憶大西洋幽靈 : 閱讀勞倫斯．希爾的《黑奴之書》

Abstract

This thesis explores the question Ian Baucom poses—“whether the now will or will not accept the property it has inherited in its what-has-beens” (Specters 330)—as a way to read Lawrence Hill’s novel The Book of Negroes (2007) now. It seeks to investigate how Hill’s novel reconfigures a black history and recalibrates history’s conception of black people to enable us to remember specters of the Atlantic. It attempts to examine how fragments of subaltern histories may challenge the authority of a white history and how we may read forms of subaltern historical agency in each of the specific historical moments represented in Hill’s novel. By representing the protagonist Aminata Diallo involvement in a series of historic events—including but not limited to the Atlantic slave trade, the American Revolutionary War, black Loyalist history, and the British abolition of the slave trade—Hill’s novel places specific demands on its readers. In addressing this topic, this thesis project consequently argues that Aminata’s story would, through the act of reading, continually be evoked and renewed beyond her moment of enunciation. There are three chapters in this thesis. Chapter One underlines the inadequacy of official representations of the British bicentenary commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade held in 2007. It accentuates Ian Baucom’s contention that “[t]he question . . . is not whether the present is or is not host to its various ‘pasts,’ but whether the now will or will not accept the property it has inherited in its what-has-beens” (Specters 330) as the problematic and the task of this thesis project as a whole. This chapter accordingly asks: how could Baucom’s concept of “the long twentieth century” enable us to recognize our inherited historical responsibility? And in what ways could we read a black history with a renewed sense of scrutiny? Chapter Two turns to Hill’s novel The Book of Negroes to investigate its reformulation of a black history as a way of remembering the specters of the Atlantic. It explores how Hill’s novel continues in various ways to problematize forms of power enacted in an authorized history and how a black history may nevertheless be read otherwise. This chapter contends that the novel’s representation of Aminata Diallo’s particularity does not simply testify against the violence wrought by the British in black Loyalist history, but, through her experience, brings into question her story at large. Chapter Three concludes this thesis by underlining its central concern with a critical project of remembering. It seeks to rethink the issue of creolization as viewed through Rinaldo Walcott’s creolized pedagogy engaged with the lived trauma of slavery and, consequently, attempts to answer the question: what would constitute an adequate way to read Hill’s novel in the present? In doing so, this thesis hopes to generate further questions about the meanings of the past, opening up new avenues to learn to engage with a past that refuses to be settled.