"Poetry, Canadian Poetry, activism, Indigenous agency, cultural belonging, environmental anxieties and racial privilege. Poems included in Resisting Canada--by poets such as Lee Maracle, Jordan Abel, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Louise Bernice Halfe, Michael Prior, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson."--

North of the Color Line examines life in Canada for the estimated 5,000 blacks, both African Americans and West Indians, who immigrated to Canada after the end of Reconstruction in the United States. Through the experiences of black railway workers and their union, the Order of Sleeping Car Porters, Sarah-Jane Mathieu connects social, political, labor, immigration, and black diaspora history during the Jim Crow era. By World War I, sleeping car portering had become the exclusive province of black men. White railwaymen protested the presence of the black workers and insisted on a segregated workforce. Using the firsthand accounts of former sleeping car porters, Mathieu shows that porters often found themselves leading racial uplift organizations, galvanizing their communities, and becoming the bedrock of civil rights activism. Examining the spread of segregation laws and practices in Canada, whose citizens often imagined themselves as devoid of racism, Mathieu historicizes Canadian racial attitudes, and explores how black migrants brought their own sensibilities about race to Canada, participating in and changing political discourse there.

Since radio's invention, some Canadians have been concerned about the increasingly commercialized and centralized nature of medium. Sometimes working alone, more often in teams, and always illegally, these activists represent islands of resistance within the ocean of homogenous frequencies, pirating radio signals for personal, political and artistic expression. In the first book published on the subject, Islands of Resistance gives you a view from the crowsnest of the phenomenon of pirate radio in Canada. Here is a collection of seventeen activist manifestos, artistic treatises of intent, historical essays on the development of radio and its regulatory bodies, sociological examination of pirate radio's application in new social movements, and personal anecdotes from behind the eyepatch. Just as the new media ostensibly renders the old obsolete, Islands of Resistance unveils the existence of a thriving clandestine counterculture. An invaluable addition to an unscrutinized subject in Canadian media studies, Islands of Resistance appeals to the anarchist, anti–authoritarian impulses in all of us. Visit the Islands of Resistance website for more about the book and to hear audio clips of pirate radio.

From 1948 to 1966, the United Nations worked to create a common legal standard for human rights protection around the globe. Resisting Rights traces the Canadian government’s changing policy toward this endeavour, from initial opposition to a more supportive approach. Jennifer Tunnicliffe takes both international and domestic developments into account to explain how shifting cultural understandings of rights influenced policy, and to underline the key role of Canadian rights activists in this process. In light of Canada’s waning reputation as a traditional leader in developing human rights standards at the United Nations, this is a timely study. Tunnicliffe situates policies within their historical context to reveal that Canadian reluctance to be bound by international human rights law is not a recent trend, and asks why governments have found it important to foster the myth that Canada has been at the forefront of international human rights policy.

Canada is regularly presented as a country where liberalism has ensured freedom and equality for all. Yet as Canada expanded westward and colonized First Nations territories, liberalism did not operate to advance freedom or equality for Indigenous people or protect their property. In reality it had a markedly debilitating effect on virtually every aspect of their lives. This book explores the operation of exclusionary liberalism between 1877 and 1927 in southern Alberta and the southern interior of British Columbia. In order to facilitate and justify liberal colonial expansion, Canada relied extensively on surveillance, which operated to exclude and reform Indigenous people. By persisting in Anglo-Canadian liberal capitalist values, structures, and interests as normal, natural, and beyond reproach, it worked to exclude or restructure the economic, political, social, and spiritual tenets of Indigenous cultures. Further surveillance identified which previously reserved lands, established on fragments of First Nations territory, could be further reduced by a variety of dubious means. While none of this preceded unchallenged, surveillance served as well to mitigate against, even if it could never completely neutralize, opposition.

In this trailblazing anthology, more than fifty self-identified sex workers from all walks of the industry (survival and trade, past and present) explore their lived experience through the expressive nuance and beauty of poetry. In a variety of forms ranging from lyrics to list poems to found poetry to hybrid works, these authors express themselves with the complexity, agency, and honesty that sex workers are rarely afforded. Contributors from Canada, the US, Europe, and Asia include Gregory Scofield, Tracy Quan, Summer Wright, and Akira the Hustler. As an antidote to the invasive and often biased media depictions of sex workers, Hustling Verse is a fiercely groundbreaking exploration of intimacy, transactional sex, identity, healing, and resilience. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE 2020 TORONTO BOOK AWARD A bracing, provocative, and perspective-shifting book from one of Canada's most celebrated and uncompromising writers, Desmond Cole. The Skin We're In will spark a national conversation, influence policy, and inspire activists. In his 2015 cover story for Toronto Life magazine, Desmond Cole exposed the racist actions of the Toronto police force, detailing the dozens of times he had been stopped and interrogated under the controversial practice of carding. The story quickly came to national prominence, shaking the country to its core and catapulting its author into the public sphere. Cole used his newfound profile to draw insistent, unyielding attention to the injustices faced by Black Canadians on a daily basis. Both Cole’s activism and journalism find vibrant expression in his first book, The Skin We’re In. Puncturing the bubble of Canadian smugness and naive assumptions of a post-racial nation, Cole chronicles just one year—2017—in the struggle against racism in this country. It was a year that saw calls for tighter borders when Black refugees braved frigid temperatures to cross into Manitoba from the States, Indigenous land and water protectors resisting the celebration of Canada’s 150th birthday, police across the country rallying around an officer accused of murder, and more. The year also witnessed the profound personal and professional ramifications of Desmond Cole’s unwavering determination to combat injustice. In April, Cole disrupted a Toronto police board meeting by calling for the destruction of all data collected through carding. Following the protest, Cole, a columnist with the Toronto Star, was summoned to a meeting with the paper’s opinions editor and informed that his activism violated company policy. Rather than limit his efforts defending Black lives, Cole chose to sever his relationship with the publication. Then in July, at another police board meeting, Cole challenged the board to respond to accusations of a police cover-up in the brutal beating of Dafonte Miller by an off-duty police officer and his brother. When Cole refused to leave the meeting until the question was publicly addressed, he was arrested. The image of Cole walking out of the meeting, handcuffed and flanked by officers, fortified the distrust between the city’s Black community and its police force. Month-by-month, Cole creates a comprehensive picture of entrenched, systemic inequality. Urgent, controversial, and unsparingly honest, The Skin We’re In is destined to become a vital text for anti-racist and social justice movements in Canada, as well as a potent antidote to the all-too-present complacency of many white Canadians.