Pan-Africanism in Canada: Anti-Blackness and Black Consciousness in Canada's Capital

This thesis examines Ottawa as a space of radical Black leadership among African, Caribbean, and Black (ACB) Canadians. I explore Ottawa's Black Radical Tradition (BRT) through a qualitative discourse analysis of three recent anti-racism policies and twelve semi-structured interviews with ACB leaders. The research explores the heuristic efficacy of the term anti-Blackness in diverse ACB leadership groups. The findings indicate that ACB leadership is diverse and yet a political commitment to the BRT binds leaders together. This thesis proposes that anti-Blackness is a useful concept for a group as diverse as Black Canadians articulating their racial experiences within a political climate of multiculturalism. This proposition is based on a non-identarian argument for the importance of anti-Blackness as an ethical and political stance in which the definition must be extended to account for transnational experiences of Blackness and simplified for use outside academia.