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Flight to Canada via Buffalo: Ishmael Reed's parody of local history.

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From: ANQ
Date: 20040922
Author:Velikova, Roumiana

Ishmael Reed's 1976 novel Flight to Canada has been rightfully commended for its parodic rereading of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edgar Allan Poe, and the slave narrative. Besides creatively intervening in national history and literature, however, Reed's novel revises the local history of Buffalo, New York, the city in which Reed grew up and which he revisited for a one-year lectureship before the publication of his novel. (1) The scenes that take place in Buffalo are gleaned from historical sources such as the slave narratives of William Wells Brown and Frederick Douglass and Home ...

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