African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
203 p., Argues for grounding the concept of global subaltern resistance in the legacy of the 1966 Tricontinental in which delegates from the liberation movements of 82 nations came together in Havana, Cuba to form an alliance against imperialism. This alliance, called the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America (OSPAAAL) quickly became the driving force of international political radicalism and the primary engine of its cultural production. Because the Tricontinental represents the extension into the Americas of the anti-imperialist union of Afro-Asian nations begun at the 1955 Bandung Conference, it points to a moment in which a diverse range of radicalist writers and artists in the Americas began interacting with its discourse. By tracing the circulation of the Tricontinental's ideology in its cultural production and in related texts from Third Cinema, Cuban Revolutionary film, the Nuyorican Movement, and writings by Young Lords and Black Power activists, Beyond the Color Curtain outlines how tricontinentalists laid the groundwork for a theory of power and resistance that is resurfacing in the contemporary notion of the Global South.
203 p., Examines the presence of slave vocality in Black Atlantic literature, placing the North American tradition of slave narrative against works from authors throughout the United States and the Caribbean. Challenges existing approaches to slave narrative by viewing the genre as one based on the fundamental impossibility of expressing black subjectivity under the political, ethical, and psychic conditions of slavery. The slave narrative thus ceases to represent an attempt by former slaves to access freedom and agency through writing, along with its promises of reason and autonomy, but rather signals (or sounds) a process of expression built not upon meaning, but upon signification. In other words, rather than crafting themselves into legible objects for the sake of narration and perception, slave narrators performed their roles as exchangeable units, both discursive and political, in ways that exposed the underlying lacunae of being a slave-narrator, a significative protocol that persists in contemporary black fiction throughout the Atlantic, even in areas in which the slave narrative did not historically emerge.
