These "islands" could be about the countries, colonies, and territories of the Caribbean. However, I am also acknowledging the "islands" of space, place, and belonging in Canada and the United States. This digital project is an ongoing historical archive of Black Toronto using primary documents and cultural artifacts to create a multidimensional interactive mapping exhibition.
Using CARTO, I created an ongoing collection of sites with cultural/social significance to the Black Caribbean/Canadian community in Metropolitan Toronto, Ontario, Canada. This map covers most of the twentieth century, discovering Black Canadian points of rupture through spatial, social, and lived spaces while answering historical questions about where and when Blackness enters and resists Canadian geographies at-large.
an interactive timeline of Black Toronto during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries using text, photographs, video, and sound.
Examine the items collected and archived in this OMEKA database. With over three hundred spaces and places recorded (and counting), Islands in the North becomes an emancipatory contribution to Canadian and Black Atlantic scholarship and conversation.
Islands in the North by Marlene H. Gaynair is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.