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.
Behn,Aphra (Author), Gallagher,Catherine (Editor), and Stern,Simon (Contributor)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2013
Published:
Lexington, KY: Simon & BrownI
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
77 p., A short novel written by English female author Aphra Behn, published in 1688. It is the story of an African prince who deeply loves the beautiful Imoinda. Imoinda is eventually sold as a slave and is taken to Suriname which is under British rule. Oroonoko is taken prisoner, is sold, and finds himself and Imoinda enslaved on the same plantation. Contents: 1. To the right honourable the Lord Maitland. 2. The history of the royal slave.
225 p., Drawing attention to poets whose writing on this subject has received little critical attention, this study examines contemporary poetry of the black Atlantic in particular focusing on work by Kwame Dawes, David Dabydeen, Lucille Clifton, and Elizabeth Alexander. In exploring poetic treatment of the Middle Passage, primarily through the lyric, epic, and long poem, the author identifies four interrelated poetics that reveal the dynamism of this legacy: lamentation, retribution, rupture, and re-membering. While critical analysis of texts that rewrite slave experiences has tended to focus on narrative, and that primarily on plantation slavery, "Sea of Bones" advocates attention to the way black Atlantic poetry renders the Middle Passage as a complicated and haunting personal heritage.