“WE WERE NEVER MEANT TO SURVIVE”: AFRICAN DIASPORIC COMMUNITIES IN ATLANTIC CANADA

Black rural communities in Canada are largely absent in the scholarship on the land question in the Americas. Because Canada has rarely been theorized as part of the African or Black Diaspora, these communities have been missing from land and labor discussions about that diaspora. Professor Bowen’s comparative study of Black rural communities in the Atlantic province of Nova Scotia fills an important lacuna in the analysis of their protracted struggle for land, livelihood, and citizenship rights. It aims to create new narratives of Black rural community life in Canada by analyzing the diverse experiences of people of African descent and by situating them as speakers and agents of their own lives. By looking at land and labor, the study will bring to light untold stories of African Nova Scotian ingenuity and resilience. This book project is the first to examine the Canadian variant of land and labor struggles within an African diasporic framework. We Were Never Meant to Survive uses the diasporic Canadian Atlantic as an empirical and theoretical framework to extend the geographical scope of the African diaspora and to internationalize Black Canadian history. African Nova Scotian people have been residing in Nova Scotia for almost 300 years, making them the oldest Black population in Canada. They are descendants of enslaved Africans and freed people, Black Loyalists from the United States, Nova Scotian colonists of Sierra Leone, Maroons from Jamaica, and refugees from the War of 1812. Yet their history (like the history of Black people in Canada in general) is understudied and not well-documented. It is overshadowed by a narrative that has portrayed Canada as the land of the free. We Were Never Meant to Survive provides a counternarrative to Canada as a land of freedom and refuge for Black people, contributing to a burgeoning body of new scholarship.