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Literary Collections Canadian

The Black Prairie Archives

An Anthology

edited by Karina Vernon

Publisher
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Initial publish date
Feb 2020
Category
Canadian, Black Studies (Global)
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781771123747
    Publish Date
    Feb 2020
    List Price
    $47.99
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781771123754
    Publish Date
    Feb 2020
    List Price
    $31.99

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Description

The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology recovers a new regional archive of “black prairie” literature, and includes writing that ranges from work by nineteenth-century black fur traders and pioneers, all of it published here for the first time, to contemporary writing of the twenty-first century.
This anthology establishes a new black prairie literary tradition and transforms inherited understandings of what prairie literature looks and sounds like. It collects varied and unique work by writers who were both conscious and unconscious of themselves as black writers or as “prairie” people. Their letters, recipes, oral literature, autobiographies, rap, and poetry- provide vivid glimpses into the reality of their lived experiences and give meaning to them.
The book includes introductory notes for each writer in non-specialist language, and notes to assist readers in their engagement with the literature. This archive and its supporting text offer new scholarly and pedagogical possibilities by expanding the nation’s and the region’s archives. They enrich our understanding of black Canada by bringing to light the prairies' black histories, cultures, and presences.

About the author

Karina Vernon is an associate professor of English at the University of Toronto, where her teaching and research focus on black Canadian literature, archives, and decolonization.

Karina Vernon's profile page

Editorial Reviews

Karina Vernon’s anthology, The Black Prairie Archives, is readable, engaging, lively, polyphonic, political and literary, and simply impossible to reduce to simple periodization or even to a set of aesthetic values

Ian Williams, Alberta Views, 2020 September