Features
Not So Black and White
English prof's stateside studies of Canadian lit turn up surprises about race relations back home
BY TERESA PITMAN
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| Prof. Jade Ferguson has looked at race issues from both sides of the Canada-U.S. border. Photo by Martin Schwalbe |
Let's say you wanted to study Canadian literature as a grad student. Almost any Canadian university would be a logical choice, but for Prof. Jade Ferguson, English and Theatre Studies, that seemed too easy.
“I decided to go to Cornell University because I thought studying Canadian literature there would be an interesting challenge.”
Interesting, definitely. So was the timing: Ferguson arrived in the United States just three weeks before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
“As a result, the first few years I was there, I not only got an academic education but I was also getting educated about what it meant to be a non-white person entering the United States. This included being detained overnight by Homeland Security on one occasion.”
Ferguson found her first couple of years in the States difficult. She says that, like most of us, she tended to think of Canadians as being much different from Americans.
“In particular, when it comes to racial issues, we see ourselves as different from Americans, especially those in the Deep South. After all, Canada was the promised land for blacks, whereas the American South was where blacks were enslaved.”
That point of view was challenged when Ferguson, who earned her BA at the University of British Columbia, began her studies south of the border.
“Because I was with people who knew nothing about Canada, who were coming from an American perspective, they were skeptical. Americans talk about slavery and racial violence as part of their history much more openly than Canadians do. And my professors pushed me to do research on race relations in Canada in the 19th and early 20th centuries.”
Her research uncovered some surprising material: documents and photos of Ku Klux Klan groups in Hamilton and mock lynchings in Alberta.
“We like to see ourselves as the pacifist peacekeepers of the world, but this contradicts that belief. Obviously, the racial violence that has defined white and black relations in the South has also defined and continues to define white supremacy in Canada in some way.”
As she continued to examine the writings of Canadian and southern authors of that period, Ferguson found the connection was even deeper. “In fact, my research showed that Canadian writers corresponded with and influenced southern writers and vice versa.”
She cites as an example Nova Scotia writer Thomas Haliburton. Haliburton's humorous stories about Sam Slick were entertaining but also conveyed his beliefs about the need for a hierarchical society — with blacks at the bottom, she says. He believed that if the slaves were freed, the white working class would be put in jeopardy.
His books were extremely popular and sold in the United States as well as in Canada, says Ferguson. Mark Twain described Haliburton as his favourite childhood author and made references to Haliburton's work in Tom Sawyer and other writings.
“So clearly we didn't just absorb these attitudes from the South — we also affected and influenced them.”
This became the theme of Ferguson's doctoral dissertation, which she is currently revising and intends to publish as a book. Meanwhile, she's come back to the country she left for graduate school.
“I never thought I'd come back to Canada, but I knew that if I did, the University of Guelph would be my first choice. I wanted to be somewhere with interesting undergraduates, a place that wasn't just about educating but also about preparing students to have an ethical and political way of living in the world — to be agents for social change. We have that at Guelph.”
When she's not on campus, Ferguson likes to listen to music, especially hip hop, and she uses that interest when she's teaching.
“I look at hip hop as a social movement, something that's constantly evolving and global in scope. It's this generation's poetry.”
She hopes to teach a course she developed at Cornell called “Hip-Hop Revolucion” at Guelph in the near future.
Although turning her thesis into a book is already under way, Ferguson is definitely not planning to do the stereotypical English professor thing and write a novel.
“I don't have a creative bone in my body,” she says, laughing. “So writing a novel would be an incredibly painful process. I like to read novels, but that's it. Writing one is never going to happen for me.”