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

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Clarke’s timely publication coincided with the “transnational turn” in Black Canadian studies. It is thus fit to admit that the work by Clarke, Siemerling or Nancy Kang have contributed to revitalize and shape the field of Black Studies in Canada by placing it in transnational and cross-border frameworks. Prompted by the poet laureate’s article, there was a revisiting of the nineteenth century in Canada to consider the different ways in which Blacks were seen, understood, and acknowledged. Accordingly, a revision of slave narratives, as a literary genre, became imperative since through the lens of this trasnational turn their reading had been rather restrictive.

To this new paradigm in Black Canadian studies, it is important to add Nele Sawallisch’s Fugitive Borders: Black Canadian Cross-Border Literature at Mid-Nineteenth Century, published in 2019. In her work, Sawallisch studies nineteenth-century autobiographical writing by enslaved men that emerged in or around the region of Canada: Richard Warren’s Narrative of the life and sufferings of Rev. Richard Warren (A Fugitive Slave) (1856), Thomas Smallwood’s A Narrative of Thomas Smallwood (Colored Man) (1851), Samuel Ringgold Ward’s Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro (1855), and Austin Steward’s Twenty-Two Years a Slave and Fourty Years a Freeman (1857). The book thus “relies on recent developments in Black Canadian studies that have turned to a transnational and explicitly cross-border understanding of Black Canadian history” (14). By rereading and re-contextualizing Black autobiographical writing of the nineteenth century, Sawallisch enlarges our understanding of slave narratives and defends that “these texts are a part of a transnational archive because they represent accounts of transnational, cross-border individuals who negotiate borders, personhood, and community” (14).