Esi Edugyan: Black Fugitivity and the Possibility of a Second Life

• Autores: María Pilar Cuder Domínguez
• Localización: The Routledge Handbook of Black Canadian Literature / Andrea A. Davis (ed. lit.), Leslie Sanders (ed. lit.), 2025, ISBN 9780367742003, págs. 445-456
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This chapter discusses Esi Edugyan’s exploration of narrative structure, viewpoints, and aesthetics in her fiction and places her work in the context of second-generation writing in Western Canada. It examines the multilayered exploration of Black history in her works through the identification and analysis of two overarching concerns: the notion of Black fugitivity and the related possibility of a second life. It argues that the writer has displayed to date a strong interest in tracing throughout different geographies and chronologies those forms of struggle and resistance against anti-Black hatred understood as “fugitive” because they may remain unacknowledged or hardly visible. The male protagonists of Edugyan’s novels experience harrowing loss and suffering due to the social conditions of Black citizenship in each setting and period, which typically define Black life as less than human. Yet, the fictions offer hope for affective healing and new beginnings in a second life, as well as the possibility of reparation and redemption after wrongdoing.