27 pages • 54 minutes read
So What Are You, Anyway?
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Lawrence Hill
Lawrence Hill was born in Ontario, Canada, in 1957 to Daniel G. and Donna Mae Hill. His parents immigrated from Washington, DC, to Canada, where his father Daniel pursued a degree in sociology. Daniel and Donna were both social justice activists. Donna had begun to support human rights efforts in the United States around the time that she met Daniel, and Daniel, who also had a passion for human rights and social justice endeavors, became the director of the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Over the course of their marriage, Daniel and Donna continued to devote themselves to social and racial equality. Together they founded The Ontario Black History Society.
Hill was deeply influenced by his parents’ social justice activism. After earning a degree in economics from Quebec City’s Laval University, Hill began working as a journalist. As a reporter for The Globe and Mail and The Winnipeg Free Press, he covered social, economic, and labor issues, and these interests translated to his later works of fiction and nonfiction.
Hill is most known for his novel The Book of Negroes, originally published by HarperCollins in 2007. Due to the book’s controversial title, it was released as Someone Knows My Name in the United States, Australia, and elsewhere. The Book of Negroes traces the story of Aminata Diallo, a young African woman who is kidnapped by slave traders from her home in Niger. Set in 1783, the novel explores themes common to all of Hill’s work, including those of subjugation, autonomy, and belonging. This novel, as well as Hill’s other bestselling works—Some Great Thing, Any Known Blood, and The Illegal—have established Hill as a critical voice of his age. Like his parents, Hill has used his art and platform to expose the horrors of America’s and Canada’s histories and to create space for Black identities in the contemporary era.
Socio-Historical Context: Racial Justice in the 1970s
In the context of both American and Canadian cultures, race relations remained charged throughout the 1970s. In spite of the social justice and civil rights movements of the 1960s, white American and Canadian citizens continued to discriminate against Black citizens of both nations. Desegregation of public schools, for example, was not enforced in the US until 1964, while it was not enforced in most of Canada until 1965. Segregation ended for good in the last Canadian school in Nova Scotia in 1983. The pursuit of racial equality, therefore, continued on into and throughout the 1970s.
Although published in 2000, Hill’s short story “So What Are You, Anyway?” is set in 1970. Throughout the opening pages of the story, the author initially obscures the narrative’s social and historical context. Carole appears as if she could be any little girl, from any given country, with any given parents, living in any given era. This is no mistake on the part of the author. Hill intentionally conceals the short story’s historical and temporal context because the third person narrator’s lens is limited to Carole’s point of view. Carole is “only a child,” so she has a limited understanding of the social, political, and racial conflicts that define the moment in which she lives (Paragraph 37). It is therefore not until the short story’s penultimate page that the reader learns that the story is set in the year 1970. This information is filtered onto the page by way of another passenger, who exclaims at the Norton couple’s insensitivity, brashness, and gaul because of how they are treating Carole, a biracial child.
Over the course of the short story, Hill gradually exposes his protagonist to the concept of race and racism in order to form a commentary on the socio-historical context of Carole’s narrative. In this way, Carole reflects Hill’s protagonist Aminata from The Book of Negroes. In an interview, he says Aminata is not “too terribly troubled about her identity” though “sometimes other people around her challenge her identity” (Sagawa, Jessie. “Projecting History Honestly: An Interview with Lawrence Hill.” University of New Brunswick). This can be seen in Carole’s experience as well, as her identity is ultimately shaped for her not only by the travelers on the plane, but by the era in which she lives. Although these dynamics are beyond her control, Carole’s sense of self is predetermined by the socio-political tensions and turmoils of the 1970s era.
Unlock all 27 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 9,150+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
