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AUTHOR
Vicent Cucarella-ramon
Liminality and (Trans)Nationalism in the Rethinking of the African Canadian Subjectivity: Esi Edugyan’s The Second Life of Samuel Tyne
Drawing on the concepts of liminality proposed by Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner and Althusser's three ideological tools that nationalism prescribe to be undertaken by individuals who try to become an integral part of a national community, this paper reads Esi Edugyan’s debut novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (2004), as an exploration of the role of literature within the debate about the different positions of black Canadian subjectivity and national adherence. George Elliott Clarke and Rinaldo Walcott polarized the African Canadian criticism by proposing two different theories in an attempt to shape up and (re)define the subjectivity of black Canadians. Clarke advocates to include…
Redemption and home in the african american city upon a hill: hannah crafts’s the bondwoman’s narrative.
The Bondwoman’s Narrative (1857) is a novel in which the black female slave Hannah Crafts aims at the remodeling of her society and to gain self–assertion through a deeply Christian commitment and a total and honest respect to the values it impinges drawing broadly on the Bible and reshaping biblical imagery to convey her message and to submit her subjectivity and her Americanness. By using the national continuum of jeremiad rhetoric and her attachment to the values of the Christian creed, the novel partakes and yet takes a different direction from slave narratives by cagily forerunning Du Bois’s praised theory of the double consciousness. In so doing, it positions its protagonist as the fi…
Carme Manuel Cuenca. 2013. Fuego en los huesos: afroamericanas y escritura en los siglos XVIII y XIX
CARME MANUEL CUENCA
The black female slave takes literary revenge: Female gothic motifs against slavery in Hannah Crafts’s "The Bondwoman’s Narrative"
The Bondwoman’s Narrative is a novel that functions as a story made up from Hannah Crafts’s experiences as a bondwoman and thus merges fact and fiction giving a thoroughly new account of slavery both committed to reality and fiction. Following and taking over the Gothic literary genre that spread in Europe as a reaction toward the Romantic spirit, Crafts uses it to denounce the degrading slavery system and, mainly, to scathingly attack the patriarchal roots that stigmatize black women as the ultimate victims. It is my contention that Hannah Crafts uses the female Gothic literary devices both to attack slavery and also to stand as a proper (African) American citizen capable of relating to th…
Book Review of Carme Manuel Cuenca. 2013. Fuego en los huesos: afroamericanas y escritura en los siglog XVII y XIX.
Book Review
Decolonizing Othello in search of black feminist North American identities: Djanet Sears' Harlem duet and Toni Morrison's Desdemona
<p>The plays <em>Harlem duet </em>(1997) by African Canadian playwright Djanet Sears and <em>Desdemona </em>(2012) by Toni Morrison signify upon European texts aiming to carve out a new definition of what it means to be black in North America. Therefore both texts make for interesting reading in the study of (black) identity construction within US and Canadian contexts for, by revising Shakespeare’s <em>Othello</em>, they rethink and rewrite a social and racial reality unrelentingly disrupted by difference and hybridity. Sears’ play establishes a specific reading of Canadianness in dialogue with African America to erect a possibility of healing and …
The Aesthetics of Healing in the Sacredness of the African American Female’s Bible: Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain
Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) stands in the tradition of African American use of the biblical musings that aims to relativize and yet uphold a new version of the sacred story under the gaze of a black woman that manipulates and admonishes the characters of the gospel to offer a feminist side of the Bible. The novel discloses Hurston’s mastering of the aesthetics that black folklore infused to the African American cultural experience and her accommodation to bring to the fore the needed voice of black women. Rejecting the role of religion as a reductive mode of social protest, the novel extends its jeremiadic ethos and evolves into a black feminist manifesto in which…
Afroperipheral indigeneity in Wayde Compton’s The Outer Harbour
Black Canadian writer Wayde Compton’s short story collection The Outer Harbour (2015) is located in the Afroperiphery of British Columbia which stands as a ‘contact zone’ that enables the alliances between Black and Indigenous peoples and also establishes a fecund ground of possibilities to emphasize the way in which crossethnic coalitions and representations reconsider imperial encounters previously ignored. The stories participate in the recent turn in Indigenous studies towards kinship and cross-ethnicity to map out the connected and shared itineraries of Black and Indigenous peoples and re-read Indigeneity in interaction. At the same time, the stories offer a fresh way to revisit Indige…
Biblical Echoes and Communal Home in Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones
Jesmyn Ward’s second novel, Salvage the Bones (2011), offers a literary account of an African American family in dire poverty struggling to weather the horrors of Hurricane Katrina on the outskirts of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. This article focuses on the novel’s ‘ideology of form’, which is premised on biblical models of narration —grounded on a literary transposition of The Book of Deuteronomy— that serves to portray the victimization of African Americans in mythical tones to evoke the country’s failed covenant between God and his chosen people. It also brings into focus the affective bonds of unity and communal healing relying on the idiosyncratic tenet of home understood as national spa…