can you hear me?

It's hard to write when you're unsure of your audience. Who needs to know about the representation of blacks in Canadian children's literature? If I write a traditional scholarly paper and submit it to an academic journal, it'll be read by a handful of people. If I post an informal essay on my blog, then anyone who searches for Canadian children's literature will be able to find this data. But how do I reach the powers that be and/or the general public in Canada?

My examination of middle grade and young adult novels published in Canada since 2000 reveals a curious preoccupation with slavery.  Of the 25 novels I was able to find, 8 are written by black authors and 17 by white authors; 3 of the 8 black-authored novels are on the subject of slavery; 2 are set in contemporary Africa, and 3 are set in the contemporary Caribbean.  Only 1 is set in contemporary Canada, and judging from the cover, it is unclear whether this black-authored book features a black protagonist (I Have Been in Danger by Cheryl Foggo; 2001).

Of the 17 novels written by whites, 10 are historical novels set in the era of slavery; 6 are set in Africa (5 contemporary, 1 historical), and one contemporary novel (Jakeman by Deborah Ellis; 2007) is set in the United States.

What does this tell us about the way black children figure in the (white) Canadian imagination?  In these 17 novels, black youth appear as fugitive and/or former slaves or as African refugees fleeing from war and disease.  Why is it so difficult for authors of any race to situate black teens in contemporary Canada? Are such manuscripts being rejected by Canadian publishers in favor of stories set in more "exotic" locales, or do they not even exist? What could explain this silence from writers in the black Canadian community? In the US, women writers are responsible for the majority of black-authored MG/YA novels. It's hard for me to name any contemporary black female authors in Canada—there's no Canadian equivalent of Edwidge Danticat or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie or Zadie Smith (novelists under 40). So perhaps the lack of MG/YA novels has something to do with the larger absence of black women from the Canadian literary scene…