“Across Land and Language: The Multiple Crossings of Enslaved African North American Women” a talk by Dr. Nancy Kang, Muriel Gold Visiting Professor

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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.