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The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: Black Canadian Writing, Cultural History, and the Presence of the PastBlack Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature

2017; Duke University Press; Volume: 89; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00029831-3788765

1527-2117

Mary Caton Lingold,

Short Stories in Global Literature

Siemerling’s book has the gravitas of a textbook, Madera’s the precision of a poem. Together they announce a new era for literary studies of the African diaspora, one which borrows from the capaciousness of Atlantic and hemispheric geographies while embarking on a pointed return to the specificities of place and nation. Madera offers a theory of the geographic imaginary, teaching us to interpret the worlds authored and inhabited by African Americans in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Siemerling expounds a canon of black Canadian literature so immense that the book itself seems to tilt the axis northward. Yet both authors keep a close eye on the Caribbean, a region formative for many Canadian writers and important within many of the nineteenth-century novels Madera explores.It makes perfect sense that the Atlantic Ocean emerged as an emblematic epicenter for the cultural forms wrought in the wake of African slavery. Paul Gilroy’s black Atlantic thesis, along with the tremendous amount of scholarship in Atlantic-oriented history, has impressed on us that in the era of slavery, Europe, Africa, and the Eastern shores of the Americas were connected in circuitous oceanic trade routes that produced multidirectional cultural exchanges. This framework has highlighted the role of Africans in the creation of American cultures, while hemispheric and Pacific approaches also have illuminated indigenous, Latin American, and Asian perspectives. These methods all challenge the nationalist master narratives that promulgate uniformly Anglo-European histories, revealing instead that the interstices are spaces of monumental importance.The geographic turn has had a significant impact on the organization of literary canons, bringing voices, for instance, from the Caribbean, England, and Africa to American literatures. Siemerling’s book urges that Canada must be understood as a vital node within African diasporic literature, arguing that “Canadian history is also black history (and that the black Atlantic history is also Canadian)” (8). The Black Atlantic Reconsidered covers several centuries, but it focuses on the era of slavery and authors who later revisited the period from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Of the early works Siemerling discusses, John Marrant’s biography is perhaps most emblematic of the paths that brought many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century black intellectuals to and through Canada. Marrant was born in New York, spent his youth in South Carolina, immigrated to England, and became an evangelical missionary to black loyalists who had been relocated to Nova Scotia after the Revolutionary War. Although he ended his days in New England, Marrant’s Canadian flock went on to found the Sierra Leone colony in the first back-to-Africa settlement. Siemerling draws together the stories of Marrant, Mary Prince (whose amanuensis Susanna Strickland immigrated to Canada and became a major literary figure), Moses Roper, Mary Ann Shad, and many others.One of Siemerling’s most successful moves is to draw attention to the fact that Canadian authors have been at the vanguard of pioneering literary treatments of the history of slavery. For instance, I can think of no other contemporary literary work about slavery—with the exception, perhaps, of Toni Morrison’s oeuvre—that has been as influential to and celebrated by scholars as M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008). A Canadian born in Tobago, Philip is, as Siemerling demonstrates, one standout figure in a generation of black Canadian writers, including George Elliot Clarke, Lawrence Hill, and many others, who have shaped the way literary critics conceptualize slavery’s legacy in the present. Ultimately, Siemerling’s book has the feel of an anthology or critical edition in that it combines archival research with author biographies and relatively brief explorations of individual works. Nearly two hundred of the book’s pages form an extensive bibliographic supplement, complete with historical timelines and extensive notes. The book’s greatest contribution is as a reference source that will surely take a place of honor on the shelf of any scholar of black Canadian literature. It should also be—as Siemerling makes his point quite successfully—an important text for all scholars of American literature.In Black Atlas, Madera attends to the importance of US imperialism and expansionism in the nineteenth century while masterfully revealing the hemispheric, black nationalist, and radically regionalist countergeographies thriving during the rise of the black novel. In one of her most enthralling chapters, Madera reads Martin Delany’s Blake (1859–62) alongside and against contemporaneous US maps to reveal that Delany’s portrait of Cuba as a locus of black nationalist politics was an astute response to the United States’ expansionist agenda in the region. Period maps place the Gulf of Mexico and the West Indian archipelago in the literal center of the United States, resulting in a graphic illustration of the nation’s colonialist interests. The maps reinforce what scholars have been urging, that locations that came to be considered remote within the dominant US imaginary were, like the Caribbean, once squarely ensconced in the national frame. Rather than simply bringing a twenty-first-century ideological revisionism to the period, however, Madera reveals throughout her book that black authors were fiercely contesting and reimagining the spatial boundaries of the Americas at the very same time that a black literary tradition was coming to be.Where a lesser book might have overlooked important intersectionalities, Madera skillfully engages with questions of gender and Native American cultural histories. Chapters on Pauline Hopkins and Alice Dunbar-Nelson expose a “protofeminist black women’s deliberative arena” that takes a critical stance within, and at times against, a male-dominated black political sphere (21). Madera is emphatic that to understand the literary geographic imaginary of the Americas one must attend carefully to the intersections and disjunctures between African and Indigenous American spheres. She eschews a reductive romanticization of Afro-Indian alliance and instead elucidates the memoir of James Beckwourth, a Western frontiersman whose writing about the Crow nation is an example of black countercartographies failing to support Native contestation of US expansion. Madera’s book illuminates numerous fascinating literary histories that would on their own make Black Atlas a treasure. But she does far more, which is to incisively theorize the relationship between the spatial imagination and literature. Her introduction is a stunning primer on key debates about geography that cuts across the fields of philosophy, literature, and cultural studies; it is essential reading for any literary scholar interested in place and space.If at first the remapping of American studies sought to reveal historical and cultural narratives that didn’t fit within national borders, Madera and Siemerling ask, how then do we reconcile the national imaginary within this new paradigm? Each of their books, in its own way, answers that question through an exploration of the literary worlds of black America, wherein the great fiction of empire has long been under critique.