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

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In his critical study of African Canadian literary history, Clarke has noted how “European Canadians imagined African Canadians as once-and-always Americans” (Odysseys Home 71). Though admitting the heterogeneous nature of Black Canadian history, Clarke contends that “it is impossible to conceive of Black Canada without the sobering boundary that the United States supplies” (Odysseys Home 28). For the Canadian scholar, there is no doubt that “African American blackness has been and is a model blackness, a way of conceiving and organizing African Canadian existence” (Odysseys Home 28). Yet, to contest the view that “African American scholars have tended to regard African Canadians as a failed version of themselves” (Odysseys Home 34), Clarke defends a Black Canadian cultural nationalism that he terms African Canadianité, which consists of a type of Black Canadian identity practiced upon African American and European models but one that reads African Canadians as “not just ‘black’ and Canadian, but also adherents to a region” (Odysseys Home 40). Clarke also express that “African Canadianité marks the hegemony of heterogeneity, an attribute that African Canadians share with the other communities in Canada” (Odysseys Home 48). In other words, the attachment of Black Canadians to the land and their country bespeaks their sense of being Canadian alongside other communities and different realities. This is what we also find in Drew’s collections through the testimonies of Black Canadians like that of Sophia Pooley, a Queen’s Bush resident whose narrative presents an insight into Native, African and European colonial relationships: