Book Review: Blackening Canada: Diaspora, Race, Multiculturalism by Paul Barrett

[para. 1]: "Paul Barrett's Blackening Canada: Diaspora, Race, Multiculturalism is an important intervention in a steadily mounting body of literary criticism on black Canadian diasporic literature and history. Employing the freighted and seemingly intractable twin Gordian knots of the Canadian Multicultural Act and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to frame a discussion of black Canadian diasporic writing, Blackening Canada investigates the ways black writers reveal the legislations' inherent biases and contradictions and challenge and rejuvenate the terminological and practical possibilities of multiculturalism by ''generat[ing] an alternative vocabulary of presence and belonging that exceeds the boundaries of the nation'' and ''blackens'' Canada."