Читать книгу Benjamin Drew. The Refugee. Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada онлайн

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In his article “Black Loyalists and Black Slaves in Maritime Canada” (2007), Harvey Armani Whitfield delves into the history of Black Loyalists and explains how the Blacks who arrived in Nova Scotia “were among the twelve hundred to two thousand slaves brought by Loyalists to Canada” (1981).⁵ For the historian, “the typical experience of black migrants to the Maritimes after the Revolutionary War was not freedom, but slavery, re-enslavement, and other brutal forms of indentured servitude” (1891).⁶ Yet, by the late eighteenth century and spurred by different defeats, the British interest in Black people changed and after the American Revolutionary War was “related to contexts and developments that also helped prepare the ground for English abolitionism in the 1780s” (Siemerling 64). Nova Scotia became a relevant site for those new and longer forms of Black testimony that included most notably the slave narrative as a literary testimony. Nova Scotia emerges, in this way, connected to several eighteenth-century slave and captivity narratives, written by Black community leaders who described the province in their memoirs or eventually took up residence there.