Fugitive Borders: Black Canadian Cross-Border Literature at Mid-Nineteenth Century

Nele Sawallisch

Open Access Published by transcript Verlag 2018

Fugitive Borders

Black Canadian Cross-Border Literature at Mid-Nineteenth Century

Nele Sawallisch
Funded by: Knowledge Unlatched - KU Select 2021: Backlist Collection

Volume 13 in the series American Culture Studies

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839445020

Overview
Contents

About this book

Fugitive Borders explores a new archive of 19th-century autobiographical writing by black authors in North America. For that purpose, Nele Sawallisch examines four different texts written by formerly enslaved men in the 1850s that emerged in or around the historical region of Canada West (now known as Ontario) and that defy the genre conventions of the classic slave narrative. Instead, these texts demonstrate originality in expressing complex, often ambivalent attitudes towards the so-called Canadian Promised Land and contribute to a form of textual community-building across national borders. In the context of emerging national discourses before Canada's Confederation in 1867, they offer alternatives to the hegemonic narrative of the white settler nation.

Author / Editor information

Nele Sawallisch (PhD) works as a lecturer at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, where she completed her doctoral dissertation in 2017. She has a background in English, French, and education and completed a trinational curriculum for teachers in Mainz/Germany, Dijon/France, and Lennoxville/Quebec. Her research focuses on African Canadian and African American literatures and cultures, particularly of the nineteenth century.

Reviews

»›Fugitive Borders‹ shows how Black cross-border life writing at midnineteenth century speaks of the history of slavery and the experiences of the formerly enslaved and fugitive with idiosyncratic voices. Undoubtedly, readers of ›Fugitive Borders‹ will want to hear, understand, and learn more from them.«
Paula von Gleich, American Studies, 65/1 (2020)

Supplementary Materials

Leseprobe

Topics

Frontmatter Open Access Download PDF	1
Contents Open Access Download PDF	5
Acknowledgments Open Access Download PDF	7
Introduction Open Access Download PDF	9
1. Fugitive Borders Open Access Download PDF	13
2. Religion Narrative of the Life and Sufferings of Rev. Richard Warren, (A Fugitive Slave.) (1856) Open Access Download PDF	35
3. Radicalism A Narrative of Thomas Smallwood (Coloured Man) (1851) Open Access Download PDF	59
4. Heroism Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro (1855) Open Access Download PDF	101
5. Community Twenty-Two Years a Slave and Forty Years a Freeman (1857) Open Access Download PDF	151
Conclusion Open Access Download PDF	199
Bibliography Open Access Download PDF	205

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 218
Keywords: 19th Century; Slave Narrative; Life Writing; Borders; Literary History; Literature; America; Cultural History; American Studies; Migration; Literary Studies

eBook

Published: December 27, 2018
ISBN: 9783839445020