The First Black British Columbia Novel: Truman Green's "A Credit to Your Race"

"Mobile identity" in Truman Green's novel, A Credit to Your Race, mimetically re-enacts the history of black Canadian resistances to slavery and racism through strategic motion, passages, and journeying, in the process asserting an autonomous black Canadian subjectivity and a sense of...

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Veröffentlicht in:Hungarian journal of English and American studies 2011-10, Vol.17 (2), p.229-244
1. Verfasser: Lane, Richard J.
Format: Artikel
Sprache:eng
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Zusammenfassung:"Mobile identity" in Truman Green's novel, A Credit to Your Race, mimetically re-enacts the history of black Canadian resistances to slavery and racism through strategic motion, passages, and journeying, in the process asserting an autonomous black Canadian subjectivity and a sense of continual self-creation. This essay situates A Credit to Your Race in the history of black British Columbia, and addresses the protagonist's foreclosed abject and creaturely status through the poststructuralist theories of Lacan, Kristeva, Santner, and Agamben, revealing a poly-consciousness that is representative of black Canadian subjectivity. Additional layers of symbolic complexity and significance found in this youth novel, such as references to the African American "Underground Railroad," open up an entirely other ethical level of reading beyond the usual sequences and structures of the Bildungsroman, adding to the text's foundational status as the first published novel of the black British Columbia experience.
ISSN:1218-7364