The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: Black Canadian Writing, Cultural History, and the Presence of the Past by Winfried Siemerling (review)

Winfried Siemerling’s The Black Atlantic Reconsidered offers an excellent critical account of more than two centuries of Black Canadian writing that ranges from eighteenth-century autobiographical narratives of Black Loyalist preachers to contemporary novels, poetry, plays, and non-fiction by Black anglophone and francophone writers. The book traces the diverse “trajectories of different groups of black slaves, early settlers, and later arrivals over time and across Canadian space” and maps how their literary outputs and cultural achievements “constitute an important and foundational aspect of Canadian history” and “implicate Canada in hemispheric and transatlantic stories of modernity” (Siemerling 8). Siemerling contests the routine elision of Black Canada from theories of the Black Atlantic and studies of hemispheric America and elucidates how “black Canada—and hence also Canada in general—is closely interwoven with so many other times and spaces of the black Atlantic” (6). His compelling close readings of Black Canadian writing are attentive to both national specificity and transnational perspectives of slavery and its legacies.

The book is divided into two parts: Part One (chapters two and three) explores a wide range of Black writing produced in what is now Canada during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; Part Two (chapters four to six) examines critical engagements with slavery in Canada and the Black Atlantic in contemporary Black Canadian writing. In Part One, Siemerling works with a rich and diverse archive of documents that directly and indirectly record the experiences and circumstances of Black life in early Canada. In chapter two, Siemerling argues that the transcribed Black narratives in the “Book of Negroes” (1783) and eighteenth-century memoirs authored by John Marrant, David George, and Boston King “show or imply successful statements of self-claimed freedom and offer examples of black agency and self-determination” (51). These texts, he suggests, figure early Canada “as a node in transnational webs of transatlantic and hemispheric connections premised on the contexts of slavery, race, and emancipation” (64).

In chapter three, Siemerling employs the phrase “Black Canadian Renaissance” to signal the large assortment of writings produced by a group of leading African American intellectuals, including but not limited to Josiah Henson, Henry and Mary Bibb, Samuel Ringgold Ward, Mary Ann Shadd, and Martin Delany, in Upper Canada/Canada West during the 1850s. Siemerling offers careful analysis of “the transnational but written and rooted in Canada” work of these nineteenth-century writers, thinkers, and activists (98), and he notes how they “record shifting circumstances and perspectives of the self that are afforded by the transition from one set of conditions to another” and speak to “black hope, self-transformation, and possibility in the face of oppression and brutality” (88). For Siemerling, black writing in early Canada addresses the imperial expansion and competition of transatlantic slave labour and participates in the hemispheric project of witnessing slavery in the New World.

In Part Two, Siemerling attends to how slavery as a central leitmotif in contemporary Black Canadian writing is a form of collective remembering that recognizes the past in the present. Early in the book, Siemerling theorizes contemporary representations of slavery in Black Canadian writing as acts of testimony and witnessing that move beyond “the registers of the melancholic” (23). He critiques the “deceiving slippage of melancholia from an incapacitating state to a transformative potential” evident in the works of scholars like David Eng and Anne Anlin Cheng (17) and contends that the presence of the past in contemporary Black Canadian writing offers “an anti-melancholic politics of memory,” a notion that he borrows from Ian Baucom (23; emphasis in original). This concept suggests that “conscious awareness of relational connection undoes a basic condition of melancholia, the disavowal that masks the cause” (23). For Siemerling, Black Canadian writers’ representations of the past “expose, defamiliarize, and critique perspectives that facilitate obliviousness to the violence, dislocations, and exploitation of...