‘‘Mama, I’m Walking to Canada’’: Black Geopolitics and Invisible Empires

Abstract

My title, as you may recognize, is a line from Alice Walker’s canonical onepage vignette in which she defines “womanist.” This of course comes out of her collection of essays In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens and is also anthologized in many women’s studies and black studies compilations. In Walker’s articulation of it, womanism is code for black feminism and as such encapsulates the basic tenets of a political and theoretical orientation that contends with race and gender simultaneously. More interesting for my purposes here, however, is that in this passage, one of Walker’s metaphors for resistance, rebellion, and empowerment takes the form of an emboldened female declaring, “Mama, I’m walking to Canada and I’m taking you and a bunch of other slaves with me” (1983:xi). “Mama’s” reply, “it wouldn’t be the first time,” denotes a long legacy of black American – female and male – freedom struggles, struggles against myriad forms of racial domination the magnitude of which can hardly be overstated (1983:xi). Walker’s nod to Canada also suggests, rightly, that the U.S.’s neighbor to the north holds a special place within a genealogy of African American political projects and freedom struggles. At the same time, in Walker’s fleeting reference, Canada’s significance is symbolic, symbolic of freedom for African Americans. Canada as a symbol of liberation elides the fact of Canada as a geographical location, a place with a black population that is itself negotiating myriad forms of oppression that overlap with, but do not replicate American ones. People have challenged Walker’s “womanist” formulation, its side-stepping the “f ” word (the “f ” word being “feminism”), its spiritual undertones, its exceptionalist positing of black women. If it is becoming more prevalent in small academic circles to query, troping Stuart Hall, “what is this ‘black,’” what is this oft-hailed signifier, it remains an inadequately explored trajectory (1993:21). Even less developed, however, is the overlapping question of “where is this black,” despite the growing popularity of academic constructions of “diaspora.” This essay foregrounds this question of “where;” it examines the relationship between black subjectivity and geopolitics as one transhistorical