To Protest for Black Life during the Pandemic: Resistance and Freedom in a Settler State

Abstract

This article reflects on the global uprisings in support of Black life during the early pandemic. The focus is on what the protests reveal about Black resistance to the nation-building project of Canada. Protests during this period are understood here to have included taking to the streets, practicing care, and calling for abolition. Drawing on critical race theory and Black Studies, especially Black feminism, the author claims these forms of protest condemned Black dispossession under Canadian laws, while they simultaneously exceeded Canada’s jurisdiction. In other words, the protests can be understood ambivalently, as occurring under and responding to, but not being of, domination. They refashioned the self and the collective, expressing transient freedom from domination and partial redress, even as settler colonial laws would continue to suppress Black and other subaltern peoples. The article navigates such insights through works by Dionne Brand, Saidiya Hartman, and Katherine McKittrick, among others.