The Toronto Africentric Alternative School: Media, Blackness, and Discourses of Multiculturalism and Critical Multiculturalism

Nicole Neverson

Abstract


This article examines the representational discourses in two Canadian ethnic publications after a campaign to secure approval of a publically funded Africentric school in the Toronto District School Board came to fruition. In documenting both publications’ problematization of issues surrounding the school, this analysis demonstrates how discourses of multiculturalism and critical multiculturalism structured the articulation of blackness as identity in the coverage. Representational discourses employed by each publication underscore the complicated and nuanced responses to community issues that ethnic media often adopt in order to affirm sociopolitical positions to those within and beyond their referential borders.


Keywords


critical multiculturalism, Canadian media, blackness, Africentric school, discourse analysis.

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