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

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Considering Henry Louis Gates remarks that narratives penned by slaves were fundamentally created “to testify against their captors and to bear witness to the urge of every black slave to be free and literate and accorded all the ‘rights of man’” (xi), Benjamin Drew’s volume’s uniqueness attests to the refugees’ unusual accounts of life during and after slavery through their related experiences and offer a wider and more acute picture of slavery and post-slavery life. Therefore, when it comes to define Drew’s book it is interesting to turn to Nicole Aljoe and Ian Finseth’s musings on the nature of slave narratives. They maintain that considering the “fundamental diversity” of slave testimonies and life accounts across the Black Atlantic routes, there should be an extension of the genre label, which they deem restrictive. For Aljoe and Finseth, there are plenty of slave testimonies that differ in form and message and that are, either way, subsumed under the label of “slave narrative”. Following this contention, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson propose to shift the term “slave narratives” to focus the attention not on the slaves’ condition but on their experiences and thus proffer the denomination “life narratives” (3), aiming to lay emphasis on personal accounts of slaves that are not isolated or exceptional but rather put forth a “communal discourse of multiple identity” (104). Drew’s collection adheres to this definition and, in so doing, challenges what had thus far been understood as slave narratives and expands their meaning by putting into words complex and wrapped up life stories. In consequence, the book constitutes a “distinct set of settler narratives” (Clarke, “Introduction” 11) shaped as a branch that grows in the same trunk that slave narratives or, in this case, Canadian slave narratives.