333 p., Examines both historical and contemporary attempts by the people of Ouidah, Benin Republic in West Africa and in the Caribbean country of Haiti to confront and reconcile their relationship via the transatlantic slave trade. Oral and visual narrative have been central to this process as people represent, reflect and interpret a past that is fraught with gaps, silences and erasures. Proposes that the process of remembrance mirrors a traditional rites of passage whereby one lives as part of a community, dies to the past and then is reborn anew in the community. Both Ouidahans and Haitians now occupy a liminal space--an exilic space--in which they struggle to remember a past that was for many years repressed and suppressed.
Adekunle,Julius (Editor) and Williams,Hettie V. (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2013
Published:
Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
334 p., A volume of 16 essays analyzing the issues of blackness and identity of the African Diaspora in global perspective. Focuses on the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
330 p., Explores the impact of the great Orishas (Yoruba: "deities") of the crossroads, Eshu-Elegguá , on the thriving literary and visual arts of the African diaspora. Eshu-Elegguá are multiple figures who work between physical and spiritual realms, open possibilities, and embody unpredictability and chance. Analyzes the texts Mumbo Jumbo (Ismael Reed, 1972), Sortilégio: Mistério Negro (Abdias do Nasicmento, 1951), Chago de Guisa (Gerardo Fulleda León, 1988), Brown Girl in the Ring (Nalo Hopkinson, 1998), Midnight Robber (Nalo Hopkinson, 2000), and Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys, 1966). The objective is to explore the aesthetic codes and philosophies that the figures of Eshu-Elegguá carry into the texts; trace their voices across multiple forms of cultural expression; and navigate the dialogues that these intermediary figures open between a group of literary texts that have not yet been studied together.
320 p., Examines the place of difference in black women's writing of the African diaspora. The works of well-known and canonical writers Toni Morrison, Buchi Emecheta, Jamaica Kincaid, and Audre Lorde illustrate key functions of the poetics of difference. The author reads these writers alongside important but underexplored figures, including Ghanaian-born poet Ama Ata Aidoo, Cuban-born novelist Achy Obejas, Trinidadian-born writer Dionne Brand, and South African/Botswanan writer Bessie Head, as well as younger writers such as U.S.-born playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, Nigerian-born fiction writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and St. Thomas-born writer Tiphanie Yanique. These writers reframe identity around radical models of difference by: (1) developing and naming hybrid genres; and (2) destabilizing formal conventions of recognizable genres through multiplicities of voice. By highlighting difference as a core component of black female identity, these writers make crucial interventions in several areas, including Afrodiasporic cultural, feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories of identity, as well as feminist, Afrodiasporic cultural, formalist, and narratological conceptions of voice.
369 p., Looks at contemporary novels of the anglophone African diaspora through the lens of movement, migration, and dislocation, with particular attention to how the selected authors depict black diasporic identity formation, and how they contribute to it through their writings. Thematically, this dissertation examines literary representations of the social, cultural, and psychological consequences that involuntary and voluntary migrations have had for black communities and individuals in North America, the Caribbean, and Britain. It explores the juncture of history, memory, geography, and diasporic identity, as represented by eight contemporary novelists of African and African-Caribbean descent: Charles Johnson ( Middle Passage ), Lawrence Hill ( The Book of Negroes ), Toni Morrison (Sula and Tar Baby ), George Lamming (The Emigrants ), Caryl Phillips (The Final Passage, A State of Independence, and Crossing the River ), Andrea Levy (Small Island ), Cecil Foster (Sleep on, Beloved ), and Edwidge Danticat ( Breath, Eyes, Memory ).
164 p., Explores four contemporary novels and a film that rely heavily on photographic and mass-media images to illuminate, articulate, and critique modern-day Black urban existence: Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco (1997), Chris Abani's Graceland (2004), John Edgar Wideman's Fanon , Paulo Lins' Cidade de Deus (1997), and Fernando Meirelles' 2002 film adaptation of Lins' novel City of God . Chapters examine the ways in which photographic and/or mass-media images are used as narrative tropes or devices for representing the material conditions of an emerging slum existence. The author argues that each text reveals a preoccupation with the rise of global urbanism and visual culture as new types of discursive spaces--new kinds of "texts"-- that shape not only the real life of black people, but also the literary landscape of Black writing across the globe.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
273 p., Explores the iconography of Cuban rumba--a unique AfroCuban dance and music complex that represents the foundation of contemporary Cuban popular culture--and argues that rumba constitutes an essential part of a greater African-based ontology. Rumba dance performance is conceptualized as knowledge embodied, an avatar of nonverbal cultural communication and consciousness, which plays a central role in the organization of daily life and formation of identity. This dissertation demonstrates that concrete continuities exist between the diaspora and mainland Africa through close scrutiny of rumba and parallel performance art traditions in north, west and central Africa. Also attempts to identify specific African-based stylistic conventions as exemplified by Sahara's Imazighen (also known as Berber) peoples, Mali's Mande (known as Gangá in Cuba) and related groups, and the Kongo civilization establishing that although ethno-cultural boundaries exist, they tend to be permeable.
239 p., Undertakes a critical task of "writing to" and "writing back to" Frantz Fanon on the issues of violence, masculinity, and nation-formation. The author deploys Brian Keith Axel's formulations of "national interruption" to position African diasporic women's novels--specifically Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, and Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory --as critical interruptions to Fanon's formulations.
