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 ).
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.