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.
Grégoire,Henri (Author), Hermon-Belot,Rita (Editor), and Little,Roger (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Language:
French
Publication Date:
2009
Published:
Paris: Harmattan
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
2 vols., Henri Grégoire, often referred to as Abbé Grégoire, was a French Roman Catholic priest, constitutional bishop of Blois and a revolutionary leader. He was an ardent abolitionist.
Rodríguez,Jaime Arocha (Editor) and Quintero Barrera,Rosa Patricia (Editor)
Format:
Book, Whole
Language:
Spanish
Publication Date:
2009
Published:
Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Facultad de Ciencias Humanas, Centro de Estudios Sociales, Grupo de Estudios Afrocolombianos
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Papers from a seminar held Oct. 28-29, 2004, at the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, Bogotá, Colombia., 293 p., A collection of personal tributes to the life and work of Nina S. de Friedemann, as well as writings related to her research on the black population in Colombia.
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.
"This essay addresses the horrific struggles of enslaved Africans during the "Middle Passage" and argues that the "Black Atlantic" can be considered as a form of existential crucifixion for those whose lives were decimated during the traversing of this oceanic divide between their old world and the new. The author argues that this existential crucifixion represents a kind of collective experiential-historical "Low Saturday" for Diasporan African peoples, in that the failure of full freedom to emerge for "us" suggests that Easter Sunday is an aspirational dream rather than a contextual reality." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
