The New African Diaspora in Vancouver documents the experiences of immigrants from countries in sub-Saharan Africa on Canada's west coast. Despite their individual national origins, many adopt new identities as ‘African’ and are actively engaged in creating a new, place-based ‘African community.’ In this study, Gillian Creese analyzes interviews with sixty-one women and men from twenty-one African countries to document the gendered and racialized processes of community-building that occur in the contexts of marginalization and exclusion as they exist in Vancouver.

Creese reveals that the routine discounting of previous education by potential employers, the demeaning of African accents and bodies by society at large, cultural pressures to reshape gender relations and parenting practices, and the absence of extended families often contribute to downward mobility for immigrants. The New African Diaspora in Vancouver maps out how African immigrants negotiate these multiple dimensions of local exclusion while at the same time creating new spaces of belonging and emerging collective identity.

Gillian Creese is the associate dean of Arts, Faculty & Equity, and professor in the Department of Sociology and the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia.

Gillian Creese's profile page

‘Creese provides the first substantial academic study of the immigration experience of Black sub-Saharan Africans living in the Greater Vancouver area.’

Canadian Woman Studies, vol 30:01:2013