Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature by George Elliott Clarke (review)

Abstract

482 Reviews consumer society is not a meaningless, disempowering culture of zombified mall rats and couch potatoes, but it is not a euphoric zone of limitless pleasure, choice, and free expression either. His book carefully charts a sensible, considered path between the two. One of the most profitable insights he has to offeris that the vampire as metaphor foryouth consumption is always inherently double, simultaneously offeringexploita? tion and empowerment. This queasy ambiguity suggestively enables, for example, a complex reading of vampire-oriented subcultures. Vampire wannabes are perhaps neither as subversive as they would like to be nor as deluded as some others would like to think them. Latham is at his best when writing about vampires. Consuming Youth is refreshingly free ofthe psychoanalytic cliche favouredby much criticism ofthe Gothic, rigorously pursuing social and economic contextualization. Latham's readings of Martin, The Lost Boys, and Rice's Vampire Chronicles contribute something new to a rapidly expanding field, by stressing the economic context of the films and the youthful figures they offerup for consumption. Discussion of Coupland's Microserfs and other 'NGener ' texts seems less rewarding, perhaps because Coupland himself is already a self-aware and critically articulate writer. The relative obscurity (at least to nonAmerican or non-fan audiences) of many of the encyclopaedic range of genre texts he discusses may also limit the appeal of certain sections of the book to all but the most dedicated connoisseurs of popular culture. As a whole, however, Consuming Youth possesses the merit of saying what in retrospect seems quite obvious, but which none the less has never previously been said. Vampires and cyborgs, the undead and the human machine, are not as far apart as their temporal locations in Gothic past and Science Fiction future might indicate. They share the same logic: figures who consume , serially offered up for our eager consumption. University of Reading Catherine Spooner OdysseysHome: MappingAfrican-CanadianLiterature. By George Elliott Clarke. Toronto, Buffalo, NY, and London: University of Toronto Press. 2002. xii + 491 pp. $85; ?60 (pbk $35-95; ?22.50). ISBN 0-8020-4376-3 (pbk 0-80208191 -6). George Elliott Clarke's poetry and plays are formally traditional but lyrical and searching. They appeal to a wide range of readers, including the 'I-may-not-knowmuch -about-poetry-but-I-know-what-I-like' crowd. Still, their content is never si? milarly comfortable, as they explore many aspects of race in Canada, including histor? ical. Canadians tend to see racism as an American problem, something that never hap? pens here. Clarke makes itclear that itdid happen here and itcontinues to happen here. This might seem like a radical agenda. Yet Clarke is an admitted conservative. He refuses to dismiss the past, especially the Black Loyalists of the late eighteenth cen? tury,those persons of African descent who chose to avoid the American revolution by moving to what would become Canada. Then there was a second immigration through the Underground Railroad, the American slaves who fled to Canada in the mid-nineteenth century. Some black Canadians would prefer to see these people as simply victims, who said and did little except suffer.For many black Canadians, an active 'black Canada' begins with the post-war Caribbean immigration. Instead, Clarke, in both his creative and his academic work, constantly returns to his antecedents. In his scholarly articles he also returns to what they said and wrote. As he notes, they might have been seeking freedom but they were far from libertarian . In both religion and politics they rejected American individualism and sought something like what Canadians tend to call 'red toryism', a socially concerned look to MLRy 99.2, 2004 483 past values. The bible of this philosophy is George Grant's Lamentfor a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965), to which Clarke himself often refers. As Grant and others have noted, while American individuals were trying to break past the frontier,Canadian communities were seeking a world of mutual responsibility. Clarke pursues this argument in many directions in Odysseys Home. The figure in the title suggests some complexities. Is a black Canadian ever 'home'? Clarke has coined the term Africadian' to claim a home...