Creative Spatializations: New Cartographies in Contemporary Black Canadian Fiction

Doctoral thesis (2013)

My dissertation explores the ways in which contemporary black Canadian novels rewrite national space by integrating into it what might be called past and present black spatialities. Regardless of its ... [more ▼]

My dissertation explores the ways in which contemporary black Canadian novels rewrite national space by integrating into it what might be called past and present black spatialities. Regardless of its official policy of multiculturalism, Canada appears unable to reflect the diversity of its population, one of the most multi-ethnic in the world, which results in the social and spatial exclusion of minorities—whose presence is perpetually construed as ‘recent’—from the dominant national narratives. Starting from Henri Lefebvre’s assertion that “[a] social transformation, to be truly revolutionary in character, must manifest a creative capacity in its effects on daily life, on language and on space” (54), and from the conceptualization of fictional literature as both a product and a producer of geographical creativities, this work considers the literary respatializations of black Canada in five recent novels, At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999) and What We All Long For (2005) by Dionne Brand, Any Known Blood (1997) and The Book of Negroes (2007) by Lawrence Hill, and Soucouyant (2007) by David Chariandy. I specifically examine four topographies through which these writers relate ‘blackness’ to ‘Canadianness,’ namely, the ocean, the city, the rural suburb, and the home space. More specifically, this dissertation illuminates how these literary representations of Canadian space locate this nation within the paradigmatic locations of black history but also show how the country’s social and geographical landscape is marked by the black history that took place in the country itself. Through a multidisciplinary approach which looks at theorizations of space emanating from literary, geographical, and sociological fields of study, I examine how these writers shift the terms of Canadian identity by disrupting the founding narratives of the nation which rely on the country’s wild landscapes and construct Canada as a white-only space. Finally, this dissertation engages with racialized bodies whose interconnectedness with both physical and imaginary spaces allow for a multiplicity of creative spatializations to emerge. [less ▲]

Towards a New Canadianness: Re(-)Membering Canada in Lawrence Hill’s Any Known Blood (1997) and David Chariandy’s Soucouyant (2007)

in Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies (2011), 1(1-2), 83-103

This article examines the representation of Canadian multiculturalism in Lawrence Hill’s Any Known Blood (1997) and David Chariandy’s Soucouyant (2007). I argue that these novels can be regarded as ... [more ▼]

This article examines the representation of Canadian multiculturalism in Lawrence Hill’s Any Known Blood (1997) and David Chariandy’s Soucouyant (2007). I argue that these novels can be regarded as revisions of Canada’s official policy towards minorities, because they both creatively rewrite silenced parts of national history, and attempt to remap the connections between Canada and the world beyond the national frontiers. Hill’s and Chariandy’s revision of the past and redrawing of the present are made particularly clear in their novels through the representation of Canadian space, more specifically in their distancing from the image of urban centres as areas of cosmopolitanism. This idea of setting the narrative in conventionally Canadian (rural) topographies is also a way of locating their Black characters in a geographical environment traditionally seen as White, which thus allows the writers to question the very elements constitutive of Canadian identity and, by extension, of the Canadian nation. [less ▲]

Pour accueillir David Chariandy

in Journal de BabeLg (2008), 26