SEARCHING FOR BLACK VOICESIN CANADA’S ARCHIVES: The Invisibility of a “Visible” Minority

Using case studies of my experiences navigating the difficult terrain of Canadian archives, as well as, black Canadian history examples such as Nova Scotia’s Viola Desmond and the No. 2 Construction Battalion, Vancouver’s Hogan’s Alley, Alberta’s Amber Valley and Montreal’s Sir George Williams University (present-day Concordia University), my article elucidates the visibility/invisibility of blackness in Canadian archival collections. It also explains why it is so important for researchers doing work on black subjects to begin to understand the logic of archives, working against (and through them) to recuperate historical absences, and to shed light on presences.