Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies

Abstract

Drawing on the concepts of liminality proposed by Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner and Althusser's three ideological tools that nationalism prescribe to be undertaken by individuals who try to become an integral part of a national community, this paper reads Esi Edugyan’s debut novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (2004), as an exploration of the role of literature within the debate about the different positions of black Canadian subjectivity and national adherence. George Elliott Clarke and Rinaldo Walcott polarized the African Canadian criticism by proposing two different theories in an attempt to shape up and (re)define the subjectivity of black Canadians. Clarke advocates to include African Canadian subjectivity in the national desire to belong to a uniform Canadian culture and aims to establish the African Canadian identity in Canada’s national soil. Conversely, Walcott stands up for the defense of transnationality as the best way to explore and grapple with African Canadian subjectivi- ty aiming to contest racism while fostering self-definition. Declining Clarke’s theory, Walcott warns African Canadians to “think contrapuntally within and against the nation” (22) as a means to counteract a Canadian nationality that has historically exclud- ed its black citizens. It is my argument that The Second Life of Samuel Tyne fully participates in this debate and aligns partially with Walcott’s liminal status for black Canadians. The diasporic nature that defines Samuel Tyne together with his impossibility for succeeding and recognizing himself as truly Canadian place Edugyan’s novel within the scope of Walcott’s critical theory and helps to reconsider and to overtly challenge the image of Canada as a compassionate and egalitarian nation-state as well as to reconsider the negotiation of space. The concept of liminality stands as a valuable critical lens to highlight the retrieval of a transcultural African Canadian subjectivity that shows the complex and multiple faces of black Canadians. However, by setting forth a liminal subjectivity that aims to problematize black Canadian subjectivity, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne expands, to a certain extent, Walcott’s understanding of the diasporic approach by rejecting nostalgia as a melancholic hindrance. In this way, it bridges memory and present to cultivate a new reading of the diasporic approach that confirms an acute and more precise reading of the black Canadian experience. In so doing, the novel discusses the waning of the sovereignty of the Canadian nation-state and opts for uprootedness, transnational politics and deterritorialization as the way to extol a self-(re)definition of the coeval African Canadian subjectivity.