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THE RACIALIZATION OF CANADIAN HISTORY AFRICAN-CANADIAN FICTION, 1990–2005 PILAR CUDER-DOMÍNGUEZ Recipes for Unforgetting: Black Canada and History African-Canadian writing of the past two decades has fleshed out AfricanCanadian experience, broadly historicizing its presence even as it reflects a regionalism that interrupts the notion of a singular pan-African-Canadian story. In the poetry of Wayde Compton, for instance, West Coast AfricanCanadians can learn about their ancestry and literary history. In the plays of Lorena Gale and George Elliott Clarke, Quebecers and Nova Scotians must face the fact that slavery was once conspicuously present on their lands. Within Lawrence Hill’s fiction, Ontarians discover the local predations of the Ku Klux Klan.1 These acts of recovery are hardly surprising for those who may be aware of African-Canadian writers’ complaints about the erasure of Black experiences from the national imagination. Expressing her anger at living in a culture that wishes to forget, Marlene Nourbese Philip envisions the writer’s role as the effort “to rewrite a history that at best forgot or omitted, at worst lied” (1992, 56). Dionne Brand also contests the myth of a homogeneous Canadian culture and, following Wilson Harris, would like to repopulate history “with buried and new visions other than those of the dominating cultures ” (1994, 136). Moreover, George Elliott Clarke has often voiced the need to make others aware of the centuries-old African presence in Canadian history and society, and Rinaldo Walcott has made an appeal for the formulation of “a black Canadian discourse conscious of both the locality of national boundaries and the limitations of nation” (1997, 41), one that moves beyond the nostalgia of immigrant writing. Such multifaceted engagement with history appears to converge with that of other Canadian authors who pursue a “re-visioning” of the national past (Kuester 1993, 31). The work of these authors becomes even more remarkable in the context of late-twentieth-century critiques of history and 113 114 U N C O N V E N T I O N A L V O I C E S : F I C T I O N V E R S U S R E C O R D E D H I S TO R Y historiography launched from divergent fronts. Post-Second World War developments include the rise of social history, which moves beyond the need to describe the deeds of the powerful, and also beyond postmodernist critiques of the supposed linearity and reliability of the historical account.2 Greatly influential in the last few decades has been the contribution of defenders of memory such as Pierre Nora, whose lieux de mémoire approach has proved tremendously influential far beyond institutional venues of historical debate.“The emergence of memory,”Klein observes,“promises to rework history ’s boundaries” (2000, 138). Although traditional historians perceived history and memory as irreconcilable, the former objective and reliable and based on facts, and the latter as inherently subjective and unreliable and based on lived experience, such a clear-cut distinction is no longer generally accepted. In fact, society at large has become aware of the necessity of remembering , particularly in the case of traumatic events such as wars. Both world wars and the Holocaust have been extensively treated from this approach, which in turn has promoted an interest in memorials and other sites of memory . For instance,Walter Allward’sVimy Ridge memorial monument to Canadian soldiers who were killed in the Great War has become one of the central symbols in Jane Urquhart’s historical novel The Stone Carvers (2002). Thus, the literary turn toward the historical imagination that we have been witnessing reflects a multifaceted critique of conventional history’s many gaps. It challenges the exclusion of those peoples without history in order to become a site for the recovery of cultural memory.3 Even though general interest in African-Canadian literature has increased exponentially, and despite the wealth of critical work lately being produced in the field, the study of the interface between fiction and history in the writing of African-Canadian authors has been neglected. While writers seem to have become fully aware of the potential of historical discourse as a powerful didactic tool that can show all parties concerned the path to social responsibility and help redefine the very concept of citizenship in more inclusive terms, the same cannot be said of literary critics, who have apparently paid little heed.4 Thus, recent contributions to the study of the historical in...

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