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

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In keeping with Clarke’s and Sawallisch’s endeavor to revisit slavery from a transnational stance and to contribute to “liberate the Canadian slave narrative” (Odysseys Home 17), it is interesting to delve into Benjamin Drew’s A North-Side View of Slavery; the Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada as an important source and testimony for its stories are anchored in the cross-border Canadian reality whilst they still reveal a lot about what kind of life refugee slaves could look forward to in this country. The collection is fully inscribed in the aforementioned and current transnational turn in Black Canadian studies since the stories by fugitive slaves included in it establish a sort of genealogy through a multiplicity of Black lineages and create a narrative testimony “of pride and strength of black communities that resisted undoing by slavery or racial prejudice” (Sawallisch 17).

In this vein, this edition of Drew’s book sets out to situate the importance of these stories within the historical, cultural and social background in which they were recorded and projected. In the end, the compilation resolves into an exhibition of the intellectual and idiosyncratic practices at work in the mid-nineteenth century North America. The collection of testimonies is ultimately revealed as a transnational and cross-border exercise of abolitionist propaganda that pictures a somewhat new branch within the slave narrative literary genre that might as well be read as slave narratives. However, A North-Side View of Slavery. The Refugee: Or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada goes beyond this and also unravels the heterogeneous formation of the origins and establishment of Black Canada and African Canadian identity while, at the same time, shows the way in which these new Black Canadians participated in the creation and birth of the country we nowadays known as Canada.