Beyond the antislavery haven

Slavery in early Canadian print culture, 1789–1889

Ellie Bird

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN:
  9781526174291
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526174284
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: the construction of Canada as an antislavery haven in transatlantic print culture
• 1 The representation of slavery in Quebec’s newspapers, 1789–93
• 2 Canada in the antebellum slave narrative, 1849–57
• 3 Thomas Jones in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick: a slave narrative in context, 1851–53
• 4 Broken Shackles: a narrative of slavery in the United States and Canada’s first major book distributor, 1889
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index