Americas and Oceania Collections blog

Exploring the Library’s collections from the Americas and Oceania

7 posts from August 2018

30 August 2018

Eric Fisher Wood: An American in Paris

Before Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron immortalised Gershwin’s production, there was another young American in Paris. When Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July 1914, Eric Fisher Wood, a young American student, was ‘quietly studying architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts’ (foreword, v). The journal he kept at the outbreak of war describes the capital’s rapid descent into near chaos and his quick assumption of responsibilities as attaché at the American Embassy then headed by Myron T. Herrick . His account is fascinating for its candid and sympathetic description of the sudden and complete upheaval for Parisians, his fellow Americans and for the German citizens who, mostly by chance, had the magnificent misfortune of being on French soil when war was declared.

Image 1. Cover
IMG 1. Caption: Eric Fisher Wood, The Note-Book of an Attaché, seven months in the war zone, 1915. 9082.ff.28.

As part of a PhD research placement, I have been working on a collection of French posters from the First World War and reading Fisher Wood’s account in tandem. The correspondence between his description of the period and the story told through the primary material in the poster collection is striking. On 2 August 1914, a poster was issued by the Police department prohibiting people from gathering (attroupement) in the streets.

Image 2. Attroupement
IMG 2. Caption: Poster prohibiting gathering and seditious proclamations and songs in public under the state of siege. Tab.11748.a.F1(5)

In his entry for Tuesday 4 August, Fisher Wood writes ‘One sees everywhere on the sidewalk little knots of people talking in low, troubled voices, and each time just as their conversation is well started they are interrupted by a policeman who reminds them that it is not permitted to s’attrouper in the streets and that they must move on.’ (13) Similarly, in relation to restrictions on opening hours for bars, cafés and the métro, he writes, ‘The Champs-Elysées is probably at present the darkest avenue on earth. (…) The sun seldom rises without revealing the ruins of one of these lamps and of an automobile, the two having mutually destroyed each other in the darkness.’ (37-38). Illustrating this, poster no 15 in the collection gives us the material evidence of these new regulations being implemented, plunging the City of Light into darkness.

Image 3. Curfew
Government poster ordering all establishments selling alcoholic drinks to close by 8pm. Metro stations are to close at the same time. Tab.11748.a.F1(15)

Reading Fisher Wood’s chronicle, we get a sense of just how much daily life and business was completely overturned. He says that all buses vanished from the city to be turned into ambulances and meat wagons, causing scenes of despair and panic for the hordes trying to flee the capital. All kinds of private property, including horses, carriages, mules and even carrier pigeons, were requisitioned by the army to support the war effort, and we have the artefacts of the announcements in the collection.

Image 4. Requisitions
Government poster calling for all heavy vehicles and cars that haven't already been requisitioned to be presented to the Commission of Requisition on 4 and 5 August 1914. Tab.11748.a.F1(10)

Alongside, Fisher Wood’s journal provides an additional layer describing how these requisitions manifested themselves in daily life: ‘All the fast private automobiles are requisitioned for the army, and one sees them tearing along vying in speed with the flying taxis, each one driven by a sapper with another sapper in the footman’s place, while one or two officers sit calmly behind, trying to smoke cigarettes in spite of the wind.’ (14)

During the War, posters constituted one of the principal channels through which information was disseminated to the public, which is perhaps difficult to imagine in our era of instant news feeds and instantaneous information sharing. Fisher Wood notes the ambient confusion and uncertainty that pervaded the population: ‘There are persistent rumours throughout Paris of battles “near Metz” or “on the borders of Luxembourg,” of “two hundred and thirty thousand French troops already in Alsace”, “ten thousand French killed at Belfort,” or “forty thousand German prisoners taken.” (14) In this atmosphere of insecurity, one can imagine just how important these posters were in keeping a fraught population informed of the war’s developments and of the steady stream of government pronouncements.

Image 5. Roger Viollet
Parisians huddled around a mobilisation poster. August 1914. Préfecture de Police, Service de l’identité judiciaire/BHVP/RogerViollet.

Fisher Wood remarks too that when Général Gallieni, military governor of Paris, was handed power, he took advantage of the new authority to usher through changes that had been hindered by ‘politics’ for years. The scourge of absinthe was suddenly outlawed as were slot machines, designed to ‘catch the hard-earned-sous of the workmen’. (39)

Image 6. Absinthe
Poster issued by the Préfecture de police announcing the decree of 7 January 1915 prohibiting the sale of absinthe and similar spirits. Signed by Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré. Tab.11748.a.F1(36)
 
 
 
Image 7.
Government poster detailing two articles of the law prohibiting slot and gaming machines issuing cash winnings or drinking tokens. Tab.11748.a.F1(22)

Eric Fisher Wood went on to serve in the British then American Armies, parts of which he recounts in the latter part of his ‘Note-book’. Following the war he returned to the United States and played an instrumental role in setting up what became the American Legion and later established himself as an architect. However the vivid, first-hand account of the experiences of this particular American, in Paris and beyond, especially when read alongside the primary resources of the posters, remains a powerful account of the civilian – and foreign – experience of the turbulent first months of war from the French capital.

- Phoebe Weston-Evans

 

References

[A collection of British and French War Posters.] 1914-1919. Tab.11748.a.

Eric Fisher Wood, The Note-Book of an Attaché: Seven Months in the War Zone (New York, 1915). 9082.ff.28.

Charles Lansiaux, Paris 14-18: la guerre au quotidien. Photographies de Charles Lanciaux (Paris, 2013). LF.31.a.5681.

Christine Vial Kayser and Géraldine Chopin (eds) Allons enfants! Publicité et propagande 1914­–1918 (Louveciennes, 2014). YF.2017.a.11967.


Phoebe Weston-Evans is a PhD placement student at the British Library where she is working on a project cataloguing a collection of French War Posters.  She is in the second year of her PhD at the University of Melbourne which looks at the author Patrick Modiano.  Phoebe is also a published translator.

28 August 2018

CFP: Revisiting the Black Parisian Moment, 1918 - 1919

As part of a series of events titled '1918: A New World?', the British Library will be hosting a symposium on the 26 October, titled 'Revisiting the Black Parisian Moment, transnational black military, musical and intellectual histories, 1918 - 1919'.  The Call for Papers is open to submissions until Sunday 2 September.  Please see below for the full Call for Papers.

We are pleased to announce that we will be joined by jazz composer and pianist, Jason Moran who will be discussing his latest work on the 369th infantry band also known as the 'Harlem Hellfighters'.  Registration cost will be £20, with discounts available.  Please see the British Library 'What's On' page for updates on tickets.

Pan-African_Congress _Paris _February_19-22 _1919
A session of the Pan African Congress, Paris, February 1919

This symposium will explore the connections between black intellectual thought, military presence, and jazz cultures at the critical juncture of Paris in the immediate post-war period.  Additionally, it will consider the present-day uses of these black histories, particularly in cultural activism.  As Tyler Stovall has argued, “comparable dynamics drove both black politics and black culture in postwar Paris.  Both Parisian jazz and the Pan-African Congress of 1919 combined complicity and resistance…”[1].  This symposium will seek to draw out these complicities and resistances.

In 1919 the ‘1st’ Pan-African Congress took place in Paris.  The Congress is widely discussed in the literature on the subject as a false-start to later more radical anti-colonial movements.   More recently, it has been repositioned within a broader spectrum of early 20th Century black anti-colonial thought that is important in its own right.  The Congress took place in a Paris already awakening to black cultures.  Just a year previously, the military band of the African American 369th Infantry Regiment led by James Reese Europe, aka the Harlem Hellfighters, toured French music halls and fought alongside French and African troops.  The 369th were welcomed back to the US with a parade from Fifth Avenue to Harlem watched by 250,000 people.  It was an instance of the renewed determination of African Americans in the fight for equality spurred by the war – as W.E.B. DuBois proclaimed in an editorial that ran in the May 1919 issue of Crisis: “We return from fighting.  We return fighting.  Make way for Democracy!”  The symposium will take an interdisciplinary approach to reconsider the overlaps taking place in wartime Europe, through the crystalising lens of Paris in the immediate post-war period.

New_York_National_Guard_(40040277381)
369th Infantry band playing in France

Additionally, we will engage with the question of what these histories have meant for future generations of black activists and cultural producers.  It will speak directly to new work on the Harlem Hellfighters by acclaimed jazz composer and performer Jason Moran, which will be performed at the Barbican in November.  “James Reese Europe and the Absence of Ruin moves through past, present and future as it reflects on the African American presence in Europe during the war – and the marks it left here during the subsequent century.”  The work emerged from conversations between Moran and filmmaker John Akomfrah who have said they were inspired by Caribbean American sociologist Orlando Patterson’s suggestion that the creative chaos of jazz provides a language for countering what he termed ‘an absence of ruin’ in black histories and intellectual thought: “how do African Americans deal with histories vanishing constantly, and how does the music become the structure?”

BN75_JasonMoran
Jason Moran

While the emphasis of the symposium will be on the US connection, this is understood within the dynamics of a transmigrational black Atlantic and we welcome papers that explore an approach to anti-colonialist thought, ‘le soldat noir’, and/or jazz from a colonial perspective, including a Caribbean context.  We also welcome papers from any discipline, in French, Spanish, Portuguese, or bilingual papers.

Possible subjects for papers include but are not limited to:

  • The historiography of the Pan-African Congress, and ‘le soldat noir’.
  • The imaginary topography of Paris, France as a site of pan-African exchange.
  • The experiences of African American and Caribbean military personnel in France, and upon their return to the US.
  • The 369th Infantry: its musical and military accomplishments.
  • James Reese Europe’s musical legacy and contributions to Harlem, including the Clef Club.
  • Other jazz bands in Paris/Europe in this period, eg. Louis Mitchell and the Jazz Kings
  • The historical work of jazz.
  • Cultural primitivism in the immediate postwar years.
  • Afro-modernism and black responses to négrophilie in the immediate postwar period.
  • Black Paris / the returning WWI black soldier, as expressed in the American and/or Caribbean imagination.
  • Tracing the influence of early pan-Africanist thought on Négritude, African American internationalism, or the later Black Power movement.
  • Connections to the escalating events in the US that culminated in the ‘First Red Scare’ and the ‘Red Summer’ of 1919.
  • Conference organisers, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida Gibbs Hunt, Blaise Diagne, and/or Gratien Candace.
  • The reappropriation of fraternité from military and colonial ends, for black rights.
  • The repurposing of Wilson’s rhetoric of ‘national self-determination’ for African, and/or African American contexts.
  • The uses of primitivism at the conference, and its relationship to the advancement of African independence movements/African American rights.
  • The African Blood Brotherhood, Cyril Biggs, Richard Moore, and Wilfrid Adolphus Domingo.
  • Pan-Africanism and anti-colonial thought in the Black press, eg. Crisis, The Liberator, The Crusader, and Negro World.
  • Critiques of European colonial rule at the Congress, and calls for international oversight (eg. League of Nations mandates).
  • Theorising ‘The Absence of Ruin’.
  • The uses of these histories as contemporary cultural politics

 

Please submit abstracts of max. 400 words with a brief one-paragraph bio in the same document to [email protected] by midnight, Sunday 2 September.

 

This event is supported by the Eccles Centre for American Studies, Serious, Jazzfest Berlin, 14-18 Now, and the Kennedy Centre.

- Francisca Fuentes Rettig

 

[1] Tyler Stovall, ‘Black Modernism and the Making of the Twentieth Century: Paris, 1919’, Afromodernisms: Paris, Harlem and the Avant-Garde, eds. Fionnghuala Sweeney and Kate Marsh.  Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. P.20.

 

24 August 2018

Americas Digital Newspaper Resources

The British Library subscribes to numerous digital databases that have both historic and more contemporary holdings from across the Americas.  Crucially, a number of these are available remotely, so registered readers can access them from home.  You can access all of the databases discussed below through the 'databases' link on the Newsroom's webpage.  The below are just a selection of what you can access through our digital subscriptions, do dig around for more, and of course there is more to be found from the rest of the world. 

 

REMOTE RESOURCES

These are perhaps the most popular of our newspaper resources, available to registered readers at just a few clicks from the comfort of your own home.  They include the following databases, each of which contains hundreds of historic titles:

African American Newspapers, Series 1 and Series 2, 1827 - 1998

Providing online access to more than 350 U.S. newspapers chronicling a century and a half of the African American experience. This collection features papers from more than 35 states—including many rare and historically significant 19th century titles.

AfAm Newspapers interface

 

Caribbean Newspapers, 1718 - 1876

The largest online collection of 18th- and 19th-century newspapers published in the Caribbean. Essential for researching colonial history, the Atlantic slave trade, international commerce, New World slavery and U.S. relations with the region as far back as the early 18th century.

Caribbean Newspapers interface

 

Latin American Newspapers, Series 1 and Series 2, 1805 - 1922

This database includes over forty titles and tens of thousands of digitised issues of Latin American newspapers from across the region – Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, Brazil and the Southern Cone.

LatAm Newspapers interface

 

Early American Newspapers, Series 1, 1690 - 1876

Includes reproductions of hundreds of historic newspapers, providing more than one million pages as fully text-searchable facsimile images.

AmHist Newspapers interface

Foreign Broadcast Information Service, which collects the records of the US government operation that translated the text of daily broadcasts, government statements, and select news stories from international non-English sources.  This is particularly interesting for researchers working on US foreign relations, but also a good record of international resources otherwise not available.

FBIS interface

 

 

Access World News/NewsBank

Another extraordinary database, though not available remotely, is Access World News/Newsbank.  This currently provides access to more than 1800 American news sources and is accessible in all British Library Reading Rooms.

On the United States ‘homepage’ the sources are listed by state but can also be searched by region. Clicking the ‘Source Types’ tab reveals the following categories, as well as the number of sources for each of them: audio, blogs, journals, magazines, newspapers, newswires, transcripts, videos and web-only sources. A summary of each source provides the date range covered, the media type, publishing frequency, circulation, ownership and – where applicable – the URL or ISSN. In addition, the news magazines can also be accessed under ‘Short-Cuts/America’s News Magazines’ on the left-hand side of the home-page. Finally, clicking the ‘Source List’ tab reveals an alphabetical list of all news sources, along with their date range, location and source type.

The database’s many notable highlights include:

Full-text coverage of more than 1300 newspapers, including: Boston Herald (1991 – );  Daily News (NY) (1995 – ); The Dallas Morning News (1984 – ); The Denver Post (1989 – ); The Detroit News (1999 – ); Los Angeles Times (1985 – ); The Miami Herald (1982 – ); New York Post (1999 – ); Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (1990 – ); Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (1990 – ); and the San Francisco Chronicle (1985 – ).

Transcripts of features on nearly seventy news programmes, including: 60 Minutes (CBS; 2004 – ) ; CBS Evening News (2005 – ); The Charlie Rose Television Show (PBS; 2004 – ); CNN (2004 – ); Face the Nation (CBS; 2010 – ); Fox News Channel (2003 – ); Meet the Press (NBC; 2012 – ); MSNBC (2003 – ); NBC Nightly News (2014 – ); NPR (1990 – ); and PBS NewsHour (2006 – ).

Full-text coverage of more than twenty news magazines, including: The Atlantic (1994 – ); Foreign Affairs (1994 – ); The New Republic (1993 – ); The New Yorker (2012 – ); Newsweek (1991 – ); and The Saturday Evening Post (1994 – ). NB: These are all listed under ‘Short Cuts/America’s News Magazines.

Output from more than 270 web-only sources, including Accuracy in Media (1998 – ); The Centre for Investigative Reporting (the oldest non-profit investigative reporting organisation in the US) (2003 – ); The Center for Public Integrity (2007 – ); The Daily Beast (2008 – ); Newsmax.com (2002 – ); and Slate (1996 – ).

 

Access to 64 newswires, including: Associated Press News Service (1997 – );  AP State Wires (from all states, 2010/2011 – ); CNN Wire (2009 – ); and UPI NewsTrack, (2005 – ).

Audio of The Diane Rehm Show (2000 – ), a daily news, arts and discussion show airing on NPR since the 1970s; a transcript is available from 2010.

The newspapers and news magazines in this database are text-only – they do not include the original page-layout, photographs or advertisements.

 

We hope that this provides some insight into just how much material is available through our digital subscriptions.  We continually add to these, and will post any updates on this blog so please do subscribe if you want to keep informed on the latest available resources.

 

- Jean Petrovic and Francisca Fuentes

23 August 2018

Help in finding Americas Newspapers & Magazines at the British Library

Continuing on from yesterday's post on the opening of the Newspaper Library at Colindale in 1932, it seemed appropriate to revisit historic posts on this topic which give very useful guidance and tips on accessing these vast and rich collections.

Tomorrow we will look at digital resources, including remote access resources that British Library registered readers can access from home.  But first up, a guide to the dailies and weeklies we currently subscribe to.

Newsroom05-s

On microfilm these titles may only be read in the Newsroom and there is usually a three month time-lag in availability; any relevant indexes are held in the Newsroom on open access. In the Reading Rooms, access to the online version of both the dailies and weeklies is variable, so please check the listing below.

DAILIES:

Chicago Tribune, 1849 –  : The microfilm shelf-mark for the Chicago Tribune is MFM.MA207, although our holdings are imperfect for the first decade or so; its Index (1972 – ) is on open access in the Newsroom at shelf-mark NRR071.94. Online access to the Tribune’s business-focused articles is provided via two databases: Gale Cengage Business & Industry (1987 – 2002), which is available in all Reading Rooms, and Factiva (from 2003) which is available in the Business & IP Centre, the Social Sciences Reading Room and two PCs in the Newsroom.

International New York Times, 2013 –  : This paper was first published as The New York Herald (European edition) on 4 October 1887. Since then it has had numerous titles, including the International Herald Tribune (1966 – 2013). In all its incarnations it has microfilm shelf-mark MFM.MA1*. Full-text access to the International Herald Tribune (1994 – 98) is available on CD-ROM in the Humanities 2 Reading Room; this may be extended to other Reading Rooms soon.

Los Angeles Times, 1881 –  : The microfilm shelf-mark is MFM.MA46 and the Index (1972 – ) has Newsroom shelf-mark NRR071.94.  Full-text online access to the LA Times (from 1985) is available in all Reading Rooms via Newsbank/Access World News; my next blog will focus on this extraordinary database.

The New York Times, 1851 –  : The microfilm version has shelf-mark MFM.MA3 and the Index (1851 – present ) has Newsroom shelf-mark NRR071.47. The New York Times, 1851 – 2010, is available as part of the ProQuest Historical Newspapers database: this provides full facsimile page and article images and can be accessed in every Reading Room. Beyond 2010, access to business-focused news is offered via Factiva (from 1980), which can be accessed in the Business & IP Centre, the Social Sciences Reading Room and two PCs in the Newsroom, and Gale Cengage Business & Industry (from 1994), which is accessible in every Reading Room.

The Wall Street Journal, 1889 –  : The microfilm shelf-mark for the American edition is MFM.MA78 and its Index (1967 – ) has Newsroom shelf-mark NNR071.47. Online access (1990 – today’s edition) is available via Factiva in the Business & IP Centre, the Social Sciences Reading Room and on two PCs in the Newsroom.

The Washington Post, 1877 –  : The microfilm shelf-mark is MFM.MA370. Full-text online access to the Post’s business articles (from 2007) is available via Factiva in the Business & IP Centre, the Social Sciences Reading Room and two PCs in the Newsroom.

  

WEEKLIES:

The New Republic, 1914 –  : Now published twice a month, for most of its life The New Republic was published weekly, hence our decision to list it here; it has microfilm shelf-mark MFM.MA57. Online access (from 1993) is available in every Reading Room via Newsbank/Access World News: once in this database, click on ‘America’s News Magazines’ which is listed in ‘Shortcuts’.

Newsweek, 1933 –  : The American edition  (1933 – 1998) has microfilm shelf-mark MFM.MA390 and the hard-copy Overseas edition (1948 – 2009) has shelf-mark LOU.A391. Full text online access to Newsweek (from 1991) is available in every Reading Room via Newsbank/Access World News: as above, once in this database, click on ‘America’s News Magazines’ which is listed in ‘Shortcuts’.

Time, 1923 –  : The microfilm shelf-mark is MFM.MA397. Online access to Time’s business articles is available in every Reading Room via ESBSCOhost Business Source Complete (from 1990) and ProQuest ABI/Inform (from 2000, excluding the last three months).

The Village Voice (New York), 1955 –  : The microfilm shelf-mark is MFM.MA481.

 

- Jean Petrovic

22 August 2018

US & Canadian Newspapers and Magazines at the British Library

August 23 marks the date on which the British Museum opened the Newspaper Library in Colindale to the public for the first time, in 1932.  This week, in a series of posts, we will look at the Library’s rich newspaper and magazine holdings from the Americas.

British_newspaper_library_colindale_jan_07
Credit: Caroline Ford, Wikimedia Commons

To help celebrate the Colindale anniversary the Eccles Centre for American Studies is delighted to announce that its guide to the Library’s US and Canadian newspapers is finally available in digital format!

Download PDF British Library Newspapers US & Canadian holdings

This guide was first published in hardcopy in 1996. 

US & Canadian newspapers
Shelfmark 2719.k.1795, or Open Access Humanities 2 Reading Room HUR Enquiry Desk 011.350973, or Document Supply m02/16737

At that time the catalogue at Colindale only offered access to these newspapers by title and town: searching for these publications by state or province was completely impossible. To address this, the Eccles guide listed the newspapers by title – the US newspapers first, followed by those from Canada – and then provided an index to these holdings by state/province and town.

In the years since the guide’s publication there have obviously been updates to the Library’s holdings. Some titles are no longer received, while others have been added. All of the titles in the guide, and more recent acquisitions, are included in the Library’s online catalogue Explore.  Yet, in spite of these changes the guide still provides the easiest and most effective way into these collections.  It is constantly used by the curators themselves, who find it invaluable, so please do take a look!  And do remember that you can always ask for help from reading room staff in the Newsroom, and from reference services.

We'll be posting more about newspapers in the Library's collections over the coming days, so be sure to watch this space.

- Jean Petrovic (née Kemble)

17 August 2018

Canada and Its Literature: A Tale of More Than Two Cultures 2/2

Language has inevitably played a significant role in Canada’s immigration patterns. Reflecting the country’s colonial history and occupation by both the French and the English, the two most commonly-spoken languages in Canada remain English (the mother tongue of 56% of Canadians) and French (that of 21% of Canadians). Of course, other factors influence human relocation, but it is easy to see the attraction of such a linguistic context for immigrants from former colonies. The Haitian-Canadian community is an especially good illustration. According to the 2011 Census, 97% of Haitian immigrants live in Quebec – the second most populous region of Canada, but more crucially, home to the largest French-speaking community in the country, and with French as the official language. The attraction is clear for people from Haiti, a former French colony that has retained French as the language of education and bureaucracy. And the Haitian community in Quebec has produced a significant amount of prominent migrant writers, such as Emile Ollivier, Marie-Célie Agnant, Gérard Etienne, Joël des Rosiers, Gary Klang and Anthony Phelps, many of whom are published by Mémoire d’encrier.

Pic 1
Dany Laferrière. Wikimedia Commons. 2014.

 

But the best-known of them worldwide is Dany Laferrière, a political refugee of the Duvalier regime who has lived in North America since the 1970s. Born to a politician and an archivist, Laferrière worked as a journalist before fleeing Haiti soon after a colleague and friend of his was found murdered on a beach – most probably by the government. His autobiographical novel, Le Cri des Oiseaux Fous (2000) [The Cry of Mad Birds] narrates this event, its impact on him and the horrors of the Duvalier dictatorship in more detail. After moving to Montreal as a 23-year-old, he spent several years scraping a living from insecure jobs, living in cheap flats and reading novels. His first novel, provocatively entitled Comment faire l’amour à un nègre sans se fatiguer (1985) [How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired] was a resounding international success. The story followed the lives of two Haitians sharing a flat in Montreal, and satirically engaged with racist stereotypes. A film adaptation followed four years after but was censured in the U.S, revealing the country’s continuing discomfort with racial issues. Over thirty years on, and with over thirty books to his name, Laferrière will be honoring the Institut Français of London with a visit on 24/09/2018 as part of the British Library’s French Caribbean Study Day.

Pic 2
Kim Thúy at the Salon international du livre de Québec 2011. Wikimedia Commons.

 

Another important migrant writer from Quebec is Kim Thuy. Born in Vietnam, her family escaped the communist regime in her homeland when she was ten years old and she spent several months in a refugee camp in Malaysia before being relocated to Quebec where she had to learn French, the language in which she now writes. First working as a translator and later as a lawyer, Thuy never severed her links with her homeland. As a lawyer for example, she went on an advisory assignment to Vietnam with a group of Canadian experts. Back in Montreal, she also opened a Vietnamese restaurant called Ru de Nam. She then turned to writing and explored themes such as Vietnamese immigrant women, the culture shocks of immigration, the mother-daughter relationship and Vietnamese food. Her latest publication, Le Secret des Vietnamiennes (2017) [Vietnamese Women’s Secret] is actually a cookbook of Vietnamese recipes handed down from mothers to daughters. Her first novel, Ru (2009) was a bestseller in Quebec and France, won prestigious awards worldwide and was translated into over twenty-five languages. It tells the story of a family’s journey from Vietnam to Quebec and their difficult adaptation to Canada. Loosely based on her experiences, it tackles the Vietnamese “boat people” refugee crisis involving dangerous escapes from Vietnam on over-crowded boats to refugee camps. Significantly, more than 50% of the Southeast Asian boat people came to Canada as a result of a government program.

Pic 3
A small selection of our holdings by French-language Canadian migrant writers (from left to right): Mona Latif-Ghattas (from Egypt), Abla Farhoud (from Lebanon), Hedi Bouraoui (from Tunisia), Ying Chen (from Shanghai), Naim Kattan (from Iraq), Régine Robin (from France), Sergio Kokis (from Bresil), Kim Thuy (from Vietnam), Blaise Ndala (from Congo), Marco Micone (from Italy), Dany Laferriere (from Haiti) and Aki Shimazaki (from Japan).

 

As you can see, Laferrière and Thuy are just two of the many French-language Canadian writers and the British Library holds books many more Canadian multicultural writers than I can even allude to in this post. Now let’s have a quick look at what we hold in terms of English-language migrant writing:

Pic 4
A small selection of our holdings by English-language Canadian migrant writers (from left to right): Kim Fu (of Chinese descent), Esi Edugyan (of Ghanaian descent), Austin Clarke (from Barbadia), M.G Vassanji (from Kenya, of Asian descent), Shani Mootoo (from Trinidad), Michael Ondaatje (from Sri Lanka), Madeleine Thien (of Chinese descent), Shauna Singh Baldwin (of Indian descent), Dionne Brand (from Trinidad and Tobago), Olive Senior (from Jamaica) and Neil Bissoondath (from Trinidad).

 

Although technically speaking still a newcomer to the international literary scene, Lebanese-born writer and photographer Rawi Hage has been particularly in vogue since the publication of his first novel in 2006.  Hage witnessed the civil war in his homeland and moved to Canada in the early 1990s where he had to work as a security guard and taxi driver to pay his way through university. Hage wasn’t the only person to relocate because of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990). In fact, as the war dragged on, Canada and Australia were the only Western countries to set up special programs to welcome Lebanese refugees. The 2011 census shows that Lebanese-Canadians still form the largest Arabic-speaking group in Canada. Language certainly had a role in this too, as 45% of Lebanese nationals can speak French. While Hage writes in English – his third language – up to quite recently he lived in Francophone Montreal, like about half of the Lebanese-Canadian population. His award-winning debut novel, De Niro’s Game (2006), tackles the hard choices that young Lebanese people faced during the civil war. His second novel, Cockroach (2008), charts the trials of an impoverished Middle Eastern immigrant in Montreal through his sessions with his therapist after a failed suicide attempt, leading the reader to question the success of Canada’s multiculturalism ambitions.

Pic 5
Rawi Hage at Quebec Writers Federation, 2012. Vimeo.

 

Hage’s colleague writer and common-law partner Madeleine Thien has rightly argued that the Canadian literary prize-awarding establishment generally prioritizes white writers over nonwhite ones). And when “multicultural”/minority writers are included, they generally tend to be men. Evoking the prestigious Giller Prize, she remarks that only 12 nonwhite writers were shortlisted over a ten-year period, and that “this number includes twice each for Rawi Hage, M.G. Vassanji, and Michael Ondaatje”. Thien’s point is all the more significant considering the extent of nonwhite and multicultural women’s writing in Canada’s literary history. The Caribbean feminist and/or queer women writers Dionne Brand, M. Nourbese Philip, Olive Senior, Lorna Goodison, Shani Mootoo, Makeda Silvera and Nalo Hopkinson are only a few examples.

Pic 5.jpg
Esi Edugyan. A portrait by Johann Wall, reproduced with his kind permission.

 

But in 2011, Esi Edugyan made history by being the first black woman to win the Giller Prize. Her novel, Half-Blood Blues, followed the lives of Afro-German and African-American jazz musicians fleeing the Gestapo in 1930s Berlin and Nazi-occupied Paris. Edugyan’s parents left Ghana in the 1970s, during a period of drastic change and political unrest following independence. Like many of their compatriots, they moved to Canada, where Ghanaians became the second-largest African immigrant group. Her family’s first-hand experiences of racism and difficulties adapting to life in Canada has inspired much of her writing. Her first novel for example, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (2004), shows the disillusionment of a Ghanaian immigrant living in Alberta in the late 20th century, a character loosely based on her father. In the past few weeks, Edugyan has made the news again, by being long-listed (for the second time!) alongside Ondaatje for the Man Booker Prize. Her competing novel, Washington Black (2018), is an unconventional slave narrative which charts the life of a twelve-year-old slave working in a Barbados sugar plantation before fleeing an unjust execution in the 1830s, travelling to America, Canada, England, the Netherlands and Morocco. Good luck to her!

Laura Gallon.


Laura Gallon is a PhD placement student at the British Library where she is working on a project assessing holdings of migrant narratives in the North American collections. She is in the second year of her PhD at the University of Sussex which is looking at contemporary American short fiction by immigrant women writers. Her placement is supported by the Eccles Centre for American Studies.


01 August 2018

Canada and Its Literature: A Tale of More Than Two Cultures 1/2

On July 9th, Michael Ondaatje was awarded the prestigious Golden Man Booker Prize for his international bestseller, The English Patient, voted the readers’ favourite winner in 50 years. Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka of Dutch-Tamil-Sinhalese descent, and moved to England as a twelve-year-old before settling in Canada eight years later. His novel, written in 1992, moves between Egypt, Italy, India, Canada and England and marked a turning point for Canadian literature. Not only was it the first Canadian book ever to win the Booker Prize, but by instantly becoming an international bestseller it arguably paved the way for fellow migrant/multicultural Canadian writers on the international scene. Its seemingly never-ending success underlines our contemporary – and apparently unwavering – fascination with migrant writing since the 1980s.  Given the current context of global migration, the related refugee crises and the fact that 3.3% of the world’s population currently lives outside the country of their birth, Ondaatje’s achievement is a useful opportunity to explore the importance of immigrant writing in Canadian literature.

Michael Ondaatje
Michael Ondaatje speaks for the Tulane Great Writer Series presented by the Creative Writing Fund of the Department of English. Dixon Hall; October 25, 2010. Wikimedia Commons

In recent years, much attention has been given to migrant literature from the United States. You may have come across some critically-acclaimed and award-winning migrant bestsellers such as Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers (2016), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013), Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) or Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003). Experiences of migration have proven to be creatively inspiring for writers and lucrative for publishers, and fiction writers from both migrant backgrounds and others were encouraged to give the genre a try.

There is some debate over the definition of migrant literature, and many writers are uncomfortable with the label, but for the sake of clarity I will define it as the literature produced by first- or second-generation migrant writers. Odds are, whether in conversation, in the media or online, “migrant literature” almost always refers to books produced in the English language and on U.S territory, with only a few exceptions. The United States are, after all, the birthplace of the “American Dream”, “the nation of immigrants,” the “melting pot” – take your pick.

Canadian Map
Map of French Canada by Pierre Du Val, 1653. Maps 70615.(8.)

But Canada is also a settler colony; in fact it is the country which takes in the largest number of immigrants yearly: since 2001 it has welcomed an average 220,000 to 260,000 immigrants per year, and as a result more than one person in five is foreign-born. Inevitably, each newcomer brings with them a suitcase full of stories, and migrant literature is bound to flourish in such a context. Canada’s immigration patterns have changed considerably in the past hundred years, and so has its literature. The post-war period was especially important as the borders were opened to increase the workforce and expand Canada’s growing economy.

In 1966, 87% of the newcomers were European, and many others were Americans escaping the Vietnam War. But by 1970, following a change in immigration law intended to end discriminatory policies against non-Western immigrants, 50% of new immigrants came from Third World countries. They were either economic migrants (like Ondaatje for example) or people fleeing repressive dictatorships and wars.

As the years went by, the latter group included Asian Ugandans (a minority expelled after Uganda gained independence from colonial rule); Haitians fleeing the repressive Duvalier regime;  Chileans fleeing Pinochet’s military dictatorship; people from Hong Kong worried about their freedom in the run-up to the transfer to Chinese rule; Salvadorians escaping their civil war; and South-East Asians from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos seeking refuge from the Vietnam war. This changed the Canadian demographic make-up significantly and led to a new policy-making paradigm: multiculturalism.

Contrary to the American "melting pot", where newcomers are expected to merge into the American Way of Life through assimilation policies, Canadian multiculturalism is often compared to a mosaic where different cultures live alongside each other, retaining their specificities inside a single country. While this paradigm has been widely criticized both by migrant and non-migrant Canadians, it has nonetheless played a substantial role in shaping Canadian federal government policies and influencing the publishing industry.

Canadian Mosaic
Canadian Mosaic Wall, 2013, photo by Tim Van Horn. Wikimedia Commons.

President Pierre Trudeau implemented multiculturalism as a policy in 1971 and appointed a minister specifically in charge of multiculturalism and launching cultural initiatives. Once such instance was the Writing and Publication Program.  Set up in 1977, its aim was to encourage writing and publishing by migrant minorities in any language and to bring the literary establishment to consider such writing part of mainstream Canadian literature. This program provided grants for writing, translation, conferences and research.  Meanwhile, French-language cultural periodicals promoting migrant writing offered a parallel channel for writers and magazines.

 

Derives 1
Dérives, first issue X.0958/169


Derives 1987
Dérives, final issue X.0958/169

 

Dérives ran from 1975 to 1987 and is accessible in the BL’s collections. The archives of the multilingual Vice Versa (1983-1996) are all available in pdf form on its website.  And the British Library is actively seeking to add the feminist magazine La Parole Métèque (1987-1990), which gave a voice to migrant women at a time when they were generally overlooked, to its holdings.

While migrant writing (like immigration) was nothing new in the 1980s and subsequently, critics from Quebec often point to this period as the beginning of critical engagement with Canadian “migrant”/”multicultural” literature.

- Laura Gallon

 

Laura Gallon is a PhD placement student at the British Library where she is working on a project assessing holdings of migrant narratives in the North American collections.  She is in the second year of her PhD at the University of Sussex which is looking at contemporary American short fiction by immigrant writers.  Her placement is supported by the Eccles Centre for American Studies.

 

References/Further reading

Carriere, Marie and Catherine Khordoc. “For Better or For Worse: Revisiting Ecriture Migrante in Quebec.” The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature, edited by Cynthia Sugars, Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 621-638.

Jaggi, Maya. “Michael Oondatje: The Soul of a Migrant.” The Guardian, 29/04/2000. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/apr/29/fiction.features

Kamboureli, Smaro. Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada. Oxford University Press, 2000.

Kamboureli, Smaro (ed.). Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature. Oxford University Press, 1996.

Kenyeres, Janos. “Aspects of Canadian Multiculturalism: History, Policy, Theory and Impact.” Revue d’Etudes Canadiennes en Europe Centrale, vol. 9, 2014, pp. 27-44.

Krauss, Clifford. “For Canada’s Top Novelists, Being Born Abroad Helps”. The New York Times, 05/11/2002.

Loschnigg, Maria and Martin Loschnigg (eds.). Migration and Fiction: Narratives of Migration in Contemporary Canadian Literature. Universitatsverlag Winter Heidelberg, 2009.

Morgenstern-Clarren, Rachel. “The Vagaries of Exile: Migrant Literature From Quebec”. Words Without Borders, October 2017. https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/october-2017-quebec-the-vagaries-of-exile-migrant-literature-from-quebec

Simon, Sherry and David Leahy. “La Recherche au Québec Portant sur l’Ecriture Ethnique.” Ethnicity and Culture in Canada: The Research Landscape, edited by J.W. Berry and J.A. Laponce, University of Toronto Press, 1994, pp. 387-409.

Troper, Harold. “Immigration in Canada.” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 09/19/2017. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/immigration/