Palimpsests of Nation and Diaspora: Black Writing in Canada and Canadian Literatures

• Autores: Paul Barrett
• Localización: The Routledge Handbook of Black Canadian Literature / Andrea A. Davis (ed. lit.), Leslie Sanders (ed. lit.), 2025, ISBN 9780367742003, págs. 55-74
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This chapter assesses the place of Black writing in Canada in relation to Canadian literature and Canadian literary discourse. Through historical analysis of anthologies, fiction, poetry, and criticism, this chapter argues that Black writing in Canada continues to be unhomely within Canadian literature. Black writers have been historically excluded from concepts of national literature but have used that exclusion as the grounds for articulating a complex relation to categories of nation and national literature. Through depictions of unhomeliness, double-consciousness, an ambivalent narration of nation, and narrative strategies of improvization, Black writers transform their exclusion from the national imaginary into alternative expressions of community and belonging. Furthermore, Black writers reveal the inadequacy of Canadian discourses of progressivism, multiculturalism, and diversity to instead depict the struggle to find a language to express the complexities, contradictions, violence, promise, and possibility for Black people in Canada. This struggle for language is a hallmark of Black writing in Canada and this chapter surveys Black writers’ work to demonstrate how they continue to invent a new aesthetic and political language that challenges the assumptions of Canadian literature.