Contesting Clarke: Towards A De-Racialized African-Canadian Literature

• Desi Valentine ^[1]
  1. [1] Athabasca University

     Athabasca University

     Canadá

     
• Localización: Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, ISSN 0004-1327, ISSN-e 1920-1222, Vol. 45, Nº. 4, 2014 (Ejemplar dedicado a: articles on failed state fiction, human rights discourses, multilingual novels, and more), págs. 111-132
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This article draws on personal narrative, literary criticism, and multicultural Canadian literature to interrogate George Elliott Clarke’s conceptualizations of a Black Canadian literature and a racialized African-Canadian literary canon in his 2002 essay collection Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literatures. Clarke’s work is juxtaposed with my own experience as a bi-racial, multi-ethnic, Black, Negro, mulatto, half-caste, African-Canadian woman, and with those of non-Black scholars, to expose the shifting contours of ethnicity and the blurred and blurring boundaries of Canadian blackness in multi-, mixed-, and indeterminately racial Canada. Through these critical comparisons, I suggest that a racialized African-Canadian literary canon excludes the multiple Canadian cultures in which our literatures are formed, and supports racial constructs that no longer fit the shapes of our multi-ethnic, diasporic, postcolonial skins. I conclude that upon the fertile ground tended by Clake's Black literary activism, a deracialized African-Canadian literature may grow.