The Transcultural Intertextuality of George Elliott Clarke’s African Canadianité: (African) American Models Shaping George & Rue

Acknowledging the richness and variety of George Elliott Clarke’s “polyphonic poetics,” this essay brings to the foreground the so far unattended (African) American intertextuality in Clarke’s novel George & Rue, where the author rereads William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1966) in a Canadian context, and revises Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) in his rendition of Africadian black masculinity, history, and voice. I situate my discussion in the context of what Daniel Coleman labels “wry civility,” or an ethical stance that is aware and critical of the historical project of normative white civility in Canada that Clarke’s novel contests and challenges with its transnational and transcultural aesthetics.