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

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Conversely, the Black Canadian scholar directs his standpoint to the crossborder and transnational turn in North American studies and counters this assumption by asserting the sheer existence of a Canadian slave narrative tradition that “is ignored as a genre of Victorian-era Canadian literature (1837-1901)” (“This is No Hearsay” 7). This recognition debunks the assumption that this body of texts is simply a “species of Americana” (“This is No Hearsay” 7) since this thought has precisely misplaced Canada from this tradition. Clarke criticizes the U.S. monopoly of the genre whilst also holds Canadian scholarly responsible for outsourcing slave narratives as “American and alien” (“This is No Hearsay” 11). Moreover, he dug into the history of nineteenth-century British North American literary production and invites to recognize “the host of slave narratives, written or spoken and transcribed, and sometimes published, in Canada, dating to pre-andpost U.S. Civil War periods, that are (or, rather, should be), therefore, integral to conceptions of the canon of Victorian Canadian literature” (“This is No Hearsay” 14). He goes as far as to provide a list of eighteen narratives printed between 1838 and 1901, half of which were published in Canada, which constitute a proof that these slaves narratives were a part of Canadian writing and publishing, and that they also act as a cultural remainder of the importance of these texts for the Canadian literary production.¹¹ In this list of distinctly “Canadian” slave narratives (“This is No Hearsay” 18), Clarke includes Drew’s A North-Side View of Slavery: The Refugee, or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada.