Afropolitanism and the African Immigrant in the African-Canadian Literary Canon

• Autores: Amatoritsero Ede
• Localización: The Routledge Handbook of Black Canadian Literature / Andrea A. Davis (ed. lit.), Leslie Sanders (ed. lit.), 2025, ISBN 9780367742003, págs. 75-94
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • African-Canadian literature became established as a subfield of Canadian Studies largely after George Elliott Clarke’s excavation of that body of work in the bibliographical primer, Africana Canadiana (1996). This is coupled with a sustained genealogical, canon-forming and seminal critique in Clarke’s Odysseys Home (2002), a study which he revisits and consolidates in Directions Home (2012). Clarke’s research and its counter-critique, Rinaldo Walcott’s Black Like Who (1997) as well as subsequent work in the field, collectively privilege an overarching “old” African diasporic figure—Black loyalist, “Africadian,” and Caribbean—as the organizing authorial presence for an African-Canadian canon. What has not been much discussed is the contribution of continental Africa to Canadian literary production. This chapter focuses on the process of African migrant and immigrant literary production as a contemporary and historical cultural/material praxis. This analysis is framed within an Afropolitan discourse that is expansive enough to accommodate, and mediate between, the “roots and routes” schools—the one and the other being personified in Clarke and Walcott, respectively—in the discussions around African-Canadian literary criticism, methodology, genealogy, and identity. In other words, I propose Afropolitanism as a critical intervention in the unresolved root/routes scholarly debate about literary genealogy, critical method, and African and Black identity within the subfield of African-Canadian literary studies.