Harriet's legacies: Race, historical memory, and futures in Canada. By RonaldCummings, NataleeCaple, Montreal: McGill‐Queen's University Press. 2022. pages 440. $37.95 (hardback). ISBN: 978‐0228010654

Abstract

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