Space, Place, Trauma, Gender, and Race in The Book of Negroes

The theories of Creswell, Massey and Lefebvre regarding space and place as elements of human geography are brought to bear in this study on Lawrence Hill’s fictionalized slave narrative, The Book of Negroes. The present paper takes into account the narrative of the main character in Hill’s work, Aminata, a slave girl who escapes the United States to live in Nova Scotia, Sierra Leone, and later in England. Gender, race, and the relationships between human beings in their communities and their geographical environments are considered in relation to the trope and the experienced trauma of the slave narrative in historical fiction and non-fiction. Specifically, the African-Canadian experience and its historiography will be unpacked in the context of space, place, and these intersecting axes of oppression and power geometry.