Canada's continued forgetfulness concerning slavery here, and the nation-state's
attempts to record only Canada's role as a place of sanctuary for
escaping African-Americans, is part of the story of absenting blackness
from its history.
Rinaldo Walcott
The fact that people of African descent have had a presence in Canada for over
four hundred years is not well known within the Canadian mainstream. The fact that
slavery existed as an institution in Canada is another fact that is not well known. Within
the Canadian mainstream writing of African-Canadian history, Blacks most often appear
in historical narratives around the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, as
American fugitives or refugees—either as escaping slaves or British Loyalists. Through
the representative writing of the "the Black refugee," Canada is often constructed as a
"Promised Land," a sanctuary or safe haven for Blacks, a place of refuge and redemption
that does not speak to the complex history of slavery that existed well before the
American exodus.
Many Black Canadian writers and scholars argue that there is a price to be paid
for this kind of representation. First, the absence of people of African descent in
Canadian historical narratives, prior to the coming o f the American refugees, ignores the
long presence of Blacks in Canada and the contributions that Blacks have made in the
development of Canada. Second, in focusing on the American Loyalists and refugee
slaves, Canadian writers and historians often construct Black Canadians as a
homogenous, genderless group, ignoring the diversity within Canada's Black population
and, in particular, the concerns of Black women. Finally, the mainstream representation
of Canada as a 'safe haven' proves problematic for any critical discussion of racism in
contemporary Canadian society, for notions of "Canada the good" and "America the evil"
that arose from those crossings North still penetrate the Canadian mainstream today.
This autobiocritical exploration examines the representation of the haven and
offers alternative readings to contemporary mainstream writings of African-Canadian
history. In part one, I track the appearance of Black Canadians, over the past fifty years,
from 1949 to 2001, in a survey of mainstream and scholarly texts. Using the results of
this survey, which does not see the appearance of Blacks in Canada until 1977, I examine
how mainstream texts might use the works of Black writers to offer more critical and
complex histories of Black Canadians and, in particular, Black women. In part two, I
take up an analysis of George Elliott Clarke's Beatrice Chancy. Seen as a counter-narrative
to mainstream writings of African-Canadian history, Clarke's work, which
takes up the subject of slavery in early-nineteenth century Nova Scotia, presents an/Other
kind of Loyalist story, one with a Black woman at its centre. In this discussion I examine
how Clarke's poetic work subverts the national narrative, as he speaks to the diversity
within blackness and the complexities in defining racial identities.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/11540 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Gibson, Chantal N. |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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