This study investigates creating antiracist spaces and determining what an antiracist sociohistorical geography looks like. I argue that an antiracist sociohistorical geography is always necessarily unfinished and in a state of becoming. I introduce as my study site a section of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, that was once a neighbourhood known as The Ward. At different times in the past, the land of this area was home to the Mississauga of the Credit First Nation, a Black community, a Jewish community, and a Chinese community. Through investigations of these historic racialized communities and through field site examination, I first document how current cultural representations within this space create racist exclusions. Next, through discussion of my experience with the Ontario Black History Society’s (OBHS) walking tour in and around this space, and through analysis of one-on-one interviews with OBHS representatives, I show the tour as creating starting points for developing antiracist geographies. Finally, by imagining the space devoid of racist exclusions, I illustrate what an antiracist sociohistorical geography might look like but also that the portrayal is a spatial and temporal moment and therefore unfinished. I combine an anti-essentialist antiracist historical methodology with critical discourse analysis and critical ethnography. My main finding is that inclusions of excluded racialized groups into dominant discourse can contribute to naming and perhaps troubling particular racisms, but do not automatically disrupt systems and structures that (re)create exclusions. To deconstruct these powers, antiracism must incorporate ongoing disruptions of dominance over space. My study shows the potential for shifting discursive meanings around racialized bodies in relation to each other and sociohistorical geographies they occupy. These shifts have implications for how sociohistorical spaces become forums of social studies and history education in everyday spaces and in schools, as people (re)learn to read bodies within sociohistorical spaces in antiracist ways.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T15:25:16Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 EnzioGSA_DISSERT.pdf: 2340735 bytes, checksum: 3e76cf2c6a9fa044f4fc67e9e62cdd17 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-11-22 / Tropicalia concerns the attempt of understanding of Brazil and a national identity characterized by the transience of time and space, rhizomatic action, perpetual laceration of cultural boundaries and at the same time act synchronously to instances such as policy and the social. A word created by artist H?lio Oiticica and registered by him on the National Register of Trademarks and Patents, was later used to a name the eponymous song by Caetano Veloso and also in this fertile cultural impulse at the turn of the sixties to the seventies on last century, who had the intention to make creating new spaces and simultaneously rethink the spatial cuts of Brazilian culture, encouraging them to be much more than a myth of a paradise within a lush new look of a tropical truth. / Tropic?lia diz respeito ? tentativa de compreens?o do Brasil e de uma identidade nacional caracterizada pela transitoriedade de tempos e espa?os, de a??o rizom?tica, de um perp?tuo esgar?amento de fronteiras culturais e que ao mesmo instante age de forma sincr?nica a inst?ncias como a da pol?tica e ao do social. A palavra criada pelo artista pl?stico H?lio Oiticica e por ele registrada no registro nacional de marcas e patentes a posteriori, foi usada para nomear a can??o hom?nima de Caetano Veloso e tamb?m a esse f?rtil impulso cultural na virada da d?cada de sessenta para os anos setenta, que teve a pretens?o de formular novos espa?os de cria??o e simultaneamente repensar os recortes espaciais da cultura brasileira, instigando-os a serem bem mais que um mito de um para?so verdejante dentro de uma nova mirada de uma verdade tropical.