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

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Moreover, A Plea for Emigration or Notes of Canada West represents Shadd’s tour de force in her defense of emigration against the Garrisonian abolitionists. This new approach to abolitionism became well received in Canada since fugitive slaves found it easier to get her voice heard and taken into account. This is why her work elicited a positive response and served as an inspiration for other abolitionists, like Benjamin Drew himself, who equally thought that migrating to Canada represented a valuable escape in search of freedom. Besides, Shadd’s antislavery plea became crucial to spread “another” type of Canadian nineteenthcentury enclosed in the aforesaid Black Canadian Renaissance. It also acted as a way to breathe flesh and visualize the accepted repression of the other that was so well represented the American Renaissance. In this sense, Shadd’s contribution is worth praising because it confronted noted Garrisonian abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass or Martin Delany, who were utterly suspicious over her emigrationist stance. Her decisive defense of transnational approach to abolitionism, which would soon enlighten other abolitionists like Drew to follow suit, explains why her name is a celebrated among the Black personalities that planted the seeds of Black Canadian identity. Moreover, as Siemerling accurately summarises, Shadd figures prominently in U.S./Canadian studies as one of the notable Black authors who “wrote and worked in a Canadian context for such an extension of democracy and citizenship in all of North America, since their labors are equally part of Canadian history, however, the trans-border and black Atlantic lives of many of these leading nineteenth-century black intellectuals also underline my claim that the bases of Canadian literary history are in need of revision” (107). In a typical cross-border abolitionist writing, Shadd’s optimism overlooks the often racist reality she had surely experienced after a few months in Canada and rather opts to focus on the Canaan myth of benevolence as a feasible and pragmatic way to impress an ideal on potential Black immigrants that is theoretically possible under Canadian legislation. This is the same optimism as well as omissions, grounded in religious terms that will be found in Drew’s collection.