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

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A North-Side View of Slavery: The Refugee, or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada should not be read having in mind solely the transcriber but taking into consideration the ex-slaves’ messages and stories that, in a Foucaultian fashion, reveal and withdraw the ideological tensions of the nineteenth century. As a matter of fact, the volume abides by the ideologies that allowed ninteenth-century slave narratives to be published, and therefore exposes the limitations but also the identifications of the life accounts of fugitive slaves with the religious politics of domesticity. This is truly how the biographic narratives were not only accepted but also publicly legitimized, and this sets the stage through which we need to read and understand Drew’s transcription and edition of the brief biographies of the fugitive slaves he interviewed.

As a slave narrative compendium, the collection opens with a paratextual advertisement that defines the book as “original in design and scope, and has been executed with the most conscientious care and fidelity,” and forewarns readers that “[n]owhere else can be found such a mass of direct and unimpeachable testimony as to the true character of the Peculiar Institution, by witnesses who have had the best opportunities of knowing its nature, and who occupy a point of view from which its characteristic lineaments can be most distinctly discerned”. By stressing both the veracity and verisimilitude of the testimonies, the text is advertised as a non-fiction account of slavery. It also prepares and induces the readers to trust the messages that will be found throughout. Right after the advertisement, Benjamin Drew writes his Author’s Preface which emphasizes again the honesty of those pieces of autobiography and states the transnational nature of the volume. The author alludes to the fugitive slaves as “colored Canadians” and therefore inscribes his slave narrative as a “cross-border experience” (Kang 443). This is underlined once more when the trajectories of the escapees cross the geographical but also ontological border that differentiates the two states: “while held in bondage in their native land, shed a peculiar lustre on the Institution of the South. They reveal the hideousness of the sin, which, while calling on the North to fall down and worship it, almost equals the tempter himself in the felicity of scriptural quotations”.