Rarely are African Canadians discussed as a part of Canadian history. They do not figure often in Canadian historiography, and fail to appear almost totally in literary criticism. Krampe, a
Westphalia high school teacher, writes of one of the nearly lost, Lawrence Hill, author of Some Great Thing, Any Known Blood, Black Berry: Sweet Juice, and The Book of Negroes. Hill is not
really lost but is one of the leaders of this small but growing contingent, and Krampe gives him full credit as he describes his own theoretical framework, giving the basics behind collective
memory theory. Krampe then discusses contemporary conceptions and adaptations, access between memory, identity and politics. Krampe then examines the Black presence in Canada, its history of
slaves and loyalists, refugees and fugitives. He then explores Lawrence Hill’s exploration of faction, historiography, metafiction, and the documentary novel, especially Hill’s Book of Negroes,
its narrative, and its narrative memory in water crossings and shifts of status, and he considers Any Known Blood and its movement back and forth across the forty-ninth parallel. Annotation
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