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

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Those examples testify to the importance and impact of Benjamin Drew’s volume as an invaluable depiction of the life of fugitive slaves in Canada. The compilation, however, unfolds as more than a collection of narratives and eventually grows into a compendium of the social, cultural, historical and ideological practices of the mid-nineteenth-century North America. Whilst emerging as a transnational branch of slave narratives, that is, a Canadian slave narrative, it also serves to witness the blossom of African Canadian identity and reality along the frontier, which, as Afua Cooper puts, exemplifies the identitybuilding process of Black Canadians, a groundwork act that is necessarily “negotiated in border zones” (“Fluid Frontier” 131). Interestingly, this exercise will be ingrained in Black Canada to the extent that it has served as a model for contemporary African Canadian writers that keep on negotiating their own identity working on and through the border zone. Probably the most renowned example is Lawrence Hill’s acclaimed novel Any Known Blood (1997). Apart from these important aspects, the appeal of Drew’s book lingers on and is still worth considering for it participates, and is inscribed, in the “transnational turn” in Black Canadian studies through its cross-border approach to transnational abolitionism and African Canadian writing. As Nele Sawalisch argues, “the autobiographies here emphasize the ambiguous – somewhat elusive, or fugitive – meaning of the border for the authors, and yet show how much the borderland was shaped by black individuals and their writing” (29).