to be further unpacked' (247). One of her major themes is that ' \"Chinatown\" is not \"Chinatown\" only because the Chinese whether by choice or constraint have lived in enclaves. Rather \"Chinatown\" is in part a European creation' (9). Indeed, she describes the perception of Chinese as a 'different' group as a 'cultural abstraction' (8). Her work contrasts with that of another geographer, David Chuenyan Lai, whose recent book, Chinatouma: Towns within Cities in Canada (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 1988), includes some material on Vancouver. Lai's main concern is with the built environment but he

Vancouver's Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875–1980 by Kay J. Anderson (review)

Vancouver's Chinatown: Racial Discourse in Canada, 1875-1980.

Moving Beyond Borders: A History of Black Canadian and Caribbean Women in the Diaspora By Karen Flynn (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2011) (301 pages, $60.00 cloth; $27.95 paper)Karen Flynn's study focuses on the lives of Caribbean- and Canadian-born Black professional women who were born between 1914 and the late 1940s. These women worked as nurses in Canada after training in hospital apprenticeship programs in Britain, the Caribbean, or Canada. The basis of her study, which is situated in nursing and labor history, rests on oral testimonies of 35 of these women; but the analysis is broadened by theoretical perspectives gleaned from postcolonialism, feminism, intersectionality, and diasporic Black studies. The book argues that Black women developed multiple subjectivities during their life course and underscores how these women "navigated the transition from childhood to adulthood" (p. 4). Their subjectivities and identities, first forged within the context of childhood, were then shaped and reshaped through migration, nursing education, and their different social roles as wives, single mothers, and community activists. The study highlights "the role of the interviewees as social actors in their own right" (p. 12).The author organizes the book along the life-course paradigm-the age-graded life patterns that are influenced by trajectories of family and working life. A life-course perspective "while attentive to social structures, allows us to see commonalities that the interviewees for this study share with women of other cultural and racial backgrounds" (p.5). We follow the life course of the interviewees through three interrelated frameworks of family, nation, and the political economy of work.Chapter 1 focuses on the primary socialization of the interviewees. The family "emerged as the central force for preparing the women to make the transition to adulthood" (p. 41) and it emerged as crucial to the formation of their psyches. Chapter 2 discusses the secondary socialization that took place in the school and the church. Flynn uses Althusser's concept of ideological state apparatuses, which constitutes subjects by interpellation to explain the influence of these institutions on the Black women's identities. According to Flynn, both institutions were imbricated in subjectivity and identity formation in ways that were both empowering and repressive. Schools provided an education and enabled friendships but contributed to how gendered selfhoods evolved and were characterized by racism. The church encouraged the young people to be competent individuals, although it also reinforced gendered hierarchies. Chapter 3 demonstrates that people do not migrate only for socioeconomic reasons. Instead, the interviewees provided multiple explanations for why they leftthe Caribbean. Flynn characterizes emigration as a luminal period in their lives: being separated from their families as young women caused much uncertainty but was also liberating. …

Moving beyond Borders: A History of Black Canadian and Caribbean Women in the Diaspora

From compromise to counter-insurgency: Variations in the racial politics of community policing in Montreal

Montreal, a city delimited by a French-speaking East and an English-speaking West, is often used as an example of how language can organize urban landscapes. That said, examining Black life...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/1070289X.2018.1545816

Délice Mugabo

Papers

Black in the city: on the ruse of ethnicity and language in an antiblack landscape