Sankofa: Recovering Montreal's Heterogeneous Black Print Serials

Using the sankofa archival praxis, this thesis seeks to recover the unknown periodicals of Quebec’s largest urban area and Canada’s second largest. This qualitative research examines 196 Black periodicals published in Greater Montreal, from 1934 to the present. As a case study of Black-controlled serialized literature it includes: journals, newspapers, magazines, directories, bulletins, and newsletters. This thesis seeks to capture, organize, and catalogue a comprehensive checklist of Montreal’s Black serials. Despite the scores of Black publications produced in the last seventy years, the vast majority of the 196 titles located are unknown to Black readers within Montreal, Quebec. While this thesis assumes that the silence of these documents is intricately linked to the marginalized status of Blacks within Canada as a whole, and Quebec in particular, it focuses upon the context of the serials’ evolution, their concomitant invisibility within the Black community of Montreal and the national and urban context of these documents. The research does not ask why this body of literature is unknown to the general populace, but rather, why Blacks themselves, as creators, that is, the Black owners, journalists, and editors of the serials, are unaware of the existence of these serials. This dissertation explores the extent to which four factors may have contributed to the invisibility of these serials in Canada and in particular in the unique setting of Montreal: language, ethnicity, orality and the treatment of documents.