This article investigates the efficacy of community organizing by African Caribbean migrants in Toronto, Ontario. The author argues that community organizing was an instinctive initiative of African Caribbean people. Historically, Black community organizational agenda, although owing much to its own resourcefulness and fortitude, was intimately connected to the influence and strength of the larger White population. Racism and social exclusions were the major external factors influencing the majority of African Caribbean institutional building. In recreating community, African Caribbean people were influenced by this political milieu. Nevertheless, they were also influenced by their own internal desires and dreams of a better standard of living and a better life for their children. They were also subjected by, for example, their own ideas regarding class, culture, gender roles, family ties, work ethic, and diasporic connections that influenced how they (re)negotiate community.

While making clear that black femininity exists and is located in multiple spaces, this essay brings out the intellectual and cultural presence and voices of black women in both national and international feminist communities. We engage black feminist thought (BFT) by offering the example of our community—the Ekwe Collective—a sisterhood of six feminist scholar–activists and their daughters. This essay offers insights on how BFT translates to the lived experience of communities of color in the twenty-first century. In particular, we draw upon and extend three dimensions of the theory: experience, generation, and space.

In trying to dismantle the hegemony of Western methodological frameworks, feminist and Black methodologies, which critique objectivity and value reciprocal engagement between researcher and subject, were used to explore research issues with African Caribbean subjects. In addition, using reflexivity, a process that is central to Black and feminist analytical frameworks, the authors interrogate and dispute the value of 'inherited western techniques' such as objectivity and the distancing of researcher from the 'researched'.

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Black Canadian artists and scholars challenge racist and nationalist discourses of Canadian nationhood and citizenship that place First Nations people, people of African descent and other people of colour who are born in Canada and can claim Canadian nationality based on birth, as outsiders. By contesting the 'master narrative' of Canadian nationhood and by interrogating blackness within Canada, these artists and scholars claim "African Canada" as a convergence of multiple African diasporic voices, coming from different ethno, cultural, linguistic and national spaces, but together articulating a deliberately transgressive Canadianness.