Undoing slavery’s anonymity: The politics of identification in twenty-first century Black Canadian poetry

Abstract

This essay discusses the language strategies deployed in twenty-first century works by three Black Canadian poets that engage with the archive of slavery (Sylvia D. Hamilton, charles c. smith and M. NourbeSe Philip) and reads them as performing a counter-pedagogy of cruelty against African-descended peoples. The analysis focuses on the politics of identification pursued by these poets in order to bring back the memory of enslaved Black subjects into the realm of the ‘human’, and particularly the recurrent device of naming or renaming as a way to counter one of the most pervasive dehumanizing practices of slavery, the erasure of one’s past and the imposition of anonymity. By means of this linguistic resource they achieve common aims: restoring dignity to the enslaved, constructing an alternative site of memorialization, and dismantling hegemonic narratives of Blackness in the nation.