Abstract
This study explores the centrality of the Black Continental African Soccer Club (BCASC) as a “diasporic resource” for members of the new African diaspora who play in an over-35 men's recreational soccer league in a Western Canadian city. Drawing from a multiyear ethnography, we critically examine how the BCASC serves as a crucial Black sporting institution for its members to collectively navigate anti-Black racism and the set of limits and pressures that come with being typecast as model minorities—the dominant representational figure for multiculturalism in the Canadian political economy—as they aspire to be, and live, as their fully fledged, and culturally authentic Black selves. Like other historic Black and ethnic sporting institutions, the BCASC and its related practices of fraternal sociality and solidarity serve as identity-affirming and redemptive, sanctuary sites where team members confront dominant and exclusionary forms of whiteness and its subordinating customs, all while palliating “homing desire” through nostalgic expressions of home.
Introduction
This study critically examines how soccer and its associated activities of sociality as “cultural productions” serve as “diasporic resources” (Nassy Brown, 1998) for members of the new African diaspora who play on a Black Continental African Soccer Club (BCASC) in an over-35 men's recreational soccer league in a Western Canadian city. Through a multiyear ethnography, we explore how the BCASC and its related practices of sociality serve as crucial sites for team members to navigate anti-Black racism and the set of limits and pressures that come with being typecast as model minorities—the dominant representational figure for multiculturalism in the Canadian political economy—as they aspire to be, and live, as their fully fledged, and culturally authentic Black selves. Better known as economic migrants, most members of the BCASC are African born, aged 37 to 55 (the majority in their early to mid-40s), who emigrated to Canada over the past two decades in search of economic opportunity, social stability, and a better quality of life. This class of immigrants, valued primarily by the Canadian settler state for the contribution of their racialized labor, are prime targets of a reconfigured immigration program propelled by neoliberal objectives (Ferrer et al., 2014).
Contemporary Black African immigrants are increasingly recognized as a vital part of Canadian society and, crucially, its political economy; yet they continue to routinely confront ideological and material challenges in the local organization of immigrant life as they “negotiate a society marked by norms and power relations of whiteness” (Creese, 2011]: 21). The role of sport in the migration and resettlement of racialized immigrants in Canada has been extensively addressed (e.g. Doherty & Taylor, 2007; Rich et al., 2015; Tirone et al., 2010), including the historical role that ethnic sporting associations and clubs have played in the preservation of racial and ethnic identities (e.g. Joseph, 2012). However, research that focuses on the sporting experiences of Black continental African immigrants is lacking. Furthermore, public discourse and academic literature has tended to promote a monolithic Black discourse—a result of racialization—portraying Blacks as a homogeneous group. This conflation overlooks the constitutive differences between the earlier transatlantic enslavement-forced diaspora, and twentieth-century voluntary immigrants from postcolonial Africa set in the context of histories, economics, and politics, including the ongoing settler-colonial economic project in Western Canada (Konadu-Agyemang et al., 2006).
Between 1905 and 1912, many Black immigrants arrived in Western Canada from Oklahoma, seeking land and freedom. As arrivants 1 (Byrd, 2011) on Indigenous territories who contributed racialized labor to transform Indigenous land into private property, their lives had already been enmeshed in broader processes of colonialism and imperialism. And, while they remained entangled with local structures of oppression (settler colonialism) in complicated ways, they also faced significant hostility from local politicians and organizations, leading to an Order-in-Council (P.C. 1324) that recommended restrictions on Black immigration to maintain the “whiteness” of the region; authorities also used tactics like selective enforcement of regulations, propaganda, and coercion of transport companies to limit Black immigration.
Black residents faced systemic racism and threats from groups like the Ku Klux Klan, along with discriminatory policies that marginalized them, such as a 1923 Edmonton order barring Blacks from public pools. Black immigration remained largely restricted until the 1967 changes to immigration policy, which eliminated race-based selection criteria. Limited exceptions, like the 1955 West Indian Domestic Scheme, allowed some Black immigrants to enter as temporary domestic workers. And, while much has changed in the Canadian political economy, members of the new Black African diaspora continue to contribute their racialized labor to the ongoing settler-colonial economic project, all while enduring anti-Black racism as they navigate the structures and hierarchies of white supremacy, on and off the field of play.
This study addresses these issues by focusing on the centrality of sport in the contemporary resettlement experiences of Black continental African immigrants as a distinct social group in relation to broader themes of racial politics, multiculturalism, cultural representation, and identity formation. In what follows, we explore the identity-conferring power of the Black, African soccer institution through which team members conceptualize and forge oppositional—individual and collective—Black identities as they navigate a white supremacist racial and ethnic hierarchy. We argue that the BCASC and its attendant activities of sociality and solidarity—especially, the weekly and exclusive Black fraternal postgame social sessions at “the parliament,” a cultural signifier used to describe the discursively created diasporic space appropriated for Black expressive culture—are salient collective meaning-making practices.
These practices are mobilized by members of the BCASC in the agentic formation of a diasporic consciousness 2 to challenge exclusionary narratives about identity and assumptions about (un)belonging in Canada upon which economic citizenship in the ongoing settler colonial economic project is imagined, while also palliating “homing desire” (Brah, 1996) through nostalgic, performative expressions of home and of their past lives. Through the BCASC, metaphorical (e.g. imaginary homelands) and corporeal (e.g. hanging out) facets of diaspora coalesce, underlining the “imaginative work that fosters diasporic connectedness and the physical movement through and across space” (Johnson, 2012: 1). Historically, this imaginative work—often heavy emotional labor—is undertaken by marginalized groups as they create complex “moments, tactics, discourses” (Clifford, 1994: 277) “for transforming even the most sinister experiences of dislocation into vibrant and revolutionary forms of political and cultural life” (Chariandy, 2006: para 1).
Sport and diaspora studies: Converging discourses of multiculturalism and model minorities
Our analytical framework draws on insights from diaspora studies, particularly Jacqueline Nassy Brown's (1998) concept of “diasporic resources,” and builds on existing research that foregrounds race and structural racial inequality. This allows us to interrogate the influence of racism on migration and entanglements within dominant structures of power (Gilroy, 1987; Hall, 1994). Paul Gilroy's argument that Black communities confront racial oppression through their use of cultural and political resources provides the theoretical scaffolding for Nassy Brown's work. In his analysis of the post-war antiracism struggles of Afro-Caribbean communities in 1970s and early 1980s Britain, Gilroy underscores the significance of Afro-Caribbean music as both a politically subversive tool in shaping Black identities, and as a cultural medium of political resistance. He highlights the dynamic cultural syncretism that shapes the construction of transnational Black identities, rooted in a shared consciousness of racialized experiences among geographically dispersed communities. Gilroy emphasizes that Afro-American cultural and political practices transcend national boundaries, symbolizing the diaspora. He argues that these practices are appropriated by Blacks outside the United States as “raw materials for creative processes which redefine what it means to be Black, adapting it …” to specific experience in various national formations in the active making and remaking of Black culture (Gilroy, 1987: 154).
Nassy Brown expands on Gilroy's (1987) idea of “raw materials” by introducing the concept of “diasporic resources,” which she defines as “cultural productions such as music…people and places, as well as iconography, ideas, and ideologies associated with them” (p. 298). She examines how Black Liverpudlians appropriate elements of “Black America” in their cultural and political practices, using these diasporic resources to assert agency and to resist oppressive structures, even while adapting to living conditions characterized by vulnerability and precarity. Of particular relevance is the idea that cultural productions and expressive cultural practices, such as music, serve as diasporic resources for agency. To Nassy Brown's list we can foreground sport and physical culture (McSweeney and Nakamura, 2019; Joseph, 2017) as historically significant diasporic resources that are mobilized by Black communities “for particular reasons, to meet particular needs … within limits, within and against power asymmetries and with political consequences” (Nassy Brown, 1998: 298). It is therefore imperative to attend to the usage of sporting diasporic resources by members of the new African diaspora as mechanisms for political organization and solidarity, and to center its analytical promise of “map[ping] diasporic space, helping to define its margins and centers, while also crucially determining who is allowed to go where, when, under what conditions and for what purposes” (Nassy Brown, 1998: 298).
In the Canadian context, sociologists and historians have shown how Black and other racialized and ethnic minority groups have used sport and physical cultural practices to carve out spaces for themselves in hostile racial and ethnic hierarchies (Kidd, 1996; Nzindukiyimana and Wamsley, 2021). Janelle Joseph (2010) deploys many of these ideas in her exploration of a men's recreational Black Caribbean cricket and social club in the Greater Toronto Area. Joseph (2010) examines the utility of these gendered spaces as sites for the maintenance of both the place of origin and a unifying home space of diasporic belonging, while also laying bare the implicit racial fissures that mark these spaces as proprietary. In underlining how team members construct, maintain, and affirm shifting (collective) identities and ways of being through cricket and its associated forms of sociality, her research shows how diasporic Black men “generate networks that help to continually accept, question, and/or resist their ‘place,’ build their identities, and feel a pluri-local sense of home” (Joseph, 2021: 436). Similarly, in his earlier ethnographic work in Leeds, England, Ben Carrington (1998) illuminates the significance of the Caribbean Cricket Club (CCC) as a sovereign Black diasporic and distinctly masculinist space, one that provides club members with a visceral sense of ontological security, serving as a vehicle for homemaking.
We use the concept of diasporic resources—and the themes of diasporic consciousness (identity and belonging) and nostalgia—as an analytical tool to explore the centrality of the BCASC for members of the new African diaspora as they recreate their lives in multicultural Canada. Since 1988, when the Canadian Multiculturalism Act received royal assent, a dominant discourse of multiculturalism has articulated a hegemonic set of ideals relating to cultural pluralism, diversity, and embracement of inclusivity as core Canadian values supplanting former colonialist ideologies (Kallen, 2004). Yet, as Bannerji (2000: 42) argues, the “core community synthesized into a national ‘we’ … is an essentialized version of a Colonial European turned into Canadian which decides on the terms of multiculturalism.” One of the key terms of multiculturalism is a “bilingual framework” that rearticulates conceptions of national belonging from previously blatant racial considerations to the domain of language and culture (Thobani, 2007). This recasting of “race” as Anglophone and Francophone “cultures” provides the facade that conceals the power dynamics that are historically rooted in racialized class formations and ongoing-settler colonial exploits, thus preserving the racial hierarchy of white settler nationalism (Kalman-Lamb, 2013). In coding racial difference as “culture,” official multiculturalism has “facilitated a more fashionable and politically acceptable form of white supremacy which has had greater currency within a neocolonial, neoliberal global order” (Thobani, 2007: 148).
Canadian multiculturalism is also implicated in an assimilationist agenda through the promotion of the model-minority stereotype, an idealized cultural standard informed by the concept of whiteness, one that is held up by dominant groups as an archetypal ideal for racialized minorities to aspire to and consensually adopt. The prominence of model minorities in the public sphere reinforces the belief that Canadian society and its institutions are accommodating, accessible to all, and characterized by equal, color-blind opportunities. It is representative of a particular ideal type of grateful, yet enterprising immigrant: “non-practicing, educated, English speaking (with a particular accent), wealthy,” non-white citizens (Dhamoon, 2009: 136); the functionaries of western neoliberal democracy who provide visible evidence of the success of Canada's multicultural project (Kalman-Lamb, 2013). As Root et al. (2014: 3) have noted, the Canadian state's ideological image of the model minority “focuses on the neoliberal ideals of self-sufficiency, traditional hard-working ‘family values’, a law-and-order orientation, and the embracing of a liberal-democratic value system focused on individual rights and western values.” In this sense, acceptance of model minorities is always contingent: they must remain confined to their scripted roles that sustain white supremacy and racial capitalism, or they risk losing their tokenistic privileges.
Sport and other aspects of national popular culture are significant sites to reify preferred visions of Canadian multiculturalism and nationalism by showcasing specific model minorities and the values they have come to embody. Chen (2022) examines the media representation of Larry Kwong and Norman Kwong, both Asian athletes who competed in the National Hockey League and in the Canadian Football League during the 1940s and 1950s, respectively, showing how this model minority discourse has been operative for decades. In recent years, the examination of the Toronto Raptor's championship run in the 2019 National Basketball Association season by Aladejebi et al., (2022) unpacks the “We The North” campaign and the media coverage of racialized superfan Nav Bhatia. In doing so, they show the contradictory ways that some racialized bodies are appropriated and mobilized through sport to form and circulate “imagined communities” (Anderson, 1983) that are seemingly embracive of all cultures while still reinforcing dominant cultural values mediated through those same idealized bodies. Popular sporting moments, in other words, can be encoded to represent a hegemonic portrait of an inclusive Canada. Yet, for racialized Others, inclusion as part of the “We” in “We The North” is permitted “only insofar as their presence upholds white Canadian ideals of belonging” (Aladejebi et al., 2022: 6); they must embrace the structural conditions of whiteness by performing “complete allegiance to the norms of the nation” (Kalman-Lamb, 2013).
Sport and physical cultural practices, and their related forms of sociality, however, also play vital roles in shaping contemporary forms of Black diasporic consciousness and political engagement (Joseph, 2014). They serve as diasporic resources through which adversarial identities are actively fashioned, a dialectical process enabling racialized groups to “momentarily transgress some of the racial constraints imposed on their lives” (Carrington, 2010: 54). “The sports arena,” as Carrington (2010: 55) explains, thus operates as an important symbolic space in the struggles of black peoples for freedom and liberty, cultural recognition and civic rights, against the ideologies and practices of white supremacy. For black peoples throughout the African diaspora, such cosmopolitan formations and outer-national identifications operate as powerful counter-claims against nation-state nationalisms and conservative mono-cultural ideologies, with their associated assimilationist drives.
Methods
The lead author obtained access to the BCASC through an elaborate trust-building process, and by cultivating mutual respect and acceptance with influential gatekeepers within the new African diaspora, and with team members themselves. Most men in the BCASC are well educated, are employed in diverse, upper-middle-class occupations (e.g. medical and engineering professionals, academics, financial analysts and businessmen, and IT specialists), are fluent in multiple languages, and are financially stable. They share not only a certain level of status derived from the accumulation and deployment of various forms of economic, cultural, and social capital, but also a set of embodied dispositions: for all team members, soccer has been, and remains, an integral part of their lives.
In September 2019, prior to the start of the indoor soccer season, a mutual friend who is a respected member of the African community and a longstanding associate of the BCASC introduced the lead author to the team's managers and publicly endorsed his proposed research project. These actions bestowed credibility and facilitated trust. The team managers subsequently arranged an information session between the lead author and the team, which took place just after the first game of the 2019 indoor season. Following the information session, which outlined research ethics, anonymity, and informed consent, and after a question-and-answer period, all team members gave their verbal consent for the study. 3 Written consent was also provided during the interview sessions.
After securing this public endorsement, the lead author immersed himself in the team's culture, attending most of the weekly games throughout the indoor and outdoor league seasons at sites throughout the city over a four-year period. Over this time, he also volunteered to undertake forms of unpaid labor, including securing personal items of value and extra soccer kits during games. The lead author's positionality as a middle-aged, middle-class, Black man, himself a recent immigrant from continental Africa who was already familiar with the group's language and norms, facilitated this process, granting him a level of insider status. Though the lead author does not play soccer actively, his knowledge of the game, and the rules and bylaws of the league provided him with cultural capital; he was invited to join in planning and overseeing practice and pregame sessions, and postgame analysis with coaches and players.
The approval and endorsement of gatekeepers, however, do not always automatically translate to full cooperation and trust from others. The lead author subsequently cultivated a network of relationships simply by hanging out with the team, on and off the pitch. In addition to attending over 40 soccer games, the weekly training sessions (during the season and throughout the offseason), and team meetings, the lead author attended social gatherings, including informal post-match drinks and more formal events like weddings, birthdays, baby-naming ceremonies, and funeral rites for family members.
Participant observation and the development of rigorous fieldnotes on mobile phones were important, ongoing activities to produce knowledge on and through social interactions with members of the BCASC. Self-reflexive fieldnotes documenting observations were written in real-time, during games when social interactions had ebbed. Another batch of notetaking was completed the morning after games. These notes were as richly descriptive as possible, capturing the language and expressions of team members on the pitch, and also prior to and following games, especially during the ritualistic Friday night postgame socializing at “the parliament” in the sports bar above the soccer pitch, a “discursively constructed Black social space” (Carrington, 1998: 283). These broad accounts of games and nuanced descriptions of specific events—behaviors, actions and reactions, conversations, physical gestures, and nonverbal cues—helped generate the production of interview guides. In line with the tenets of “ethics as process,” the lead researcher was purposeful and reflective in establishing and nurturing relationships with participants (Ramcharan and Cutcliffe, 2001) by embracing an “ethics of care” (Munford et al., 2008). This involved actively engaging with participants, ensuring continuous communication and thoughtful consideration of ethical responsibilities throughout the research process. Participants were encouraged to feel comfortable exercising their agency in consenting to participate in the research as an ongoing process (Ramcharan and Cutcliffe, 2001).
During a series of semi-structured interviews, team members were subsequently invited to reflect on their own experiences associated with immigration and settlement in Canada, and the significance of the BCASC in these processes. These interviews mostly resembled informal conversations between the lead author and participants, a tone that helped build rapport and free-flowing discussions. The lead author conducted 30 semistructured, in-person interviews 4 (one interview per team member) between June 2021 and January 2023: 24 participants played in both indoor and outdoor leagues, and another six held leadership positions as coaches or team managers in addition to playing on the team.
The interviews utilized a combination of closed- and open-ended questions, frequently supplemented by follow-up questions that asked “why” or “how.” Dozens of shorter, informal interviews, and casual conversations took place during moments of sociality, especially during the indoor season when team members retreated to sports-themed bars in the soccer facilities. These indoor games, thus, doubled as the proverbial “guys” night out; after each game, most team members would converge in the pub to enjoy food and pitchers of beer, and to watch sports on big-screen TVs and the other soccer games taking place on the fields below. These moments of Black, masculine/fraternal camaraderie, however, also generated meaningful and heartfelt discussions about experiences with anti-Black racism in Canada, politics, relationships with partners and children, and longings for home.
Data analysis
Data analysis utilized both inductive and deductive approaches in an iterative process using thematic analysis techniques (Braun and Clarke, 2020). Themes were produced from deep and prolonged data immersion, and a thoughtful and reflective process. The lead author first actively listened to the interview audio recordings to understand the key topics discussed before transcribing them. Open coding was employed to derive meanings directly from participants while ensuring that the resulting themes aligned with our research questions and objectives. Semantic and latent coding captured both the explicit meanings conveyed by respondents and the inferred meanings identified by the researchers.
To ensure that both the verbatim transcriptions and the researchers’ inferred meanings accurately reflected the participants’ voices, the transcripts and preliminary interpretations, including fieldnotes, were shared with the participants to address any concerns about representation. In this way, the co-constructed meanings are the outcomes of a co-creative, interpretive process, one that illuminates the significance of the BCASC as a diasporic resource for team members through their voices. Themes were generated from the interpretation of aggregated meaning and meaningfulness across the data corpus.
The themes that were distinctly identifiable included “Identity” and “Belonging,” highlighting the crises of identity and the challenges that many Black immigrants face to “fit in”; “(re)creating community,” with its coded data revealing narratives of “creating Black diasporic space” with a focus on appropriating space to gather (hang out), and for the enactment of Black (African) identities and cultural behaviors; and “collective memories and nostalgia” from gathered coded data reflecting longings and mitigating the “homing desire.” To safeguard participant anonymity, explicit identifiers of the research sites have been altered, and pseudonyms employed. The deliberate use of common African male names is intentional.
Diasporic consciousness—identity and belonging
A recurring theme that emerged within our fieldwork and interviews with participants was their regular dialectical entanglements with dominant white Canada and its institutions, and their subsequent racialization, all enveloped within the ever-present pressure to assimilate into specific model-minority attributes. These processes, as participants noted, remain central to their socially constructed identities, enmeshed in, and articulated through, the politics of race and its representation. Participants acknowledged the consequential effects of race on their new social identities, especially in multicultural Canada where anti-Black racism is pervasive, and where race-talk is an “ambient phenomenon,” one that permeates notions of “citizenship, family, education, crime, poverty, entertainment, and sex, and much more besides” (Taylor, 2004: 4). They repeatedly emphasized how, since arriving in Canada, embodied distinctions that were otherwise largely of no substance to them—their “Black” skin color, native names, and accents, for example—have come to be defined by others as key identity attributes, understood as markers of difference that showcase their subordinate positions in a racial hierarchy.
In analyzing the concept of “Canadian-ness” in relation to the construction of subjectivities and subject positions in multicultural Canada, Rinaldo Walcott (2005: 438) notes that the rhetoric of official multiculturalism on “Blackness” “relies on and supports a persistent relationship to a heritage situated outside of Canada's national boundaries.” “Blackness” is also typically ambiguously positioned within the nation to be perceived as problematic (Dei, 2013). It is against this backdrop that the diaspora's “pervasive image of otherness” is framed (Burdsey, 2010: 316). In response to these antagonisms, contemporary Black African economic immigrants have embraced a diasporic consciousness that goes beyond national, linguistic, and generational boundaries, forming within and in opposition to the racist frameworks present in Western societies (Walcott, 2003). This diasporic consciousness prioritizes cultural identities that are primed or reinforced as psychological coping mechanisms to confront racism (Joseph, 2021). In grappling with existential anxiety, members of the BSASC communally rally and strategize around their Black cultural identities; the soccer club, as a Black sporting institution, has come to serve as a significant cultural vehicle, both symbolically and materially, to cultivate and propel diasporic consciousness and solidarity.
Chudi (age 47), a professional in the healthcare sector and a member of the club since 2016, underlines how the BCASC represents the most salient site in multicultural Canada through which team members can simply be themselves. The BCASC powerfully shapes their individual and collective identities around African connectedness, a refusal of the dominant social norms and pressures of white society: There's a social, cultural identity that comes with playing with people who have a similar background, speak similar languages, have similar experiences with you as an immigrant. Although we are a soccer organization, we are a lot more than that and the club represents a lot more than soccer. Being able to identify with Africans, similar languages, similar backgrounds, similar experiences, similar difficulties in a foreign climate. It helps a lot. (Personal communication, 7 January 2023)
Here, Chudi's use of “we” refers to an embodied sense of “oneness,” the product of mutual historical experiences associated with migration and Blackness. Thus, through the BCASC, an “imaginary coherence” is imposed across the diaspora by the narrative of a “collective ‘one true self’…which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common” (Hall, 1994: 223–224).
Rasheed, a 55-year-old management professional who has been with the BCASC since 2018, illuminates the salience of the BCASC as a Black, sovereign space where team members can “discover, excavate, bring to light” different identities that are “hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed ‘selves’” (Hall, 1994: 223). We don’t have to be politically correct [around model-minority expectations]. You can say things as they come, because you come from the same environment, the same culture. So, what may be misunderstood in another setting, these guys understand where you’re coming from. And in an environment where everybody expects you to be politically correct…this soccer club, it allows you express yourself without having to feel that you have offended or are offending anybody. There's that safety. It's a safe environment, to test your ideas, to express your frustrations, say anything you want to say, because you come from the same background, you understand yourselves. …When I’m in [another team, he plays with occasionally], I have to be very sensitive when I’m with that group, because there are only two Africans in the team. (Personal communication, 13 August 2022)
For participants like Rasheed, outside of the BCASC, the need to continually self-police their behaviors, language, and their Black identities in the broader racial hierarchy is heavy emotional labor. This underlines the rigid limits of multiculturalism and the weighty expectations of assimilation: the pressure to showcase model-minority attributes, and not those that could be deemed inappropriate/too Black. For Rasheed, his guard can never fully come down in other spaces and with other people, even in sport settings, and the feeling of safety—both mentally and physically—can only be nurtured with fellow members of BCASC with whom he can take off the model minority mask, at least temporarily.
The search for belonging and acceptance resonates with many members of the BCASC whose relationships with Canada have been fraught with racial antagonism and, at times, outright hostility and anti-Black racism. Bola (39), an IT professional, recounts his struggles “searching for a place to belong, to flourish, and to escape precarity and invisibility” (Maiangwa, 2023: 8) in a white supremacist society. I went through the entire hiring process for a job in IT. The manager I was to work under had already hinted that I was his preferred candidate. For the last stage, I was invited to make a short presentation to the hiring committee which he said was a formality. Surprisingly, I was not hired. I was devastated because I knew I performed very well. I reached out to the IT manager for some feedback. He responded that the reason I was not hired was because the (all-white) hiring committee felt I was not a good ‘culture fit.’ How do they know that when no one asked me any questions [about this]? I think it is because I don’t look like them, I don’t talk like them, I do not have a Canadian education or work experience. I do not fit into their social circle, so I cannot work with them. How do I fix that? (personal communication, July 30, 2022)
Even as a model minority, Bola has been judged by skin-deep affinities and by other social markers instead of his actual qualifications and skills. His potential employers have looked to their own backgrounds in multicultural Canada and cannot find people like him there. He does not share the physical and linguistic attributes, nor does he fit into their familiar and narrow understandings of (white) culture. Bola acutely feels the limits of belonging in several social spheres in Canada. This soccer that we play as a group gives the impression that we are many here. But when you go out there alone… sometimes I walk into a bar to have a drink and watch some sport and the whole environment feels very ‘hard’ [unwelcoming]. The kind of stares I get. Who is this? What is he doing here? Wow! It feels really awkward, and quite scary. In such situations I really feel like an ethnic minority. I do not have such feelings here [in the BCASC]. Nobody looks at me strangely as if I am different because all around me there are people like me. (Personal communication, 30 July 2022)
With these experiences, Bola joins the throng of Black African immigrants in Western and settler-colonial societies who become what Mapedzahama and Kwansah-Aidoo (2013: 69) describe as “objects of curiosity for the ‘white gaze’, with all of its prejudicial embodiments and connotations.” His body is constantly read by others for signs of (un)belonging and is immediately understood as being out of place. “Such a recognition of those who are out of place,” as Sara Ahmed (2000: 22) notes, “allows both the demarcation and enforcement of the boundaries of ‘this place’, as where ‘we’ dwell.” In response to his racist-induced experiences of “loss, marginality … and blocked advancement” (Clifford, 1994: 312), Bola has only found sanctuary in the BCASC, a Black diasporic space that brings a culmination to his search for belonging, a sporting institution where he can reconstruct his fragmented identity with others who are engaged in a similar process.
Oku (43), a professional in the financial sector, underlines his experiences with linguistic racism and accent discrimination, and with navigating the racial hierarchy in his workplace. Most white people do not want to learn anything about the cultures and behaviours of other communities that don’t look like them. They prefer to remain ignorant. I am talking to you now and you can understand me. In my office they claim they cannot understand me when I talk. I no longer talk naturally, the way I'm talking to you when I am in the office or when I am on a call. I am compelled to choose and pick my words one after the other. There's a [white] fellow from Britain in my office who does not talk exactly the way white Canadians do but no one is asking him to adjust. They want me to talk like a white man. (Personal communication, 7 August 2022)
Oku's speech mannerisms mark him as an outsider, engendering a visceral feeling of alienation and unbelonging. His colleagues refuse to even contemplate embracing a semblance of linguistic diversity—a cornerstone of inclusivity in a so-called multicultural society. They are unwilling to undertake the labor to understand a less familiar, foreign-accented form of English. Instead, Oku has been given his marching orders to “lose the accent,” and to modify his less socially prestigious form of English to align with the dominant standard of whiteness. Speech patterns and accents are significant markers of identity; they play a pivotal role in shaping self-perception for newcomers. What Oku is being asked to “lose” here is the aural expression of his Black identity, shaped by his origins, cultures, histories, beliefs, and experiences. To protect his career and livelihood, Oku temporarily yields to the pressures and expectations that he will conform to Western speech standards and model-minority attributes. Yet he continuously grapples with the emotional labor of his decision and with its impacts on his identity: his accent signifies his heritage and connects him to his roots.
When asked about the significance of the BCASC, Oku expresses his excitement at the powerful, rich, and full-throated evocations of Africanness, and the restorative, life-affirming “Black expressive behaviour” (Carrington, 1998: 283) the soccer club engenders. I will say having a community and being with people who look like you are really the things that have positively impacted my survival in Canada. You know, there's this thing that when you get into your own community, to your own people, you get excited. I have found my own people! When we talk, when I'm talking, they won’t say I'm screaming because they know that I'm not screaming. When I'm talking fast, they know that I'm not angry. This is where I can be myself, my real self. I can be me. (Personal communication, 7 August 2022)
For Oku, the club provides a powerful, temporary reprieve from the various forms of “contestation, improvisation, hybridization, metamorphosis, and in some instances denigration” (Mensah, 2014: 23) that his “Blackness” is subjected to in Canada.
Obol (47), a management professional who has been with the BCASC since 2018, underlines the persistent micro-aggressions he experiences, even as he puts down roots in Canada and is firmly established both in his domestic and professional life. Against this backdrop, he emphasizes the importance of the BCASC as a (Black)life-sustaining sanctuary space. In many ways you are told you do not belong here. The one that really triggers me is when I invest the time and labour to learn how to pronounce your name, and then when it's the other way around, I get the comment, “I don’t think I can get your name right, you know what, I don't even want to try”. Then I get asked the question, “where are you from”? I'm Canadian just like you are. So I see these little subtle racially tinged insults go on in my consulting practice. This makes our soccer club very important because that's one avenue where you get a replica of what you have back home. Your identity. So I think that's one thing that I really love about it. (Personal communication, 29 May 2022)
“Where are you from?” This question, as Obol notes, imaginatively displaces Black people from their current “here,” symbolically expelling them back to the distant places of their origin, reassigning them to a far-off geographical location (Kwansah-Aidoo and Mapedzahama, 2018). These often-well-intentioned questions have profound psychological consequences for Black immigrants: they emphasize unbelonging and cultivate an emptiness that cannot be remedied by well-paying jobs and middle-class status, or by the attainment of Canadian citizenship. Obol feels the weight of these experiences, and from having to continually conform to model minority status, a necessary sacrifice he knows he has to make if his consulting firm that services a dominant white population is to thrive. He finds safety and security in the BCASC, fulfilling his “Afrocentric” aspirations for an “authentic, natural, and stable rooted” African identity (Gilroy, 1993: 30), one that he shares with others from a common history, ancestry, and traditional long dwelling. For him, the BCASC provides salient, if all-too-brief, weekly connections with home, with others, and with his “true self.”
Lateef (age 47), a professional in the healthcare sector and a member of the BCASC since 2017, was a sought-after economic migrant; indeed, he had been targeted and lured from England by the provincial government precisely because of his professional credentials. He underlines the salience of the BCASC in the context of deadly anti-Black racism in Canada (and across North America) that stands in stark contrast to celebratory discourses of multiculturalism. I’m a Black man, I’m an African and that's the starting point. I cannot truly dissociate myself from my original identity as a Black man, an African. In fact we have to reinforce our identity and that's what the soccer club does. Even as we integrate into Canadian society, you've seen what's happening all over the world with the Black Lives Matter Movement. Now more than ever, is the time to have dual identity. Number one as a Black man, and number two, a Canadian, that brings something to the table and makes Canada better because of where I’m coming from. That's the world we live in nowadays. (Personal communication, 14 May 2023)
The importance of self-identification for members of the BCASC, like Lateef, stems from its powerful and symbolic act of emancipation from the marginalized status of a model minority within an oppressive cultural hegemony and its accompanying white gaze. Lateef, in other words, refuses to embrace the rigid and often hyphenated identities that newcomers are expected to consensually adopt to affirm the veneer of Canadian multiculturalism. He is first and foremost, a Black man; then a Canadian. Still, Lateef's recognition of the need for Black economic migrants to bring “something to the table and make Canada better” underscores the conditionality of notions of belonging, even for those who, on the surface, fit many of the attributes of the model minority. As Lateef acknowledges, he needs to continually prove himself “worthy” of these attributes, typically through the sale of his labor power and through his contributions to the political economy. In this way, diasporic consciousness is formed “by experiences of discrimination and exclusion and also through identification with … cultural/political forces such as [BCASC]” (Clifford, 1994: 312).
Meeting at “the parliament” to “fellowship”: Creating Black social space to (re) make community and assuage “homing desire”
Over the course of years of fieldwork and interviews, members of the BCASC shared their experiences of racist attacks and micro-aggressions, including those they’ve been subjected to on the soccer pitch by other players and by referees (Nya and Scherer, 2024). In other words, they continually felt the weight of their Blackness, all while playing on such a culturally significant and meaningful soccer team. Against this backdrop, the sobriquets “the parliament” and “fellowship”’ have emerged as the most significant site for the (re)creation of Black space, community, and solidarity, where members of the new African diaspora assuage their longings for home and comfort each other.
Akin to a democratized political governing body that conducts legislative and oversight functions, the activities and deliberations at “the parliament” are centered on the collective navigation of the racial and ethnic hierarchies of the soccer system (Nya and Scherer, 2024) and broader Canadian society, which are both fraught with perilous uncertainties and pervasive anti-Black racism. 5 For the BCASC, the discursively created space christened “the parliament” is a collective response to experiences of anti-Blackness, on and off the pitch. In this domain, members of the BCASC articulate a politics of resistance, unashamedly reimagining themselves on their terms. Just as resistance occurs within this space, it also attends to the “necessity to become. To make oneself anew,” to reconceive Blackness, and cultivate wholesome Black subjectivities (hooks, 1990: 14). Hence, “the parliament” exists as a safe space, where members of the new Africa diaspora can “affirm one another and by so doing heal many of the wounds inflicted by racist domination” (hooks, 1990: 42).
In this “fellowship,” team members collectively draw strength and comfort from each other. They eat, drink, and share stories of trials and tribulations underlined by anti-Black racism, as well as their agency, their resistance, and occasionally, their small victories in oppressive and hostile settings. The use and practice of meeting at “the parliament” to “fellowship” as markers that animate social interactions among the BCASC is intentional; it emphasizes a collective, Black identity with shared beliefs, convictions, and behaviors, in other words, for people holding something in common. These names confer on team members symbolic and material membership in a putative constituency. To further borrow from bell hooks (1990: 149–150), “the parliament,” where members of the BCASC and their supporters meet to “fellowship,” is a site of radical possibility, a space of resistance … a central location for the production of a counter-hegemonic discourse that is not just found in words … a site one stays in, clings to even, because it nourishes one's capacity to resist. It offers one the possibility of a radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds.
In what follows, we introduce and analyze excerpts from a research field note (Friday, 5 November 2021) to outline the ways in which members of BCASC are enabled through the weekly Black fraternal social sessions at “the parliament”—the key site for their cultural and social activities as a team/club where they co-create and maintain a sense of community, and assuage feelings of “homing desire” (Brah, 1996). After initial post-game discussions in the dressing room, win or lose, team members reconvene at “the parliament” to ‘fellowship’. The phrase meeting at “the parliament” to ‘fellowship’ refers to the post-match gathering of the team and its supporters in the pub upstairs to socialize over food and drinks. The pub is a sizeable open space with tables and chairs that can accommodate 12–15 people at a table. As team members and supporters converge in a defined area in the pub away from others, we create a diasporic Black space for ourselves. A team member takes the first turn to buy two pitchers of draught beer and a smaller jug of soda for those who do not consume alcohol. West African Food is laid out on the table in disposable platters. Tonight, we are having suya and meat pies! Suya is perhaps the most popular street food in most of West Africa. It is thin strips of flame-grilled, smoky, charred beef, spiced with a blend of ginger, garlic, onions, paprika, chili, salt, and a dried peanut rub known as kuli kuli. Meat pies are also extremely popular in Africa and are usually on the menu as small chops in social gatherings. The seats fill up quickly and we begin to pass around the pitchers of beer and platters of food. Information is also quietly circulated: tonight, we have some smuggled in cans of Guinness, Harp Lager, and, importantly, bottles of palm wine imported from Nigeria in a bag underneath the table. The smells and tastes of home! Eating and drinking is done with great relish, and with little concern for Canadian standards of dinning etiquette; fingers are the utensil of choice. Voices in conversation are full-throated, and most times in vernacular, or in our own peculiar brand of English-based creole language known as pidgin or broken English. If English is spoken at all, it is not ‘oyinbo’ English (spoken with the white man's accent), but our own unique way of pronunciation. There is a lot of masculine ‘yabbing’ (teasing) that results in hearty and uninhibited laughter. The sounds of home! Through these actions this largely white space undergoes a transformation into “the parliament”, a Black African diasporic space that operates as a site and setting where “different forms of collective agency based on individuals’ identifications with African[n]ess and/or [B]lackness occurs” (Rastas and Nikunen 2019: 207). There are no concrete borders, yet it is recognized that entry or occupancy is by membership or at the behest of a team member as we engage in practices of ‘fellowship’—the deliberate and intentional use of visible and shared cultural signifiers, which function as territorial markers—as a kind of “resistance through ritual” (Hall and Jefferson, 1976) to borrow from Fletcher (2012: 15). ‘The parliament’ as a Black African diasporic space provides a platform for members of the BCASC to resist processes of exclusion and express their ethnic identities.
We spend about two hours playing soccer, but we can be at ‘the parliament’ for over three hours after the game whether we lose or win. Most times we know that it is time to go only because the guys at the bar shut down and start cleaning up. “The parliament” is about drinking, eating, talking. From the moment I get in, I feel free. I am not even speaking in English with my teammates, I'm speaking my native language. It really feels good! We reminisce about when something significant happened in soccer and how it impacted us. I remember we all talked about ‘where were you the night Nigeria beat Brazil in 1996’ and we go back to that time. For me, back then I was just 13, and I remember thinking about when I would be old enough to drink beer with the adults around me as we watched the game…and now I am drinking beer (laughing). You can’t beat that feeling. It means more to me than the games we play together, even the ones we win, and I like winning. (Personal communication, 13 January 2023)
Koko's excitement at finding and contributing to a fraternal space of Black, diasporic solidarity and sociality is understandable: This is one of the very few judgment-free, “Black spaces” (Carrington, 1998) where he can be himself unapologetically, without offending the dominant cultural sensibilities (Joseph, 2010).
Importantly, apart from the linguistic liberties Koko enjoys within this Black space, he expresses the profound feelings that nostalgic conversations provoke. These moments of collective reminiscing are joyous and remarkably powerful; they transcend winning or losing a soccer game. In what follows, we draw from a fieldnote from the same evening to illustrate the types of nostalgic discussions that typically take place during “fellowship” at “the parliament.” Soccer dominates discussions in “the parliament” tonight as we analyze the brutal racist attacks by the British fans targeted at the three Black English soccer players, Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka (who has Nigerian ancestry) who lost their penalty kicks against Italy in the shootout during the UEFA EURO 2020 at Wembley Stadium on Sunday, July 11, 2021. This ignites a discussion on the prospects of a Black African team winning the FIFA World Cup, which eventually turns to reminiscing about the ‘glory days’ of African soccer. We passionately relive, recreate, and replay some of the fiercest rivalries in African soccer, conjuring up legends and proudly recalling when ‘our’ teams and players shook the foundations of the soccer world. The men also display warm nostalgic expressions for the soccer of their youth. They share colorful accounts of how they honed their skills playing barefoot on dirt streets. Tales are shared of bravery, brawls, bruises, and broken limbs; of team rivalries; of flair, skill, panache, and soccer mastery; of ‘monkey post’ (a distinct type of street soccer with no standard rules), and of rain ball (soccer played in the rain). The joy of victories and the pangs of defeats from decades past are (re)lived, (re)celebrated, and (re)mourned all over again. Importantly, their stories also encompass a social landscape that is complementary. Enduring bonds of friendships were forged in these times, even romantic relationships. The influence of the ‘beautiful game’ in their lives is evident in the cherished moments and poignant memories they hold onto. Through this collective storytelling, members of the BCASC revel in the past inside the present as we are transported to an idealized time and place, far removed from the prevailing political and racial tensions in our lives.
These nostalgic conversations are emotionally enriching and restorative; during interviews with members of the BCASC, they expressed fulfilment and gratitude for these moments, and for the impetuous passions they evoke, which they described as a wellspring of strength that sustains them. For Etteh, recreating home and the past in “the parliament” is “an essential part of survival” (Boym, 2001: 51). The connections between yesterday and today are crucial; the past holds the stories and feelings that keep him grounded in the present and in solidarity with others in the BCASC. These types of conversations are meaningful to me as a person of African origin because remembering growing up keeps me connected with my roots. Gathering to eat, drink, and tell stories is an enduring African tradition, and as you know most of our history has been passed down orally through storytelling. That we are able to replicate that tradition here for me is the high point of my week. In those moments we forget the harsh frigid winter that is outside, we forget the stress of the jobs we are just coming from, we forget the indignities to which we are being subjected. In those moments we are home. (Personal communication, 2 February 2022)
In discussing nostalgia and the immigrant experience(s), Ritivoi (2002) suggests that “what triggers nostalgia in the first place … is precisely a critical discrepancy between the present and the past” (p. 30). For members of the BCASC, emigrating to Canada has been one of the most challenging and traumatizing times of their lives, a significant transition from their well-defined roles within African societies and communities to living in unfamiliar and alienating settings where they endure cultural and linguistic othering, political marginalization, and ever-present anti-Black racism. As Stuart Hall (1994) notes, in these hostile settings, nostalgic storytelling is a way for Black individuals to collectively preserve their heritage and to proudly perform and forge their identities. Similar sentiments were echoed by Joseph (2010: 10) in her study of a recreational Black Caribbean cricket and social club in Canada; she underlines that “cricket and its attendant social activities were a primary means to maintain their fantasies of home… and performances of African heritage.” For the men of the BCASC, the centrality of nostalgia in their boisterous conversations with each other palliates yearnings for homelands, and encourages the co-creation of African identities by memorializing and re-living the past as they remake their lives in Canada.
Conclusion
In this article, we have critically examined the centrality of the BCASC as a “diasporic resource” (Nassy Brown, 1998) for contemporary Black continental African immigrants—members of the new African diaspora—particularly in relation to broader themes of racial politics, multiculturalism, cultural representation, and identity formation as they recreate their lives in multicultural Canada and as they contribute their racialized labor to the ongoing settler-colonial economic project. In addition to investigating this issue in a unique context, our research shows how participation in men's recreational soccer and its related activities of sociality can foster a sense of solidarity and resistance for Black, African immigrants.
Through the BCASC, for example, members appropriate diasporic space in self-defining ways that allow them to construct their own sense of belonging. In these spaces of Black solidarity and healing, the constellation of nostalgic memories fuels their need for “imaginary homelands,” providing “much of the courage needed to continue living in the present” (Gilroy, 1993: 36). The BCASC, thus, serves as an identity-affirming Black enclave where members reinforce their “Africanness” or “Blackness” in solidarity and on their own terms. In this redemptive and restorative diasporic Black space, they craft their own social maps, transforming from “unplaced to emplaced persons” (Kraemer, 2013).
Indeed, our analysis reveals that members of the BCASC have embraced this particular Black sporting institution and, importantly, its attendant forms of fraternal sociality at “the parliament” in ways that meaningfully transcend soccer as just a game. Along with Joseph (2010), we view the activities in these spaces as “deeply encoded oppositional practices” (p. 37) and as avenues for “individual self-fashioning and communal liberation” (p. 40). The uninhibited and joyful expressions of Black African culture in “The Parliament,” for example, show a desire to confront anti-Black racism and to resist assimilation. “The parliament,” in other words, is the diasporic space where protest and condemnation of anti-Black racism can be vividly articulated, and where members of the BCASC have come to learn that so many of their personal struggles are indistinguishable from those of others on the team and in the broader diaspora. The boisterous and joyful moments that fill “the parliament” are not just the sentiments of a group of Black African men who do not delude themselves about white supremacy in Canada, but of those who also know they can collectively work together to oppose it. Ethnic activities and events are often celebrated as triumphs of multiculturalism by dominant interest groups; they are also powerful acts and sites of resistance.
Every study has its limitations, and our research is no exception. We did not fully explore the relational dynamics within the diaspora and how diasporic spaces can be hierarchical and both inclusive and exclusive. While an in-depth analysis of class relations was beyond the scope of the study, the diverse socio-economic, educational, and occupational backgrounds created class hierarchies in this diasporic space. As a result of this, some team members enjoyed greater status evident in the informal positions of authority they held, and the influence they wielded in the running of the club's affairs; others remained more in the margins.
Finally, more research is needed on gender in these diasporic spaces, which can be patriarchal. While there is currently no equivalent women's team, 6 the BCASC does not function as an exclusively masculine space. Though infrequent, wives, partners, daughters, and friends sometimes attend games and join their men at the parliament. The role of women in discursively creating Black diasporic spaces deserves scholarly attention: In what ways, if any, does the BCASC function as a diasporic resource for them? Additional research is also needed to explore the complexity of Black African masculinities in these diasporic spaces, including how diverse, hierarchical notions of masculinity and gender identities are challenged, reaffirmed, and reconfigured (Pasura and Christou, 2017).
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
