Identity and Industry

Reviewed by: Identity and Industry: Making Media Multicultural in Canada by Mark Hayward, and: African Canadian Leadership: Continuity, Transition, and Transformation ed. by Tamari Kitossa, Erica S. Lawson and Philip S.S. Howard Gordon Alley-Young Mark Hayward. Identity and Industry: Making Media Multicultural in Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019. 230 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $29.95 sc. Tamari Kitossa, Erica S. Lawson and Philip S.S. Howard, eds. African Canadian Leadership: Continuity, Transition, and Transformation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. 401 pp. Contributors. Index. $31.46 sc. At first glance, Mark Hayward’s (York University) cultural study of multicultural media in Canada post-WWII through to the digital age, and Tamari Kitossa (Brock University), Erica S. Lawson (University of Western Ontario), and Philip S.S. Howard’s (McGill University) edited volume on African Canadian leadership both have a shared Canadian context in common but seemingly little else. Upon deeper reflection, the books connect thematically in terms of how political policies such as multiculturalism, in practice, can work to erase rather than to preserve diverse cultures and how we need to broaden our traditional understandings and look to the periphery in order to get a more complex understanding of the subjects in question, whether it be African Canadian leadership or multicultural media infrastructure. Hayward’s work originated in his dissertation at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and was developed into a book with the help of a Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council grant. Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) also provided Hayward a bursary to research its extensive archive of third-language newspapers published in the province. Hayward rejects that his work is a history of multicultural media in Canada; rather, he argues that he selectively examines “institutions, organizations, norms, and regulations that served as the infrastructure supporting, monitoring, organizing, and managing the production and distribution of media serving minority communities” (Hayward, 7) from post-WWII to present time. His work is organized into four chapters that examine the creation of new cultural/linguistic spaces (chapter one), the degree of autonomy experienced by different media (chapter two), how media format was shaped by the interplay of language/culture and political and economic constraints (chapter three), and the scale of multicultural/multilingual media in terms of local, national, and global information dissemination (chapter four). By examining the constraints and limitations that infrastructure placed upon multicultural media, Hayward hopes [End Page 119] that we will be able to move forward in a way that “contributes to the continuous renewal of the demand for a commonality in and through (rather than against) difference” (Hayward, 172) in a way that simply studying cultural representations found in these media cannot provide. Kitossa, Lawson, and Howard’s edited volume is formidable in terms of the range of studies of African Canadian leadership it provides. The book is comprised of fourteen chapters across five sections, in addition to an introduction by the editors and a foreword by award-winning African Canadian sociologist, novelist, and journalist Dr. Cecil Foster (State University of New York at Buffalo) whose recent research on Black train porters in post-WWII Canada, specifically the women and men who fought for Canadian citizenship and employment rights, speaks to the ethos of this work. In Part One: Models and Theories, chapter one author Carl E. James’s piece, “Black Leadership and White Logic: Models of Community Engagement,” examines five models of Black leadership and critically interrogates the problematic ideologies and/or outcomes of each. The groundwork laid in this chapter resonates throughout the rest of the book. In Part Two: Women and Leadership, the chapters examine women’s leadership collectives in Quebec and Black women’s activism and leadership in academia. Notable is chapter seven, author and volume editor Erica S. Lawson’s piece, “Mercy for Their Children: A Feminist Reading of Black Women’s Maternal Activism and Leadership Practices,” for rewriting marginalized Black working-class women and their family and community leadership interventions back into the leadership literature, a literature base that Lawson notes is biased towards white, male, politically elite, and self-interested agents. Then, Part Three: Organizing and Mobilizing, examines issues

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