The Disappearing Act: Racial Banishment and the Geography of Black Lives in Canada

Mechanisms of removal have always been employed to extract or sever Black people from geographical landscapes. Geographical removal, a form of violence, not only ruptures connections between people and place but is a process of racial violence that is situated in histories of racial exclusion and colonial domination. This paper pays particular attention to cases of green dispossession and white gentrification as key contemporary sites through which racialized techniques of removal are practiced, enacted, and narrated to structure geographic domination. These violent acts of dispossession operate under the auspicious language of urban renewal/revitalization projects that underwrites and neatly erases the racialized management of Black bodies. Drawing on Ananya Roy’s concept of racial banishment, this paper sheds light on racial-colonial-state-instituted structures that function to propel processes of removal, while bringing attention to the ways that mechanisms of removal operate differently on Black geographies. I contend that the material and discursive work of (re)presenting Canadian landscapes through revitalization projects, and varying processes of legally imposed spatial exclusion, is not merely a practice of capital accumulation or burial, but also that of racial banishment which brings into focus the legal disappearance of African/Black Canadians in geography.