AFUA COOPER'S “THE HANGING OF ANGELIQUE”

Afua Cooper's “The Hanging of Angelique”

Afua Cooper's “The Hanging of Angelique”

Introduction

Poet and historian Afua Cooper's convincing The Hanging of Angelique recreates and interrogates the article of the enslaved Afro-Portuguese woman Marie-Joseph Angelique, and in doing so presents readers a fascinating gaze into the annals of slavery in Canada. Afua Cooper's publication comprises a foremost assistance to Canadian annals in both the learned and well liked realms (Harvey Amani Whitfield, 2008). As rigorous scholarly study, Cooper examines test transcripts, personal notes, and other New World correspondence to make an learned coup. Her publication boasts a new viewpoint on Canadian slavery, changing the likeness of us as benign: "Slavery was as Canadian as it was American or West Indian." As a spectacular re-telling of one slave woman's life of oppression, The Hanging of Angelique reaffirms and expands the feminist slogan that the individual is political.

 

Critical Analysis

Cooper complicates and enriches our comprehending of Canadian annals and the African Diaspora as she recreates the life and world of Angelique. Starting with a prologue which overlays eighteenth 100 years Montreal with the refurbished, tourist-filled “old town,” Cooper values the Angelique's excursion to the Americas as a young female to review the international business in human body material in the eighteenth century. She feels on the function of Portugal in starting the Atlantic slave trade as well as those of the Dutch and French empires in increasing it, before focusing her eye more harshly on the environment of the “peculiar institution” in Canada (www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com).

Cooper's aim then moves to Angelique herself. Born in 1705 and conveyed from Europe to New England by her preceding proprietor, Angelique was 20 when she reached in Montreal, traded to the rich fur dealer François Poulin de Francheville and his wife, Therese de Couagne. After the ...