Cecil Foster: Reflections on Modern Canada's endurance

Join MISC at 4:00 pm on Monday, February 2nd at the Faculty Club (3450 McTavish Street) for a lecture by Cecil Foster, Determining new international and domestic orders: reflections on Modern Canada's endurance and more so resilience as Black and West Indian.

The enduring dominant narrative of Canada is of a social ideal produced by two founding peoples of Western European ancestry. Even as Canada demographically appears most multicultural than ever, the dominance of this narrative presupposes that essentially Canada was and always should be a white man's country, whether organically Anglo, Franco or a combination of both. It is this whiteness that supposedly provides Canada its social resilience.

Dr. Foster will offer the counter argument that from even its earliest days as a settler colony, Canada was inherently Black and that to this day its social justice model of development based on ideals of diversity, equity and inclusiveness reflects Canada's undeniable historical, cultural and Black British West Indian heritage. This is an identity that dominant Canada always tried to deny in preference for a whiteness imposed through structural and institutional conformity and cooption. Ironically, recognition of this identity is at the heart of Canada's Official Multiculturalism that saved the Canadian Confederation. And it could save Canada again. It is this same quest for a social order grounded in Blackness and the search for enduring freedom that could set Canada apart as a truly modern country in this moment of disruptions of established orders and systems domestically, but particularly elsewhere in the Americas and the rest of the world.

The lecture will be followed by a Q&A and reception. This event is free and open to public; registration is required via Eventbrite.

Cecil Foster is a leading author, academic, journalist and public intellectual. His work speaks about the challenges that Black people have encountered historically in Canada in their efforts to achieve respect and recognition for their contribution to what is now a multicultural Canada. He highlights their fight for social justice and human dignity. In particular, Foster addresses the issues of immigration in his critical discussions on who is a Canadian in the ever-evolving social narrative toward a genuine multicultural Canada. Dr. Foster is a professor in the Department of Africana and American Studies at the University at Buffalo, State University of Buffalo.

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