Beyond the Antislavery Haven

Auteur

Eleanor Bird is a Research Associate in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University

Texte du rabat

This book challenges the dominant narrative that Canada was a benevolent antislavery haven for self-liberated people from the United States and explores how this image developed given that slavery was practiced in Canada. Eleanor Bird examines the framing context of fugitive slave advertisements and abolitionist debates in newspapers. She considers how Black settlers depicted their lives in Canada after crossing the Canada-US border and how slave narratives circulated and were read in Canada. Canada was connected to Britain, France, the Caribbean and United States in its early print culture of slavery and this was central to how Canadians and Canadian readers fashioned their self-image in relation to slavery. Early Canadian newspapers reveals that Canadian enslavers and readers may not have recognised their own complicity in slavery even as they knew that slavery was practiced in Canada. In getting beyond the reductive and idealised image of Canada-as-haven, this book makes a significant contribution not only to our understanding of Canada and its relationship with slavery, but to slavery and abolition print cultures in the Black Atlantic World.