Our Black World: Ecological Poetics in Montreal's Black Radical 60s and 70s, or A Black House against the Weather

A worthy heir to the Black Writers’ Congress held in Montreal in October 1968, and to the Sir George Williams University protest which culminated in February 1969, Uhuru, a newspaper launched in June 1969, both channeled and stimulated Black radicalism in Quebec’s largest city at the turn of the 1970s. Despite its short life, which ended in November 1970, the bimonthly established itself as a vehicle par excellence for formalizing Black revolutionary thought and praxis. Based on the paper’s editorials, I reflect on the “Black House” project promoted by the editorial committee, a political, social, cultural, and economic project against and in excess of “the overall exploitative society”, and locates it in the broader history of the Black radical tradition in Montreal.

Part of the GPE Brown Bag Seminar Series 2023–24.