Читать книгу Benjamin Drew. The Refugee. Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada онлайн
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Philip Younger
Gilbert Dickey
William J. Anderson
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Mary Younger
Edward Hicks
Henry Blue
Aaron Siddles
John C–n
Reuben Saunders
Thomas Hedgebeth
William Brown
Mr. -
Isaac Griffen
William Street
BUXTON
Isaac Riley
Mrs. Isaac Riley
Harry Thomas
R. Van Branken
Henry Johnson
DRESDEN; DAWN
British American Institute
William H. Bradley
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WINDSOR
Refugees’ Home
Thomas Jones
William S. Edwards
Mrs. Colman Freeman
Ben Blackburn
William L. Humbert
David Cooper
John Martin
Daniel Hall
Lydia Adams
J. F. White
Leonard Harrod
SANDWICH
George Williams
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Mrs. Henry Brant
AMHERSTBURG
Charles Brown
James Smith
Rev. William Troy
William Lyons
Joseph Sanford
John Hatfield
COLCHESTER
Robert Nelson
David Grier
Ephraim Waterford
Eli Artis
Ephraim Casey
Rev. William Ruth
GOSFIELD
John Chapman
Thomas Johnson
Eli Johnson
Introduction
Slavery was an indelible part of everyday life in Colonial Canada under both the French and British regimes, and the presence of Black people in the country was manifested in literary terms almost from its inception. Long gone is the time in which Canadian studies grounded the beginning of Black Canadian writing with Austin Clarke’s first novel published in 1964. As far back as in 1991, in his now classic two-volume study of Black Canadian literature titled Fire on the Water: An Anthology of Black Nova Scotia Writing, George Elliott Clarke set out to map the origins of Black writing in Canada and stated the seventeenth century as the starting point to consider the beginning of the African experience in the country. In the same vein, Winfried Siemerling’s recent and groundbreaking book The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: Black Canadian Writing, Cultural History and the Presence of the Past (2015) has insisted on the endeavor of tracing back the origins of African Canadian literature1 and explains that “Black writing in what is now Canada is over two centuries old and that black recorded speech is even older” (3). Much earlier than the publication of these two works, the second half of the twentieth century witnessed the revision of the critical history of North American slavery and its unambiguous practices in Canada. Ashraf Rushdie studied this phenomenon and concluded that “the 1960s saw the formation of a contemporary discourse of slavery”, one that “developed new methodologies and generated new visions” (5). Following this trend, two foundational books opened the way to study Canada’s history of slavery: Marcel Trudel’s L’Esclavage au Canada français (1960), later on translated into English by George Tombs in 2013 with the title of Canada’s Forgotten Slaves, and James Walker’s The Black Loyalists (1976). These studies represented new directions in the analysis of slavery and did away with the image of Canada’s acknowledged reproval of American chattel slavery. They also underlined the historical fact that “Canadian history is also black history (and that black Atlantic history is also Canadian)” (Siemerling 8). Truthfully, African slavery in the territory nowadays known as Canada began in New France where slavery was suffered by Black and Indigenous people. The first known evidence of a Black enslaved subject can be found in 1628, nine years after a Dutch ship brought the first cargo of Africans to Jamestown. It was then recorded how David Kirke, otherwise known as the British Conqueror of Québec, took with a slave boy to the French territory, thus installing African people in New France and in British North America thereafter. The petite nègre was brought to New France from Madagascar which proves that slavery not only existed but was well established in Canada.