To Dream of Return: The Rewriting of Memory, Black History, and Slave Narratives in Lawrence Hill's Someone Knows My Name

This project is a critical analysis of Lawrence Hill's Someone Know My Name and his subversion of the traditional slave narratives throughout his novel. I examine Lawrence Hill's ingenious use of a fictional framework to revise, subvert, and critique racial essentialism that is brought on by white abolitionist intermediaries. I explore the ways in which Hill's protagonist and master narrator uses metatextuality to share the stories of black forced migrants and to remember, recall, and fill in historical gaps pertaining to African, American, and Canadian histories. I also explore Hill's intertextual method of using black enslaved women's narratives to call up gendered power in his protagonist and, finally, I examine his novel as a declaration of female agency.