Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal

By David Austin

In the 1960s, Montreal was a hotbed of radical politics that attracted Black and Caribbean figures such as C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney, Mariam Makeba, Stokely Carmichael, Rocky Jones, and Édouard Glissant. It was also a place where the ideas of Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Malcolm X circulated alongside those of Karl Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. During this period of global upheaval and heightened Canadian and Quebec nationalism, Montreal became a central site of Black and Caribbean radical politics. 

Situating Canada within the Black radical tradition and its Caribbean radical counterpart, Fear of a Black Nation paints a history of Montreal and the Black activists who lived in, sojourned in, or visited the city and agitated for change. Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s conception of slavery’s afterlife and what David Austin describes as biosexuality – a deeply embedded fear of Black self-organization and interracial solidarity – Fear of a Black Nation argues that the policing and surveillance of Black lives today is tied to the racial, including sexual, codes and practices and the discipline and punishment associated with slavery. 

As meditation on Black radical politics and state security surveillance and repression, Fear of a Black Nation combines theoretical and philosophical inquiry with literary, oral, and archival sources to reflect on Black political organizing. In reflecting on Black self-organization and historic events such as the Congress of Black Writers and the Sir George Williams Affair, the book ultimately poses the question: what can past freedom struggles teach us about the struggle for freedom today?

Featuring two new interviews with the author and a new preface, this expanded second edition enriches the political and theoretical conversation on Black organising and movement building in Canada and internationally. As the Black Lives Matter and abolition movements today popularize calls to disarm and defund the police and to abolish prisons, Fear of a Black Nation provides an invaluable reflection on the policing of Black activism and a compelling political analysis of social movements and freedom struggles that is more relevant now than ever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Release date: May 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9781771136341

David Austin

David Austin is the author of the Casa de las Americas Prize-winning Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal, Moving Against the System:The 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Making of Global Consciousness, and Dread Poetry and Freedom: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution. He is also the editor of You Don’t Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James.

Book preview

Cover image for the second edition of Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal by David Austin.

"Fear of a Black Nation is no ordinary history. Working at the crossroads of history, theory, philosophy, and literature, David Austin updates his now classic study of the Black and Caribbean radical tradition in the ‘composite island’ that is Montreal. Its challenge to the white-washing of the city’s history is even more important today given Quebec’s war on woke."

—Steven High, professor, Department of History, Concordia University

"David Austin’s brilliant and game-changing Fear of a Black Nation ensures that we will never forget to include Canada in histories of the African diaspora. This new edition includes Austin’s generative reflections on the life of the text and reminds us that, in the tradition of the very best that Black Studies has to offer, he is an activist-scholar propelled by a vision of liberation and a quest for a better world."

—Monique Bedasse, associate professor, Department of History, New York University

"David Austin’s Fear of a Black Nation makes a major contribution to work on internationalist political organising in ‘the global sixties.’ Locating Montreal as a key hub of radical Black politics in this period, he draws attention to important but neglected aspects of the political trajectories of key figures such as C.L.R. James, Miriam Makeba, and Walter Rodney. In doing so, he provides an account of interrelated solidarities in the face of significant racialized state repression that speaks in powerful ways to our political present."

—Dr. David Featherstone, author of Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism

"Fear of a Black Nation is an outstanding philosophical meditation on, by, for, and with the ‘emancipated but unfree.’ Austin takes the clay that he gathers through exemplary scholarship and conjures life from it. The result is an urgent, generous summons to grapple seriously with the injustice we face today, to understand how it is linked to the injustice faced by others, and to work towards change. The point, after all, is to change the world."

—Bryan Mukandi, senior research fellow, School of Languages and Cultures, University of Queensland

"David Austin brings to life the ideas and political labour that have helped shape the Black Radical Tradition in Canada. Fear of a Black Nation remains an urgent read for those of us who believe that a critical understanding of the past is an important tool for creating a better tomorrow."

—Scott Rutherford, assistant professor, Department of Global Development Studies, Queen’s University

"Fear of a Black Nation is a superb book by the finest Black Canadian intellectual historian of his generation, David Austin. Within it, as in all his work, the critical location of Canada in studies of twentieth-century Black radicalism is made with incredible discernment, and in this book’s wake it will never be forgotten."

—Aaron Kamugisha, professor, Department of Africana Studies, Smith College

"David Austin’s Fear of a Black Nation is an impressive achievement: original, important, and timely. Theoretically sophisticated yet accessible, this book fills a void in the study of left and radical movements and Quebec, Canadian, Caribbean, African American, and Black diaspora politics."

—Richard Iton (1961-2013), author of In Search of the Black Fantastic

"A brilliant analysis of the Black Canadian experience, David Austin’s Fear of a Black Nation challenges everything we think we know about Black Canada and the police state. Drawing on extensive research that spans several continents, Austin tells the story of Black activism in Montreal, showing us how this activism changed history for Black people worldwide. Without a doubt, it is ground-breaking work."

—Afua Cooper, James R. Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies, Dalhousie University

"An extremely important and timely book–exhaustively researched, expertly executed, and beautifully written. Fear of a Black Nation solidifies David Austin’s place as one of the most important Black writers and intellectuals in North America."

—Barrington Walker, associate professor, Department of History, Queen’s University, and author of Race on Trial

Austin’s welcoming and rigorous archive and theoretical acumen reconstitute Montreal as a key nodal coordinate charting a Black Radical Atlantic/Analytic. To evoke Kwame Ture’s oft-repeated formula on the dialectic of the singular and universal: as long as David Austin’s comprehensive and engaged analytic is studied and treated as seriously as the world, humanity will not be diminished one iota.

—Jeremy Matthew Glick, Department of English, Hunter College, City University of New York

"In Fear of a Black Nation, David Austin reveals how the global currents of sixties protest converged on Montreal–while demonstrating, in turn, how the organizing of a small group of Montreal-based West Indian and Black Canadian intellectuals and activists reverberated far beyond the city. Brilliantly conceived, meticulously researched, trenchantly argued, and elegantly written, Fear of a Black Nation upends our understanding of the history of Black internationalism and places Austin among the foremost chroniclers of the history of left radicalism in the Caribbean and North America."

—Peter James Hudson, professor, Department of African American Studies and History, UCLA

"An extremely important and timely book–exhaustively researched, expertly executed, and beautifully written. Fear of a Black Nation solidifies David Austin’s place as one of the most important Black writers and intellectuals in North America."

—Barrington Walker, associate professor, Department of History, Queen’s University, and author of Race on Trial

"Fear of a Black Nation is a powerful reclaiming of the history of radical Black organizing in 1960s Montreal and an insightful analysis of its global ramifications. This book makes a major contribution to the fields of Black history and political studies; it also challenges conventional and left race-blind readings of the histories of Quebec and Canada."

—Sunera Thobani, professor, Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia

"David Austin thoroughly analyzes the issues of power, gender, race, and politics that were at play at the time of, and after, the 1968 Congress of Black Writers. The radical left narrative of the Caribbean intersected with Black radical politics in Montreal, and life was forever changed by the rhetoric, the call for sweeping change, and a Pan-African sensibility. Fear of a Black Nation is a must-read for anyone interested in closing gaps in modern Canadian history."

—Althea Prince, professor, Department of Sociology, Toronto Metropolitan University, and author of Being Black

"In this superb book, Austin shows us how ‘the past reverberates in the present.’ From the historical fact of slavery in Canada to national security state paranoia towards Black dissent in the 1970s, Fear of a Black Nation artfully weaves a rich tapestry connecting Black struggles for freedom and dignity, the geohistorical significance of Montreal and Black/Caribbean left thought, and the politics of race, gender, class, and nation. Canada, and, indeed, the world, is not yet free from ‘the burden of race’–this work offers important insights for struggles against the dehumanizing effects of racism and colonialism, and points toward new horizons of possibility for human emancipation."

—Aziz Choudry (1966-2021), assistant professor of Integrated Studies in Education, McGill University

"In this path-breaking work, Austin takes us deep into the fascinating world of race, security, and Montreal’s 1960s. When we emerge, it is no longer possible to talk about Canada or Quebec in the same way as before. Fear of a Black Nation is a crucially important book."

—Sean Mills, assistant professor, Department of History, University of Toronto, and author of The Empire Within

At the heart of this big-hearted book is Austin’s insistence on history, or as he puts it, the ‘lived experience of Blacks,’ against silence and the abstractions or chimeras of ideology. Readers will learn much about Canada’s Black history here, but they will also learn about why it matters to everyone.

—Karen Dubinsky, professor, Department of Global Development Studies/History, Queen’s University

David Austin

Fear of a black Nation

Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal

Second Edition

Between the Lines

Toronto

Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal

© 2013 David Austin

First edition published in 2013. Second edition published in 2023 by

Between the Lines

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Toronto, Ontario · M5V 3A8 · Canada

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be photocopied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of Between the Lines, or (for photocopying in Canada only) Access Copyright, 69 Yonge Street, Suite 1100, Toronto, ON M5E 1K3.

Every reasonable effort has been made to identify copyright holders. Between the Lines would be pleased to have any errors or omissions brought to its attention.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Fear of a black nation : race, sex and security in sixties Montreal / David Austin.

Names: Austin, David, 1970- author.

Description: Second edition. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220454418 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220454515 | ISBN 9781771136334 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771136341 (EPUB)

Subjects: LCSH: Black power—Québec (Province)—Montréal—History—20th century. | LCSH: Montréal (Québec)—Race relations—History—20th century. | LCSH: Montréal (Québec)—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC FC2947.4 .A885 2023 | DDC 971.4/2804—dc23

Cover and text design by

David Vereschagin/Quadrat Communications

Printed in Canada

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing activities: the Government of Canada; the Canada Council for the Arts; and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council, the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and Ontario Creates.

Logos for institutional funders: The Governemnt of Canada, Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Creates, and The Ontario Arts Council.

In memory of my grandfather, Cecil Austin, and Jan Carew, Bridget Joseph, and Irene Kon

For my children, Méshama and Alama

Contents

After Ten Years: Revisiting Fear of a Black Nation

Preface to the First Edition

1A New Beginning, and the Afterlife

2Still Searching for the Black Atlantic

3Old Ghosts and the Myth of Two Solitudes

4Nègres Blancs, Nègres Noirs

5Kindred Souls and Duppy States

6Être et Noir – Being and Blackness: Memory and the Congress

7Days to Remember: The Sir George Williams Narratives

8Fear of a Black Planet

9Still a Problem

Afterword: Two Interviews with the Author

Notes

Index

After Ten Years

Revisiting Fear of a Black Nation

Policing blackness was deemed essential to ensuring the health of the social body and minimizing danger. In the eyes of the city’s ruling elite, racial segregation was synonymous with public good, and the imposition of the color line a means of controlling crime by funneling prostitution, gambling, drugs, and other vice into black neighborhoods and containing it there.

– Saidiya Hartman¹

We are living in a political age where everything is based on exchange – solidarity is somehow supposed to be like a market economy. What it means to be a revolutionary is to fight for those who may not fight for you.…And I know that’s a hard thing to do in this age of pessimism, but we have a long history…of fighting for others – even people we’ve never seen before. If we could learn to do that, then we could actually learn to love.

– Robin D.G. Kelley²

As clichéd as it sounds, it is hard to believe that Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal was published ten years ago. To paraphrase A Tale of Two Cities, the past ten years have been both the best and worst of times, a season of both darkness and light, hope and despair. And much has happened during this relatively short passage of time to demonstrate that, unfortunately, the issues raised in Fear of a Black Nation are more acute and urgent today than they were ten years ago. A pandemic and the public discussions about the murders of Black people by police officers have served to highlight our current political predicament, at least momentarily sparking a renewed commitment to social transformation beyond the cosmetic measures adopted by the power elite to appease a restive population, including mere representation in the form of more Black faces in high places. The tumult of our times has laid bare the extent to which disastrous political policies, abetted by intense policing and surveillance and ongoing environmental devastation, have exacerbated preexisting economic and social inequalities.

Fear of a Black Nation began as an introduction to speeches delivered during the 1968 Congress of Black Writers. (These speeches have since been published in paperback and as an audiobook under the title Moving Against the System: The 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Making of Global Consciousness.³) That introduction morphed into its own manuscript initially titled Fear of a Black Planet, the title of Public Enemy’s classic 1990 album, but concern over copyright infringement contributed to the title change. In retrospect, the word nation is a more accurate representation of the contending nationalisms – Canadian, American, Quebec, Caribbean, Indigenous, and Black – that converged or came into conflict during the long sixties (between the Second World War and the 1970s). During that time, Montreal emerged as a composite island of Caribbean- and African-descended peoples whose politics and actions shook the city and country and reverberated in the Caribbean, the United States, and England.

In the early 1990s I had written about the Congress, the Sir George Williams protest, and related events as part of the genealogy of Black radical politics in Canada and within the figurative Black Atlantic. But I had since become leery of spinning the same narrative – meditating on the same song – about that political moment and doing so without consciously and explicitly referencing contemporary politics. The key to rethinking that narrative was stepping back from the story as it had been generously bequeathed to me by individuals actively involved in the politics of that time and posing the questions, what does this story tell us about contemporary politics? And what does it mean for us today? Thinking about these questions while engaging with a range of ideas and grappling to integrate them into a coherent whole, I began to construct another version of the story that I had inherited. Fear of a Black Nation is the culmination of many conversations dating back to the early 1990s, as well as a dive into the archive and an interdisciplinary weaving together of threads from the past into the present.

Several works of theory, philosophy, and literature created a fresh space in my political imagination that permitted me to rethink and reframe the narrative both through and beyond history. As I wrote in the introduction:

While Fear of a Black Nation is not a history, its approach is largely historical in so far as it focuses on Black politics in Montreal during a particular moment in time, beginning with the story of the 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the Sir George Williams Affair – and situating these events within the framework of global and North American history and evolving conceptions of race. The wider Black and anti-colonial struggles – and the role of the diaspora in shaping politics and history – form an integral part of this story. Ultimately, Fear of a Black Nation is a reflection on the politics of race as a central part of the prevailing social, economic, and political hierarchy that shapes our daily lives.

In a private conversation with me, Steve High, a remarkable historian and author of Deindustrializing Montreal: Entangled Histories of Race, Residence, and Class, has queried my remarks about history, perhaps thinking that I am attempting to distance myself from history as a discipline. On the contrary, I have a profound appreciation of history and the labour of historical research. That is not the issue, nor are my remarks an effort to wiggle my way into that amorphous and elusive category of the theorist. What Fear of a Black Nation consciously does is combine oral, archival, and secondary research with a set of ideas tied to theory, philosophy, and literature in order to think through the past in relation to the present as part of the process of imagining futures that extend well beyond the existing order of things. History, like theory, represents congealed experience accumulated over time, and in this sense, at least for me, history is a methodology, a way of approaching realities through prisms of the pasts, pasts that are imagined and understood through prisms of the presents.⁴

Fear of a Black Nation’s genesis, spirit, and aspirations, as well as its tenor and tone, are perhaps best summarized in a review by rosalind hampton:

Fear of a Black Nation was launched through a series of media interviews and appearances by Austin: at the UNIA in Montreal in conversation with author H. Nigel Thomas; in Ottawa at Octopus Bookstore in conversation with journalist Adrian Harewood; and in Toronto at A Different Booklist. The significance of the locations and styles of the launch events should not be overlooked. Such choices reflect and reinforce the location of Austin’s work within a tradition that understands intellectual work and activism as inextricably linked, and that emphasizes oral history, grassroots autonomous organizing, popular education, face-to-face dialogue, and accountability to community. How this book has come into being and been presented to us suggests how we are to receive and engage with it – with patience, deep reflection, in conversation with others, and with an emphasis on bringing theory and practice together in ways that help us to better understand what Austin calls the irrational-rational logic that facilitates the survival of race and the racial codes that continue to govern White supremacy.⁵

I have known Professor hampton – author of Black Racialization and Resistance at an Elite University – for some time, and she is well positioned to share those insights given her past work as an organizer and community worker in Montreal. It is almost as if she spilled the beans or revealed a secret insight that was nonetheless in plain view: Fear of a Black Nation is grounded in the theory and practice of liberation; it is a meditation on social transformation and political organization, situated in a historical context in which de facto segregation was a way of life in Canada. The book is the product of more than two decades of conversation – including informal and formal interviews – and deliberation that was later married with archival research and theoretical inquiry.

The value of combining archival research and critical inquiry rests in the ability of history and theory to shed light on our lives and on the meaning of freedom in the living present. History is never solely about the past, and we always view the past from the perspective of the present. But rather than being imprisoned by either the present or past, we can choose to consciously engage the past in ways that enrich our understanding of both what is humanly possible and the constraints that eclipse life’s freedom dreams, to use Robin D.G. Kelley’s term. And while I am very conscious of the fact that we live in an intellectual age in which feigned theorizing – often taking the form of metaphorizing lived experience, historical or contemporary, including plantation and prison life – has become the gold standard, there are several theorists and philosophers who facilitated my own thinking as I contemplated writing Fear of a Black Nation.

There was once a time, not too long ago, in academic and some political circles at least, when it felt as though you couldn’t speak with any degree of intelligence on any subject without citing the French philosopher Michel Foucault. The more people I knew who gravitated towards him, the more I consciously chose to resist that temptation, leery of being caught up in what felt like a theoretical straitjacket fueled by the latest intellectual fashion to veer away from political economy and more materialist conceptions of society. Then, in April 2011 I visited the historian and Marcus Garvey and C.L.R. James scholar Robert Hill, who was attending a conference at Columbia University on the Black Radical Tradition. As we caught up, my eye was drawn to a copy of Foucault’s Society Must be Defended that was sitting on his New York hotel room dresser. I was curious, mostly because Bobby, possessor of one of the most radiant minds that I know, was reading it. I took note, but I don’t recall having more than a fleeting conversation with Bobby about the book. Soon after, I purchased a copy of it, initially only reading parts of it sparingly. I was more than intrigued by the way Foucault theorized race and class dynamics in Europe, and I drew on this and his conception of biopolitics for an essay on race, ethnicity, and power in Quebec historical narratives that was published in the journal Race and Class.⁶

I went on to read Discipline and Punish and other work by Foucault, alongside Giorgio Agamben’s Means without Ends and Homo Sacer. I was immediately drawn to Agamben’s concept of the state of exception. But I was also struck by the fact that neither he nor Foucault seemed to be aware that people of African descent in the Americas lived under a permanent state of exception during slavery and continued to do so in what Saidiya Hartman refers to, in Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the African Slave Route, as slavery’s afterlife. Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, which represents slavery and the subjection of African Americans as biopolitics personified, turned out to be the perfect complement and critical response to the absences in the work of her European counterparts. It’s impossible to read Scenes of Subjection without feeling struck by her description of the racial terror inflicted on the bodies and minds of enslaved Africans in the Americas, and especially Black women.

At about the same time, the artist Hajra Waheed suggested that I read Arjun Appadurai’s Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger, which explores the apparent contradiction of increasing nationalism in an era of globalization.⁷ Appadurai reinforced my thinking about the palpable sense of dread or fear that the presence of the relatively small population of African Canadians has historically elicited in the minds of European Canadians and in the Canadian state power structure and its security apparatus – the same fear described in Public Enemy’s signature album, Fear of a Black Planet.

Glen Coulthard’s Fanon-inspired Red Skin, White Mask: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition is a groundbreaking book in Indigenous studies and Fanonian theory. The Yellowknives Dene political theorist’s book was published the year after mine, but I was already familiar with his core theoretical arguments about Indigenous decolonization and misrecognition.⁸ Fear of a Black Nation was certainly written in conversation with Coulthard’s seminal work, and the same can be said of Scott Rutherford’s meticulous research on the Red Power movement in Canada, which has recently been published as Canada’s Other Red Scare: Indigenous Protest and Colonial Encounters during the Global Sixties, and Sean Mills’s The Empire Within:Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal.⁹

I would be more than remiss if I did not mention Richard Iton’s marvelous book about Black diasporic politics, popular culture, and human freedom, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era. Its liquid transnational approach to thinking about the ongoing process of modern globalization helped to frame the political ties that transcended the borders, always porous, separating Canada from the United States and North America from the Caribbean. This framing makes visible the specific geographies of Fear of a Black Nation, a book largely set in – but not confined to – a place (Montreal, Quebec, and Canada) that is not usually figured in the Black Atlantic, has historically been excluded from the politics of the Black Radical Tradition, and is largely alienated from the Caribbean Radical Tradition on the grounds of being diasporic. In Search of the Black Fantastic is a seminal work of political theory and human political geography, a book about diaspora and the migration of peoples, cultures, art, and ideas across time and space. It critically engages with the ideas of Agamben and Foucault but finds them wanting, important and yet inadequate in terms of capturing the range of biopolitical problems that confront people of African descent in the Americas.¹⁰

It is important for me to add here that Richard was born to Caribbean parents (from Jamaica and St. Vincent) and grew up largely in Montreal, and although he spent part of his youth in the U.S., members of the Black and Caribbean left in Montreal played an important role in his political awakening. The ideas that he stitches together in his books have deep roots in his socialization in Montreal where he was exposed to the very Black and Caribbean transnational radical politics and the language of Quebec and Canadian nationalism that I describe in Fear of a Black Nation. Richard passed away weeks before Fear of a Black Nation was released, but I am happy to say that my old friend was able to read and comment on the final draft before his transition in April 2013.

Fiction has the capacity to open spaces in the political imagination precisely because it can visit places that the social sciences often cannot or refuse to travel to. While it is true that great works of non-fiction – think of classics such as C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins or Afua Cooper’s The Hanging of Angélique – are often works of art that depend on the creative and interpretive powers of the author, they are generally limited by the burden of proof – evidence – in ways that do not apply to fiction, which is by nature speculative. In thinking about the relationship between race, sex, and politics, for example, Dany Laferrière’s simple syllogism Sexe + race = politique captures the spirit of the racial codes that were tethered to slavery and that persist in slavery’s afterlife.¹¹ Granted, this syllogism appears in Laferrière’s essay Je suis fatigué, but it emanated from the mind of a fiction writer whose satirical novel Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer provides insights into politics that cut to the heart of how competing Quebec and Canadian nationalisms play themselves out in racial-sexual terms in Montreal. And whereas Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes offers a window into the dominant tropes that define Canada’s national identity and its founding racial myths, both Nigel Thomas’s Behind the Face of Winter and Mairuth Sarsfield’s No Crystal Stair were insightful in relation to the Sir George Williams University protest and Black life in 1980s Montreal and to the 1930s and 1940s in Montreal’s St. Antoine District (Little Burgundy), respectively. Both novels implicitly call into question Canada’s two founding nations (the English and the French) narrative in which McLennan’s novel is so heavily, and profoundly problematically, invested while illustrating the transnational character of Canada’s Black diasporic history. The same can be said of Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes, seen through the prism of the author’s main character, Aminata Diallo. These novels were in many ways as important to the framing of this book as the various works of theory and philosophy that I have mentioned.

New Edition

In the main, the original text of Fear of a Black Nation remains untouched, with a few corrections, but there are a few additions to this second edition. At Richard’s suggestion, a map of Montreal has been added. Circumstances did not permit its inclusion the first time around, but the map will help to situate some of the events described in the book, providing the reader, especially those who are not familiar with the city, with a sense of Montreal’s geography. The map also shows the city’s proximity to Toronto, New York, Detroit, and various Caribbean territories alluded to in the book, as well as to London, England, where parallel events to those in Canada and the Caribbean simultaneously unfolded in the post–Second World War period. This edition also includes two previously published interviews I gave after the book was released. The first interview, conducted by Peter Hudson, was originally published in the fall 2014 issue of the CLR James Journal.¹² It provides a wider and more historical analysis that situates the book’s genesis within the political-intellectual and theoretical traditions that have shaped it.

The second was conducted by Aziz Choudry for an edited collection, Activists and the Surveillance State: Learning from Repression.¹³ Sadly, the interview represents one of our last collaborations as Aziz passed away in 2021. In hindsight, I wish I had been more attentive to Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work when discussing prison labour in this interview. During a recent interview of her own, Gilmore deemphasized the importance of labour in the prison industrial system and instead emphasized that the loss of time, as prisoners languish behind prison bars, is at the core of the economic engine tied to the prison industry. Prisons engender an entire infrastructure linked not only to the judicial system and police forces but also to housing, schools, restaurants, and other businesses and institutions – that is, to a range of industries tied to the needs of those who are incarcerated and employed within prisons. The wasted time and disrupted lives of prisoners supports an entire economic infrastructure that is the carceral equivalent of a college town but that also extends to towns where there are no prisons.¹⁴ Gilmore’s pathbreaking Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition to Globalizing California was available when as I wrote Fear of a Black Nation, but I had sadly not yet read it. Her carefully crafted analysis of the escalating development of the prison industry in California in the 1980s and how prisons and the judicial system have come to permeate the lives of the incarcerated and their families has implications for the Americas in general. If I were rewriting Fear of a Black Nation, I would have to seriously consider the implications of Gilmore’s work for Canada, the Caribbean, and other parts of the Americas while grappling with Prison Abolitionist organizing, the spirit of which is captured in the work of Mariame Kaba’s We Do This ’til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice.

Although I entertained a change to the subtitle, substituting the word surveillance for security, upon reflection I thought it best to resist the urge to insert a word that has gained great currency today. The word security implies surveillance, but surveillance does not necessarily imply security. In addition to surveillance capitalism, surveillance technology – including the use of artificial intelligence that can specifically target people of African descent, contributing to what Ruha Benjamin refers to as the New Jim Code¹⁵ – facilitates the practices of the state security apparatus and its efforts to defend the state from presumed foreign bodies, or viruses, to use a word whose meaning has assumed renewed and vital significance in our pandemic age. We have borne witness under COVID-19 conditions to the reality that viruses do discriminate, that they do not affect all people equally. The pandemic has exposed the deep structural problems affecting nonwhite racialized workers in the core and the periphery of the Americas, including Canada, and across the entire world.¹⁶ But in the sixties it was surveillance that functioned like a virus, penetrating the intimate lives of the surveilled, as was evident in the RCMP’s attempts to police what they perceived to be wayward interracial relationships and sexual encounters. The state security apparatus’ actions were also permeated by a fear of Black-White political solidarity, and their surveillance and repression were part and parcel of the state’s presumption that it needed protection from a restive Black population.

When I wrote Fear of a Black Nation, I did not yet have the language that Saidiya Hartman has since introduced to explore the ways the state policed Black lives based on presumed intimate ties, in this case interracial ones, or to describe the lives of Black people who were not necessarily consciously acting politically but whose wayward lives both shaped and confronted the established order of things. Such an analysis – as in Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals – captures the inherently political nature of the criminalization of not just those who were, or are, political activists but also those who turned their backs on conventional society and its customs and mores in order to survive, and in some instances thrive, precisely because society had turned its back on them. Such an analysis would consider the lives of the criminalized in general and explain why during the Sir George Williams occupation in 1969 Black sex-trade workers would give their financial support to the Black protesters who had been arrested during the police raid on the computer centre.

Although I have not changed it, I do have lingering misgivings about the use of the time marker sixties in the book’s title. Some have interpreted Fear of a Black Nation as yet another sixties book, and there is currently a kind of sixties exhaustion, a fatigue that is the result of an over-represented decade that overcrowds our historical imagination as it drowns itself in its own popularity. But Fear of a Black Nation is not about the sixties, although it is very much rooted in that period. The long sixties embody one of those moments that we will constantly draw on for insights into the past and present, as well as future possibilities. But when we strip away the romance and headiness of that time and think about it in terms of self-organization and the struggle for social transformation and in relation to the ways surveillance, suppression, policing, and imprisoning curtailed and subverted Black life-chances and were intended to destroy the lives of activists – then we can begin to think about the threads, or the lines of continuity, that connect that historical moment with our own. Indeed, that is the whole point, and in this sense, the sixties are a part of the decades that they both anticipated and preceded and cannot, or at least should not, be studied in isolation from their contemporary implications.

Readers and reviewers of Fear of a Black Nation have focused on the importance of the Congress of Black Writers and the Sir George Williams protest, and rightly so. These were seminal events that played an important role in galvanizing Black folks in Montreal, Canada, the Caribbean, and, to a lesser extent, the U.K. and the U.S. But the book pivots around those events to make a larger point about Black and Caribbean political organizing and thought in Quebec and Canada – part of the Black and Caribbean radical traditions that are neither collapsible nor mutually exclusive – and their transnational (Caribbean and American) political filiations and implications. The book’s overarching thesis can be summed up in the following way: We live with the deep-seated racial codes that have roots in slavery and colonization, codes that were designed to discipline and punish people of African descent in the Americas – Black subjection to capital for the purpose of economic production. Today, these codes are deeply rooted in a fear of Black self-organization and of Black folks in general, as well as Black-White and Black-Indigenous solidarities. This is what I describe as biosexuality: a palpable sense of dread that is embedded in the psyche and rooted in the racial codes of slavery and that persist in its afterlife, shaping our daily human encounters, including intimate relations. This thesis is somewhat lost in the euphoria and spectacle of the monumental events of the Congress of Black Writers and the Sir George Williams protest.

Fear of a Black Nation implicitly poses questions that I could only explicitly pose, elaborate, and appreciate once the book had been written and released from my own consciousness, allowing me to further ponder its meaning and significance. These questions include: What do you do with a now surplus Black population whose bonded labour produced the surplus value (I realize that I am stretching Marx’s meaning of this term) that was essential to the accumulation of wealth that facilitated the emergence of modern capitalism? What happens to the emancipated but unfree who are restive and always potentially revolutionary? This was the Du Boisian dilemma, the problem, posed at the turn of the twentieth century in The Souls of Black Folks, and it is the central issue that is raised not only in Fear of a Black Nation but in any book that addresses post-emancipation Black life. The state’s response to this predicament has been repression and terror, policing and surveillance, alongside the quotidian diminishing, devaluing, and eroding of Black lives within a racialized state. This is what modern classics such as Afua Cooper’s The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal and Barrington Walker’s Race on Trial: Black Defendants in Ontario’s Criminal Courts: 1858–1958 demonstrated by opening up a space for thinking about the legal and extra-legal dynamics of race in Canada, and in the wider Americas, before Fear of a Black Nation was published. It is also what Robin Maynard’s Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present and Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey’s Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America have since examined. In this same spirit, I would also like to highlight Ronald Cummings and Nalini Mohabir’s recent anthology, The Fire That Time: Transnational Black Radicalism and the Sir George Williams Occupation, and Paul Hébert’s PhD dissertation, A Microcosm of the General Struggle: Black Thought and Activism in Montreal, 1960–1969.

The racial codes tethered to slavery are always present, even when they are unspoken – present in absentia, or unvisible. This, in part, accounts for what I have come to refer to since the publication of Fear of a Black Nation as the plantation-to-plant-to-prison pipeline.¹⁷ The plant accounts for the mass migration tied to the industrialization of Black labour from the South (including the Global South) to the North – including the From Motown to Ghost Town deindustrialization phenomenon embodied in cities like Detroit and Montreal. This process is characterized by surveillance and security measures, policing and prisons, and the persistence of unfreedom for the fungible and expendable – a surplus population subsisting on what Saidiya Hartman alternately refers to as the plantation extended into the city. Here Hartman adeptly counterposes the freedom associated with plots of land for personal cultivation in the post-emancipation period with the terror of plantations – urban plots against the plantation and the surveillance that had its origins in slavery and the administered logic of the plantation – all of which persists in northern cities as part of the reach of the plantation into the ghetto. The logic (yes, that much overused word) of the plantation in northern cities, including in Canada, engendered the surveillance and policing of the lives of Black folks, which have assumed varied forms in different contexts over time. Yet when it comes to Black lives in North America, as the Jamaican theorist Sylvia Wynter pointed out decades ago, the result has historically been a combination of de facto segregation tied to the logic of the plantation and the ongoing criminalization, ghettoization, and incarceration of Black folks, even as a tenuous Black elite, a presumed talented tenth, has emerged over time.¹⁸

As Hartman suggests, the extent to which these practices have affected the lives of women, including queer women, as part of the submerged tenth – the antithesis of Du Bois’s talented tenth – has been dramatically overlooked. To understand and appreciate the lives of these women, the surplus who have traditionally been criminalized and discarded, is to embrace them as agents of change engaged in acts of politics and resistance against the strictures and values of the state that polices their lives.¹⁹ The lives of these women embodied the urban extension, via migration, of the rural plantation that, in Hartman’s words, was not abolished, but transformed. Hartman goes on to say that the "problem of crime was the threat posed by the black presence in the city; the problem of crime was the wild experiment in black freedom; and the