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COMPLEMENTING REWRITINGS of the Harlem Renaissance such as Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo and Toni Morrison's Jazz, Mairuth Sarsfield, in her first novel, No Crystal Stair, attempts to re-create a particularly Canadian (post-)Harlem Renaissance. By rhetorically refiguring African American constructions of race such as those in Nella Larsen's novels, Sarsfield writes into Canadian history a definitive space for Black Canadians. George Elliott Clarke, in his groundbreaking study "Contesting a Model Blackness: A Meditation on African-Canadian African Americanism, or The Structures of African Canadianite," demonstrates how Black Canadian writers rework African American tropes to produce literature that is particularly Canadian. Like the writers whom Clarke catalogues, Sarsfield transforms American figurations. Specifically, she cleverly refigures Harlem Renaissance objections to American racial categorization such as those that Larsen makes, so that her writing reflects problems in and solutions to the ways of categorizing in Canadian society. In so doing, Sarsfield addresses her novel to an assumed audience sharing a Canadian understanding of group division. Larsen's argument against American modes of racial classification can help to reveal Sarsfield's manipulation of the Canadian identity categories even as Sarsfield's rewriting of the genre may help to clarify Larsen's rhetorical agenda for re-creating the ways in which her readers view race.
Census questions on cultural identity as they have evolved over the years provide a barometer of ideological differences in the American and Canadian ways of categorizing citizens. Although both censuses have varied greatly in their long histories, the U.S. census has always focused its division on race - so that, for instance, for the past twenty years, the official federal government categories were American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian or Pacific Islander, Black, Hispanic, and White (with the option to consider Hispanic as a race or as a secondary ethnicity),2 whereas the Canadian census (until 1996) always focused on what we would nowadays term "ethnicity": for instance, Jamaican, Cree, Vietnamese, French, English, Ghanaian, Danish, et cetera. I use "race" here to indicate a categorization based on perceived skin colour often linked to the perception that one's race marks a biological or genetic difference from other races. I use "ethnicity," on the other hand, to describe categories that represent cultural differences in which perceived skin colour does not determine the dividing lines and...