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Published in 2022, almost two centuries since the Underground Railroad's most famous conductor was born, Ronald Cummings and Natalee Caple's Harriet's legacies seeks to explore the ways in which Harriet Tubman, as both a person and a symbol, continues to resonate across time and space. Taking a wide-ranging and deeply interdisciplinary approach to Harriet Tubman's legacies in Canada, Cummings and Caple's edited collection goes about the important and complex work of asserting Canada's place in the African diaspora, as well as the African diaspora's place in Canada.Ever since Black Canada was famously left out of Paul Gilroy's conceptualization of the Black Atlantic, scholars of Black Canada have been writing about and thinking through a dual erasure of Black Canadian experience. On the one hand, Black Canada is often unrecognized by other communities in the African diaspora, constituting an external invisibility. On the other, within Canada, Blackness is often perceived as recent and peripheral to Canadian history, constituting an internal marginalization. In such a context, the way that Cummings and Caple take up Harriet Tubman manages to disrupt both these narratives, by recentring Harriet Tubman as a diasporic rather than simply African American figure and by asserting that Harriet Tubman's time in Canada was important and not outside of her political life, as is sometimes depicted. This volume is timely because, as the editors point out, there has been a resurgence of interest in Harriet Tubman as found in film, television, and popular discourse, particularly online. But rather than focusing on these depictions, the collection heads in a perhaps surprising direction as it situates Harriet Tubman as a starting point for an almost overwhelming variety of approaches to Black Canada, past and present. Some chapters have more obvious connections to Harriet Tubman, like Karolyn Smardz Frost's fascinating chapter "The Cataract House Hotel: Underground to Canada through the Niagara River borderlands," which concerns the region of Canada that Harriet Tubman lived in, and Afua Cooper's "The miracle of Ann Maria Jackson, slave fugitive and heroine of the Underground Railroad," which brings a vital gendered lens to historical research about the Underground Railroad. Other chapters approach Harriet Tubman's legacy through creative engagement, notably Kaie Kellough's beautiful "She balances the border" and Alexis Pauline Gumbs' thoughtful

The 2003 novel by lê thi diem thuy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For, explores its unnamed narrator's coming of age particularly through an exploration of her relationship with her father, both in terms of their actual interactions as well as her understanding of herself through her understanding of him, including the ways that she sees herself being or becoming him, both psychologically and physically. The primary means by which the narrator comes to understand herself and the world is through an imaginative empathy with those around her, most prominently her refugee father, which is depicted as a deeply embodied experience. Yet her empathy is also a burden that, while shaping her subjectivity, constrains her sense of self. Thus, the novel raises a question: how is it possible for the children of immigrants to form their own identities in the shadow of their parents' suffering and sacrifice? This article argues that the novel stresses the necessity of working to understand one's immigrant parents as well as the simultaneous potential necessity to distance oneself from them. In other words, the novel explores the generative possibilities of bodily distance as a means of achieving psychic closeness.

David Chariandy’s lauded 2007 debut novel Soucouyant explores the way that immigrants transmit lessons, beliefs, and ways of being to their children both intentionally and unintentionally, and the ways that these transmissions can contradict one another. This article argues that while much of the critical writing about Soucouyant has foregrounded the relationship between the unnamed narrator and his dementia-suffering mother, the text is just as concerned with exploring intragenerational relationships as it is with intergenerational ones. Indeed, the text demonstrates the interweaving of both intergenerational and intragenerational relationships in a unique and compelling way. The lessons that get passed on between the generations shape the lives and interactions of second generation subjects between themselves. In particular, the relationship between the narrator and Meera, the mysterious woman who has moved in with and is taking care of his mother when he returns to her home after deserting her for several years, poses the question of how these two second generation subjects of differing class backgrounds might reconcile themselves with both their parents’ Caribbean pasts, their own Canadian presents, and uncertain futures. The novel’s subtitle, “a novel of forgetting,” signals the central role of memory and forgetting play in the novel. The immigrant parents’ desire and attempts to forget the past are not wholly successful and their second generation children are forced to first remember before they can move forward without being haunted by the traumas, silences, and anxieties of their parents. The complex racial and class politics of Trinidad and Canada lead to the narrator and Meera receiving very different legacies from their parents. However, their eventual coming together, in all its difficulty, suggests that there is hope for second generation subjects who wish to choose a different path than the one set for them by either their parents or the nation-state.

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