Infinite Worlds: Eighteenth-Century London, the Atlantic Ocean, and Post-Slavery in S.I. Martin's Incomparable World, Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes, David Dabydeen's A Harlot's Progress, and Thomas Wharton's Salamander

In Black London: Life before Emancipation (1995), Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina writes of how, on discovering that 15,000 Africans and their descendants were living in London in 1768, she was struck by a vision of her present-day London as 'suddenly occupied by two simultaneous centuries' (2) - an eighteenth-century city of black pageboys and entertainers, of black beggars and prostitutes and autobiographers, overlaying the late twentieth-century one like a ghostly palimpsest. In the same decade as Gerzina was articulating these spectral imaginings, four prominent black British novelists were similarly looking back to the eighteenth century - to the final decades of the British slave trade, to the Atlantic Ocean across and around which it took place, and to London, where the abolitionist cause was advanced. Caryl Phillips, S.I. Martin, David Dabydeen, and Fred D'Aguiar all published novels in the 1990s that have black protagonists and are set entirely or partly in the eighteenth-century metropolis. In the subsequent decade, two Canadian novelists did likewise: Lawrence Hill and Thomas Wharton both published historical novels featuring female ex-slaves that end up in London after long and circuitous oceanic journeys.[i] Since historical novels are always prompted by present-tense obsessions and therefore frequently gaze at two centuries simultaneously, how does this outpouring of eighteenth-century-oriented narrative reflect and enhance our contemporary understanding of slavery, the Atlantic world, and London? What geographies and identities, what forms of mobility and dwelling, what personal quests and local or global communities do these novels imagine for the imperial capital's black inhabitants at a time when the prevailing winds were blowing abolition and revolutionary political change across the Atlantic world? And how do these texts - transhistorical, transnational, circum-Atlantic visions of London echo - or anticipate - other postcolonial writings about the world city of our time and the black person's place in it

From the Farmstead to the Condo: Douglas Fetherling on Literature and Publishing in Canada

Douglas Fetherling, the poet, writer and editor, began his literary life working for the fabled House of Anansi Press in the late 1960s. He speaks about the changing literary environment, noting that it has grown much more complex and cosmopolitan than when he started at Anansi in the 1960s. Fetherling discusses changes in book design and editorial work, and argues that ownership is crucial in the Canadian publishing industry. He outlines the rise of the literary agent in the 1990s and comments on the decline of independent bookselling. He notes that the Canadian canon has expanded over the years with the advent of disciplines such as gender studies, Native studies, postcolonial studies and the subsuming of literature into cultural studies, pointing out the fragility of Canadian literature