Possibilities of "Peace": Lévinas's Ethics, Memory, and Black History in Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes

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dc.contributor.authorEmode, Ruth
dc.contributor.supervisorShlensky, Lincoln
dc.date.accessioned2013-04-24T22:13:59Z
dc.date.available2013-04-24T22:13:59Z
dc.date.copyright2013en_US
dc.date.issued2013-04-24
dc.degree.departmentDepartment of English
dc.degree.levelMaster of Arts M.A.en_US
dc.description.abstractThis thesis interrogates how Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes represents histories of violence ethically by utilizing Emmanuel Lévinas’s philosophy of ethics as a methodology for interpretation. Traditional slave narratives like Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography and postmodern neo-slave narratives like Toni Morrison’s Beloved animate the violence endemic to slavery and colonialism in an effort to emphasize struggles in conscience, the incomprehensible atrocities, and strategies of rebellion. However, this project illustrates how The Book of Negroes supplements these literary goals with Hill’s own imagination of how slaves contested the inhumanities thrust upon them. Through his aesthetic choices as a realist, Hill foregrounds the possibilities of pacifism, singular identities, and altruistic agency through his protagonist Aminata Diallo. These three narrative elements constitute Lévinas’s ethical peace, which means displaying a profound sensitivity towards the historical Other whom imperial discourses and traditional representations of catastrophes in Black history might obscure.en_US
dc.description.proquestcode0325en_US
dc.description.proquestcode0328en_US
dc.description.proquestcode0352en_US
dc.description.proquestemailjaslife12@hotmail.comen_US
dc.description.scholarlevelGraduateen_US
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1828/4544
dc.language.isoenen_US
dc.rights.tempAvailable to the World Wide Weben_US
dc.subjectBlack Historyen_US
dc.subjectCanadian Literatureen_US
dc.subjectEmmanuel Levinasen_US
dc.subjectEthicsen_US
dc.subjectSlave Narrativeen_US
dc.titlePossibilities of "Peace": Lévinas's Ethics, Memory, and Black History in Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroesen_US
dc.typeThesisen_US

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