Event
“Across Land and Language: The Multiple Crossings of Enslaved African North American Women” a talk by Dr. Nancy Kang, Muriel Gold Visiting Professor
Wednesday, October 23, 2024 12:00to13:30
Peel 3487
Seminar room, 3487 rue Peel, Montreal, QC, H3A 1W7, CA
In “Constructing Black Women’s Historical Knowledge” (2000), historian Afua Cooper has stated, “Black women’s history has been at worst invisible, and at best marginal in the history of all Canadian histories.” Cooper has notably fleshed out the story of Marie-Joseph Angélique, a slave accused of—and subsequently hanged for—burning down half of Vieux Montréal in 1734. Speaking about “resister and rebel storytellers,” scholars Jessie Sagawa and Wendy Robbins (2011) have pointed out that Angélique’s story is reminiscent of “much African Canadian writing” in its capacity to illuminate individual and community power, as well as prompt reconsideration of how we define an oppositional national identity in view of our US neighbors.
In this spirit of recovery, the first part of my talk examines a selection of cross-border fugitive slave narratives by women, collected in abolitionist Benjamin Drew and published in 1856. I analyze key patterns, tropes, and gender-based concerns among these formerly enslaved newcomers. The second part offers a brief literary analysis of US Latina writer Ana-Maurine Lara’s verse novel Kohnjehr Woman (2017) which (re)instates a Black lesbian voice into the transnational medley of slavery’s interrupted but not-quite-silenced women.
Nancy Kang
Nancy Kang is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Canada Research Chair in Transnational Feminisms and Gender-Based Violence at the University of Manitoba. She co-authored The Once and Future Muse: The Poetry and Poetics of Rhina P. Espaillat (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), which won the Honorable Mention for Best Book published between 2017-2020 from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers.
Mon, 10/07/2024 - 08:53
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