Toronto In Colour: the 1980s features street scenes from the 1980s when I was new to the city, and saw it with fresh eyes. I had no way to anticipate how significant these Toronto photos would seem to me 30 years later. They show things that no longer exist, even though it hasn't been that long. Without necessarily trying to, I caught images of buildings, cars, fashions, gadgets that are no longer part of our world. Toronto's entire skyline is utterly changed, part of the inevitable growth and evolution.
"Toronto Flashback" (1980-1986), by Avard Woolaver, documents the city of Toronto, Canada, in the 1980s. Woolaver grew up in rural Nova Scotia and moved to Toronto in 1980 to study photography. He did a lot of street photography in those years, capturing street scenes with fresh eyes. Michael Amo writes in the introduction, "When Avard arrived in Toronto in 1980, he brought that watchfulness with him, that deep-seated empathy for humans going about their solitary business, a simultaneous loneliness and delight in our ceaseless effort to remake the world in our own image."
Queering Urban Justice foregrounds visions of urban justice that are critical of racial and colonial capitalism, and asks: What would it mean to map space in ways that address very real histories of displacement and erasure? What would it mean to regard Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (QTBIPOC) as geographic subjects who model different ways of inhabiting and sharing space? The volume describes city spaces as sites where bodies are exhaustively documented while others barely register as subjects. The editors and contributors interrogate the forces that have allowed QTBIPOC to be imagined as absent from the very spaces they have long invested in. From the violent displacement of poor, disabled, racialized, and sexualized bodies from Toronto’s gay village, to the erasure of queer racialized bodies in the academy, Queering Urban Justice offers new directions to all who are interested in acting on the intersections of social, racial, economic, urban, migrant, and disability justice.
Toronto has long been a place that people of colour move to in order to join queer of colour communities. Yet the city’s rich history of activism by queer and trans people who are Black, Indigenous, or of colour (QTBIPOC) remains largely unwritten and unarchived. While QTBIPOC have a long and visible presence in the city, they always appear as newcomers in queer urban maps and archives in which white queers appear as the only historical subjects imaginable. The first collection of its kind to feature the art, activism, and writings of QTBIPOC in Toronto, Marvellous Grounds tells the stories that have shaped Toronto’s landscape but are frequently forgotten or erased. Responding to an unmistakable desire in QTBIPOC communities for history and lineage, this rich volume allows us to imagine new ancestors and new futures.
Delving behind Canada’s veneer of multiculturalism and tolerance, Policing Black Lives traces the violent realities of anti-blackness from the slave ships to prisons, classrooms and beyond. Robyn Maynard provides readers with the first comprehensive account of nearly four hundred years of state-sanctioned surveillance, criminalization and punishment of Black lives in Canada. While highlighting the ubiquity of Black resistance, Policing Black Lives traces the still-living legacy of slavery across multiple institutions, shedding light on the state’s role in perpetuating contemporary Black poverty and unemployment, racial profiling, law enforcement violence, incarceration, immigration detention, deportation, exploitative migrant labour practices, disproportionate child removal and low graduation rates. Emerging from a critical race feminist framework that insists that all Black lives matter, Maynard’s intersectional approach to anti-Black racism addresses the unique and understudied impacts of state violence as it is experienced by Black women, Black people with disabilities, as well as queer, trans, and undocumented Black communities. A call-to-action, Policing Black Lives urges readers to work toward dismantling structures of racial domination and re-imagining a more just society.
The history of Toronto's nightlife reveals its pulse.From award-winning veteran music journalist and DJ Denise Benson comes Then & Now: Toronto Nightlife History, a fascinating, intimate look at four decades of social spaces, dance clubs, and live music venues. Through interviews, research, and enthusiastic feedback from the party people who were there, Benson delves deep behind the scenes to reveal the histories of 48 influential nightlife spaces, and the story of a city that has grown alongside its sounds.
"No Money Down - Toronto (1980-1986)", by Avard Woolaver, documents the city of Toronto, Canada, in the 1980s. It is a follow-up to his first book "Toronto Flashback (1980-1986)". Woolaver grew up in rural Nova Scotia and moved to Toronto in 1980 to study photography. He did a lot of street photography in those years, capturing street scenes with fresh eyes. From the introduction: "Looking back now at the photos some thirty years later, so much comes back to me about being dropped into a new environment. We use our creative tools as extensions of ourselves; they help us understand and define our place in the world. For me, having a camera in my hand at all times helped me remember: You only get to do this once. We have to take the time to see it as clearly as we can."Derek Flack writes in blogTO, "Woolaver's work is so fascinating--a record of Toronto with a soul."
Historically Canadians have considered themselves to be more or less free of racial prejudice. Although this conception has been challenged in recent years, it has not been completely dispelled. In Colour-Coded, Constance Backhouse illustrates the tenacious hold that white supremacy had on our legal system in the first half of this century, and underscores the damaging legacy of inequality that continues today. Backhouse presents detailed narratives of six court cases, each giving evidence of blatant racism created and enforced through law. The cases focus on Aboriginal, Inuit, Chinese-Canadian, and African-Canadian individuals, taking us from the criminal prosecution of traditional Aboriginal dance to the trial of members of the 'Ku Klux Klan of Kanada.' From thousands of possibilities, Backhouse has selected studies that constitute central moments in the legal history of race in Canada. Her selection also considers a wide range of legal forums, including administrative rulings by municipal councils, criminal trials before police magistrates, and criminal and civil cases heard by the highest courts in the provinces and by the Supreme Court of Canada. The extensive and detailed documentation presented here leaves no doubt that the Canadian legal system played a dominant role in creating and preserving racial discrimination. A central message of this book is that racism is deeply embedded in Canadian history despite Canada's reputation as a raceless society. Winner of the Joseph Brant Award, presented by the Ontario Historical Society
Toronto Graffiti is a 500+ page book comprising 21 precedent-setting artist interviews, 1,000+ full-color photos, maps, timelines, definitions, and opinion pieces.
Skinheads. Drug dealers. Cops. For two brothers-of-circumstance navigating the violent streets of this industrial wasteland, every urban tribe is a potential threat. Yet it is amongst the denizens of these unforgiving alleys, dangerous squat houses, and underground nightclubs that the brothers - and the small street tribe to which they belong - forge the bonds that will see them through senseless minor cruelties, the slow and constant grind of poverty, and savage boot culture violence. Friendship. Understanding. Affinity. For two brothers, these fragile ties are the only hope they have for salvation in the wake of a mutual girlfriend's suicide, an event so devastating that it drives one to seek solace far from his steel city roots, and the other to a tragic - yet miraculous - transformation, a heartbreaking metamorphosis from poet and musician to street prophet, emerging from a self-imposed cocoon an urban shaman, mad-eyed shaper of (t)ruthless reality. What We Salvage is a reckless, gritty, and unapologetic journey, a novel that seizes the poignant fragility of Catcher in the Rye and throws it into a merciless world reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange. It is a work that author James Morrow dubbed "postmodern punk," a term that befits Baillie's poetry-as-street-prose style.
