Reconsidering Diasporic Memories: A Case for Black Women’s Orality and Knowings in Canada

• In Event: Reflexivity in History of Education Research: Complicating Oral History, Archive, and Black and Indigenous Voices

Abstract

This paper will situate the oral histories of Black female educators who taught in Canada from the 1940s to the 1980s, to discuss the ways Black women’s stories can tell us not only of a collective Black Canadian experience marked by sexism, separation, and racial discrimination but also of individual actions and affirmations of professionalism and resistive pedagogical approaches that challenged assumptions about Black existences in Canada. Situating the uses and approaches of oral history to highlight Black women’s individual and collective choices, I argue that the process of telling herstories can be understood as a Black feminist practice that is both political and restorative in nature.

From a methodological standpoint, the recording, writing, and interpretation of Black women’s stories disrupts historical erasures that constructed a Canadian national identity through the lens of the Great White North and gives way to a greater understanding of the richness and multiplicity of Black life in twentieth-century Canada. By situating Black women as active and conscious participants both in Canada’s nation-building project and in the fight and contestation of settler colonialism and its project to erase Indigenous and Black presence from the land, oral history can be a counterhegemonic practice that is both political and transformative in nature. In particular, the oral stories of Black women teachers offer a lens into understanding the intersections of their professional and personal lives, as well as racial and gendered hierarchies that structured Canadian schooling institutions in the twentieth century. These oral histories help us to locate Black women as producers of knowledge and reveal the everyday experiences of Black women often left out of historical writing.

In “Diasporic Memories: Community, Individuality, and Creativity – A Life Stories Perspective,” Mary Chamberlain discusses Caribbean migrant workers’ stories in creating alternative models of nationhood to account for the emotional rather than geographic borders that characterized African Caribbean migration and identities. She encourages us read oral stories for symbolic meanings in order to explore choices of language and repetition and to examine how frameworks of family and belonging are remembered. According to Chamberlain, Black diasporic memory is a necessarily layered one that links “the Black experience and provides a cultural continuity with those back home and overseas.” In this paper, I argue that Black women educators’ recollections of their professional lives in the mid-to-late twentieth century gave me an opportunity not only to examine the stories women chose to discuss but also to interpret the tones, silences, pauses, laughter, and body language of interview participants, to reveal the diverse possibilities of their memories, narratives, and identities. As such, I contend that the practice of oral history in Black communities considers research participants not as mere subjects of historical analysis but rather as engaged knowledge producers who made deliberate and conscious choices about the stories they described during the interview process.

Author

• Funke Aladejebi, University of Toronto