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4. “The Abuses of Settlement”: Esi Edugyan’s The Second Life of Samuel Tyne

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Settling Down and Settling Up
This chapter is in the book Settling Down and Settling Up
[T]he racialized terms of nationhood, belonging, geography, and citizenship – those discourses and experiences which attach identity to place and vice versa – are terms which are not fully experienced by several communities. Black narratives of un-belonging, non-citizenship, and elsewhere not only rupture the homogeneity of nation-space by asserting blackness and/in Canada, they also stretch and reconfigure the meaning of unsatisfactory racial, geographical boundaries.Katherine McKittrick, “‘Their Blood Is There, and They Can’t Throw It Out’: Honouring Black Canadian Geographies”This chapter focuses on Esi Edugyan’s The Second Life of Samuel Tyne(2004) and shifts from the UK back to the Canadian context. I build on my examinations of Levy’s novel by again considering the need for different epistemological frameworks than those offered by hegemon-izing national discourses – frameworks through which we might bet-ter understand the ways the second-generation children of immigrants struggle to negotiate belonging. Edugyan’s novel is an important one in this study given the ways it complicates and unsettles various geog-raphies and assumptions about “race” in Canada. In setting the novel mainly in the small town of Aster – which is based on the historical black settlement of Amber Valley, Alberta – and tracing the Porter fam-ily’s early-twentieth-century migration north from Oklahoma, Edug-yan disrupts the mythos of the Prairies as a space built solely by the labours of European-descended peoples. The novel further complicates the black presence in Aster through the arrival of Maud and Samuel Tyne, post–Second World War immigrants from the Gold Coast, and Chapter 4“The Abuses of Settlement”: Esi Edugyan’s The Second Life of Samuel Tyne
© 2019 University of Toronto Press, Toronto

[T]he racialized terms of nationhood, belonging, geography, and citizenship – those discourses and experiences which attach identity to place and vice versa – are terms which are not fully experienced by several communities. Black narratives of un-belonging, non-citizenship, and elsewhere not only rupture the homogeneity of nation-space by asserting blackness and/in Canada, they also stretch and reconfigure the meaning of unsatisfactory racial, geographical boundaries.Katherine McKittrick, “‘Their Blood Is There, and They Can’t Throw It Out’: Honouring Black Canadian Geographies”This chapter focuses on Esi Edugyan’s The Second Life of Samuel Tyne(2004) and shifts from the UK back to the Canadian context. I build on my examinations of Levy’s novel by again considering the need for different epistemological frameworks than those offered by hegemon-izing national discourses – frameworks through which we might bet-ter understand the ways the second-generation children of immigrants struggle to negotiate belonging. Edugyan’s novel is an important one in this study given the ways it complicates and unsettles various geog-raphies and assumptions about “race” in Canada. In setting the novel mainly in the small town of Aster – which is based on the historical black settlement of Amber Valley, Alberta – and tracing the Porter fam-ily’s early-twentieth-century migration north from Oklahoma, Edug-yan disrupts the mythos of the Prairies as a space built solely by the labours of European-descended peoples. The novel further complicates the black presence in Aster through the arrival of Maud and Samuel Tyne, post–Second World War immigrants from the Gold Coast, and Chapter 4“The Abuses of Settlement”: Esi Edugyan’s The Second Life of Samuel Tyne
© 2019 University of Toronto Press, Toronto

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents v
  3. Acknowledgments vii
  4. Introduction. “Settling Down and Settling Up”: Conceptualizing the Second Generation 1
  5. 1. “A Kind of New Vocabulary”: Dionne Brand’s (Re)Mappings in What We All Long For 35
  6. 2. “Belonging Is What You Give Yourself”: Tessa McWatt’s Out of My Skin 59
  7. 3. “I Knew This Was England”: Myths of “Back Home” in Andrea Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon 86
  8. 4. “The Abuses of Settlement”: Esi Edugyan’s The Second Life of Samuel Tyne 111
  9. 5. “When Roots Won’t Matter Any More”: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth 138
  10. Conclusion. “Conditions of Possibility” 165
  11. Notes 171
  12. Works Cited 181
  13. Index 193
Readers are also interested in:
https://doi.org/10.3138/9781442685338-006

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents v
  3. Acknowledgments vii
  4. Introduction. “Settling Down and Settling Up”: Conceptualizing the Second Generation 1
  5. 1. “A Kind of New Vocabulary”: Dionne Brand’s (Re)Mappings in What We All Long For 35
  6. 2. “Belonging Is What You Give Yourself”: Tessa McWatt’s Out of My Skin 59
  7. 3. “I Knew This Was England”: Myths of “Back Home” in Andrea Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon 86
  8. 4. “The Abuses of Settlement”: Esi Edugyan’s The Second Life of Samuel Tyne 111
  9. 5. “When Roots Won’t Matter Any More”: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth 138
  10. Conclusion. “Conditions of Possibility” 165
  11. Notes 171
  12. Works Cited 181
  13. Index 193
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