Beyond the Antislavery Haven - (Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century) by Ellie Bird (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book explores how Canadians and Canadian readers have fashioned their self-image as an antislavery haven, showing a more complicated picture of Canada as a slaveholding, exploitative and racist place.

Book Synopsis

This book challenges the idealised narrative of Canada as an antislavery haven for self-liberated people to explore Canada's complicated relationship with slavery. Examining advertisements, abolitionist texts and narratives about slavery in Canadian newspapers and the texts that were printed alongside them, it shows how Canadian readers and enslavers developed an image of themselves as belonging to an antislavery community even while recognising their own complicity in slavery. The book explores narratives that depict the lives of Black settlers in Canada and how slave narratives circulated in Canada. Canada's relationship with slavery is far more complicated than seeing it as either an antislavery haven or a slaveholding space. Canada was connected to Britain, France, the Caribbean and the United States and this was central to how Canadians and Canadian readers fashioned their self-image in relation to slavery.

From the Back Cover

Beyond the antislavery haven challenges the dominant narrative that Canada was a benevolent antislavery haven for self-liberated people from the United States. Instead, it explores how this idealised image developed, despite the historical reality that slavery was practiced within Canada itself.

The book examines the framing context of fugitive slave advertisements and abolitionist debates in newspapers. Bird 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 reveal 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.

About the Author

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