HHU, 23.21.00.46
My talk examines Wayde Compton's The Outer Harbour (2015) as a short story cycle and explores how the work’s polyphonic, multimodal, and speculative characteristics highlight the heterogeneity of the contemporary African Canadian experience. First, I investigate how Compton’s stories can be described as ‘tales that touch’, based on the genre-specific tension between centrifugal and centripetal narrative forces (Lundén 2014) that shape the recurrence of characters, locations, and narrative techniques in the short story cycle. The cycle’s polyphonic form presents the African Canadian experience as both localized and particular and collective and interconnected by including ten stories all set in Vancouver but each being focalized through a different African Canadian character. While centrifugal forces attend readers to the diversity of African Canadian experience, interconnections between individual stories add a collective dimension to its portrayal of Afroperipheralism on the macro-level of the cycle. Compton’s striking use of multimodality, moreover, points to contestations in dealing with Vancouver’s settler colonial past and in projecting its future by imagining encounters between descendants of white anglophone settlers and (mixed-race) Asian, African and Indigenous as well as more-than-human characters. The paper examines how Compton’s cycle engages with the genre of speculative fiction to redress forgotten histories and to highlight the complex negotiations of belonging for Vancouver’s black communities and (their interrelationships with) other minoritized groups.
Moderation: Prof. Dr. Birgit Neumann (HHU)