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About Dr. Andrea Davis

Andrea A. Davis is Professor of Black Cultures of the Americas in the Department of Humanities at York University and co-editor of the Journal of Canadian Studies. A champion of Black Studies in the humanities and former Canadian Commonwealth scholar, her interdisciplinary research is rooted in an anti-racism feminist framework that analyzes questions of race and gender through a focus on the literary and cultural productions of Black women, constructions of Black youth masculinities, and Black and Indigenous solidarities. As Academic Convenor of the 2023 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, she led a transformative vision of interdisciplinary research grounded in Indigenous and Black Thought and environmental justice. Previously, as interim director of the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC) in 2012-2013, her SSHRC-funded research on the effects of violence on Black youth in Canada and Jamaica was profiled in the Council of Ontario Universities' Research Matters campaign. A passionate advocate for students, Davis is also an accomplished teacher who has won teaching awards at the faculty, university and national levels, including a 2021 3M National Teaching Fellowship. In November 2023, she received an Honorary Doctor of Laws (honoris causa) from Royal Roads University in recognition of her contributions to Black Studies. She is the lead editor of The Routledge Handbook to Black Canadian Literature (forthcoming in fall 2024), and her next book project is a creative nonfiction exploration of women’s nineteenth and twentieth-century journeys across the Atlantic Ocean and Sargasso Sea.

Book: “Horizon, Sea, Sound. Caribbean and African Women's Cultural Critiques of Nation”

Dr. Davis proposes insightful reflections on the place of reintegrated histories as places of resistance and solidarity in the face of exploitation and dispossession in Canada and in the Americas more broadly.

The critique of Canadian multiculturalism that Davis proposes enables the formulation of theoretical tools of solidarity to resist the hegemonic violence of the nation-state. Davis demands that stories of African and Caribbean subjects be revealed beyond national or regional borders. They must be integrated, weaved into a historical and contemporary narrative of the Americas, one able to cast the plurality of their shared experiences of land and sea. 

The contribution of the book invites us to challenge the nation-state category of analysis as inadequate. By integrating the history of Caribbean women into shared narratives of anti-capitalist resistance, Davis shatters regional categories themselves. In many ways, her book suggests that it’s impossible to think about either the Canadian past or future without integrating the past and future of Caribbean, African and Indian subjects.

The prose is clear and fluid. The arguments are organized in an impeccable structure. Sources are varied and used in the study with both analytical rigor and intellectual creativity. A superb endeavor that deserves to be celebrated and recognized by peers in the Americas and the Caribbeans.