| Summary/Abstract |
Montreal, a city delimited by a French-speaking East and an English-speaking West, is often used as an example of how language can organize urban landscapes. That said, examining Black life in Montreal complicates that tidy narrative by illustrating how race, not language, configures the city. Broadly, this study examines the way racial and linguistic divisions play out in the geography of the city. More specifically, as it is grounded in Black geography and cultural geography, this paper highlights how Black activists in the 1990s made explicit the many ways in which Blackness in Montreal was rooted in a history and a geography that exceeds urban and national boundaries. Contesting an ethnicization that marked their Haitianness as outside Blackness, these activists also bridged smaller-scale divisions: those inscribed at the scale of the city that placed Haitians in the East and Black anglophone people in the West.
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