1. The
Middle Passage as Cultural Memory
Equiano, Olaudah. The
Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano: Or, Gustavus Vassa the
African, 1789 (Vol. I).
London: Dawsons, 1969. Print.
This autobiography describes the
extraordinary life of Olaudah Equiano, who was captured in West Africa (eastern
Nigeria today) and sold into slavery at age eleven. Equiano’s narrative offers
the earliest, and perhaps the only, first-person account of the harrowing
Middle Passage experience. The author was first a slave to a British naval
officer for several years, who exposed him to Christianity. He was later sold
to a Quaker merchant, who allowed Equiano to purchase his own freedom in 1766. Equiano
describes his subsequent move to London, where he committed himself to the
abolitionist cause. The book’s conclusion advocates Christianity, morality, and
the abolition of slavery.
James, C. L. R. The Black
Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York:
Vintage Books, 1989. Print.
Chronicles the history of slavery
and slave revolt in the French colony of Saint Domingue, which became the
nation of Haiti (and later the Dominican Republic) after a long struggle for
independence. James gives early
imaginings of Columbus landing on the shores of Hispaniola in search of gold,
slavers scouring for human cargo on the coasts of Africa, and the agonizing journey
of the Middle Passage. During the period of unrest that led to revolt in
1790-1, James details the tense communiqués between France and San Domingo,
including his analysis of France’s shifting decrees in response to unrest. The
prevailing rationale to preserve slavery, James explains, was to preserve
France’s prowess in oceanic commerce.
The
Black Jacobins narrates the rise of Toussaint L’Ouverture during San
Domingo’s revolt; James portrays L’Ouverture as a courageous fighter and an astute
politician. L’Ouverture made an uneasy alliance with Spain in the campaign to
expel French forces from the island, and later orchestrated the expulsion of the
Spanish. L’Ouverture also led the defense of the island against invading British,
Spanish and French forces, even as San Domingo maintained commercial relations
with these nations. Because Haiti’s economy depended so heavily on sugar
exports, the young nation had to establish itself even as imperial ships
trafficked its shores.
Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. UNC
Press Books, 1994. Print.
Argues that the primary motivation for the slave trade
was capital gain and as such, slavery was fundamental to the growth of
capitalism in the international economy. Williams’ analyses focus specifically
on Britain’s accumulation of capital both in the American colonies and, after
the revolution, in the West Indies. The accumulation of wealth through the trade
of slaves and the raw materials they produced, Williams argues, enabled
investment in the machinery that fueled Britain’s Industrial Revolution. He
also highlights how the trans-Atlantic slave trade led to deterioration in West
Africa while Europe was greatly enriched. An important detail for this
bibliography is how the concept of race that prevails today began with the
slave trade. Item not seen.
Césaire, Aimé. The Original 1939 Notebook of A
Return to the Native Land: Bilingual Edition. Trans. A. James Arnold and
Clayton Eshleman. Middletown, Conn:
Wesleyan University, 2013. Print.
Césaire’s furious, plangent and defiant poem describes
the Antilles islands as a wretched, revolting land. This mute, inert land
“pitted by smallpox, dynamited by alcohol” is very much a projection of the
poet’s psychosocial perceptions. The decaying environs of Césaire’s Antilles
are a stand-in for the psychological neuroses that centuries of colonization and
racist dehumanization has caused for the islands’ inhabitants.
Négritude is Césaire’s redeeming ideology, which gives
the poem its resilience. Négritude as expressed in Notebook is what was then a revolutionary idea that
“it-is-beautiful-good-and-legitimate-to-be-a-nigger“ (verse 109). For Césaire,
the nearby island of Haiti is “where negritude rose for the first time and
stated that it believed in its humanity” (34). Martinique, for the poet, was
still in the process of awakening to the racial consciousness that négritude
represented. The potent symbol of the slave ship on its transatlantic voyage is
where Césaire imagines this awakening: “And the nigger scum is on its feet//
the seated nigger scum/ unexpectedly standing/ standing in the hold/ standing
in the cabins/ standing on the deck/ standing in the wind/ standing under the
sun/ standing in the blood/ standing/ and/ free” (107-8).
Hayden, Robert. “Middle Passage.” Collected Poems. Ed. Frederick Glaysher.
New York; London: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1996. 48-54. Print.
Confronts one of the most tortured
memories of the American collective experience. The poet narrates the “voyage
through death” as he imagines the anguish of chattel slaves tight-packed below the
decks. Slaves singing as they jump from the ship to feeding sharks, crewman
casting lots to lie with “the comeliest/ of the savage girls,” and
unconscionable African slave traders are a few of the painful topics readers
encounter.
In an inventive twist, the poet
inverts roles by imagining the Amistad revolt.
There is an implicit judgment of slavery’s inhumanity when white slavers become
victims begging those they enslaved for mercy. Hayden remembers this “voyage
through death” without forgetting “life upon these shores.” “Middle Passage” is
thus homage to the past that keeps an eye on the present and the future.
Harris, Wilson. “History, Fable
and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas.” Selected Essays of Wilson Harris:
The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination. London; New York: Routledge,
1999. Print.
Contemplates the attempts on the
part of black communities in the Americas to imagine their history, which has
otherwise been discarded, misrepresented or marginalized. Harris (1970) argues
black history in the Americas began in the Middle Passage as part of a
“renascence of a new corpus of sensibility that could translate and accommodate
African and other legacies within a new architecture of cultures” (158).
Because this corpus is both African and American, Harris reflects, it makes
sense that its new spatiality was formed over the waters between the two
landmasses.
Morejón, Nancy. “Mujer
Negra (Black Woman).” Proyecto Ensayo
Hispánico. Ed. Gómez-Martínez. N.d. Web. 8 Mar. 2015.
In this brief poem (1975), Morejón addresses
the historical legacies of the transatlantic slave trade, the Middle Passage,
plantation slavery, imperialist capitalism and national liberation. The poem’s
speaker declares she can still smell the spume of the sea she was forced to
cross, and she recalls her trials as a slave until she came down from the
Sierra (evoking the Cuban Revolution) to do away with the money-lenders,
generals and the bourgeoisie. Where they planted a tree for communism, the poem
concludes, its generous wood still resounds.
Walcott, Derek. “The Sea is
History.” Poets.org. Academy of
American Poets, 2007. Web. 18
Feb. 2015.
Explores the memory of the
transatlantic slave trade, new world slavery, the struggle for emancipation and
the right to vote. “The Sea is History” (1980) imagines the poem’s speaker
being interrogated by “sirs” who ask about his/her history. The speaker assures
these sirs his/her history is locked away in the sea’s grey vault. As Walcott
describes these memories sinking into the vault, he shows they are at once
irretrievable and impossible to forget. The poet alludes to this haunting past
while linking each moment to a biblical scripture. In this way, the poem shows
black history in the Americas is neither less significant nor less momentous,
and yet there is no great book that narrates it. The poem in a sense is
Walcott’s attempt to salvage that lost history.
Walcott, Derek. “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory.” Nobel
Laureates in Search of Identity and Integrity: Voices of Different Cultures.
Ed. Anders Hallengren. New Jersey: World Scientific, 2004. iucat.iu.edu.
Web. 9 Mar. 2015.
Reflecting on the performance of Ramleela, the dramatization of the Hindu
epic Ramayana, in the Trinidadian
village of Felicity, Walcott seeks to complicate perceptions of the amalgam of disjointed,
fragmentary cultures of the Antilles. Walcott ruminates on the denigrating
appraisals of Antillean culture as “illegitimate, rootless, mongrelized,” but
gestures toward recovery and revaluation: “Break a vase, and the love that
reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry
for granted when it was whole.”
In light of vacationers in search
of a Caribbean staged for post-card photos, even as “[t]he sea sighs with the
drowned from the Middle Passage, the butchery of its aborigines,” Walcott sees a
cultural loss in the act of impoverished islanders selling themselves in this
way. Amid these erosions of selfhood, Walcott asserts to posterity the fact of
Antillean culture.
2. Atlantic World Scholarship Meets the Black Imaginary
Emory University. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. Emory
University, 2008, 2009. Web. 18 Apr. 2015.
This interactive website offers
detailed and comprehensive data on the Trans-Atlantic slave trade between 1501
and 1866. Site features include numerous essays; trade route maps; images of
archive maps, trade registries, drawings of ships and slaves; total estimates
of slaves taken into the trade according to temporal cohorts; lists of slave
ship captains names; and records of African names differentiated by region of
origin.
Stevens, Laura M.
“Transatlanticism Now.” American Literary History 16.1 (2004): 93–102. Googlescholar. Web. 14 Feb. 2015.
Situates scholarship on
transatlantic literary imaginaries in the context of the burgeoning field of
Atlantic History. The period between 1500 and 1800, for Stevens, is the most
important for Atlantic history because this is the time that most dramatically
altered transatlantic connections. It is precisely these connections, the
article continues, that make Atlantic nations and nationalisms impossible to
study in isolation.
Stevens puts David Armitage’s
“Three Concepts of Atlantic History” in dialogue with cultural theorists like
Paul Gilroy and Benedict Anderson, as well as literary historians like Paul
Giles, William Donoghue and W.
M. Verhoeven. The author sees “imagined communities” in the Americas forming
out of a multidirectional flow of people and ideas. Stevens focuses on
pre-modern authors like Jane Austen, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Anthony
Trollope, Olaudah Equiano and Edgar Allan Poe. She imagines the ocean as “a
site of almost empty surfaces but richly populated depths, a place that must be
passed through rather than settled on, and a vast territory whose edges change
with the hours" (93).
Morgan, Philip D. “The cultural implications of the
Atlantic slave trade: African regional origins, American destinations and new
world developments.” Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave
Studies, 18:1 (1997) 122-145. Googlescholar.
Web. 31 Mar. 2015
Surveys scholarly investigations of the statistical
records of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Morgan synthesizes the collaborative
work of David Eltis, David Richardson and Stephen D. Behrendt at the W.E.B. Du
Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard. The project, he explains,
was to compile “information on all known individual voyages drawn from the
records of all the major European and American slaving powers“ (124). Morgan
asserts that broad summaries of slave trade records obscure significant changes
in trading patterns over time. “Aggregate, sequential and structural analyses,”
Morgan notes, “emphasize the complexity of the slave trade” (127). Citing by Eltis
and Richardson, Morgan asserts that the variety of African cultures taken into
slavery resulted in fewer ‘carryovers’ of African culture in the black diaspora
than previously thought. Morgan emphasizes the case of Cuba, which trafficked
slaves from so many regions, by arguing that the loss of culture and language
was severe. This research is very interesting, and surprising, considering the
continued practice in Cuba of Lukumi, a language and religion derivative of
Yoruba in present-day Nigeria and Benin.
Morgan explains why his research emphasizes records of
slaves arriving in the Americas and not on those leaving Africa, even though he
recognizes the political complexities that influenced the slave trade in Africa
are very significant. Morgan’s decision not to focus on Africa in any profound
way shows to be deeply flawed when he claims that long journeys from interior
Africa ‘probably’ eroded the ethnic and cultural identity of captives by the
time they got to port. Judging from generalized statements concerning
Senegambia and the Yoruba, Morgan and the scholars he cites demonstrate a very superficial
understanding of ethnicity in West Africa.
Mann, Kristin. “Shifting Paradigms in the Study of the
African Diaspora and of Atlantic History and Culture.” Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies,
22.1 (2001) 3-21. Googlescholar. Web.
14 Feb. 2015.
Engages with the burgeoning academic discourse between
scholars of Africa and scholars of the Americas, and seeks to redress a
discursive impasse. Mann argues there have been two prevailing paradigms in the
study of the black diaspora in relation with Africa. The first paradigm, put
forth by Melville Herskovits, viewed manifestations of black culture in the
Americas as the product of ‘survivals’ retained from Africa. In the 1970s,
Richard Price, Sally Price and Sidney Mintz “emphasized innovation and adaptation
within black cultures of the New World and argued for the development of hybrid
creole culture” (5). Mann takes these paradigms apart by revealing not only the
complexities in black diaspora cultures but also their variety across geographical
specificity in the Americas. She concludes by calling for representations of
the “African diaspora beyond simple oppositions, unitary models and static
constructions to more varied, complex and fluid accounts that come closer to
capturing the unfolding experiences of Africans and their descendants
throughout the Atlantic world” (16).
Sandiford, Keith Albert. Theorizing a Colonial Caribbean-Atlantic
Imaginary: Sugar and Obeah. New York: Routledge, 2011. Print.
Establishes the author’s use of the term imaginary by
building on Cornelius Castoriadis’s definition, which Sandiford characterizes
as “the magma or creative force from which a society’s cultural origins may be
traced” (1). Sandiford views the foundation of the colonial Caribbean-Atlantic
imaginary as an extension of western literary works like Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Milton’s Paradise Lost. The sections most
relevant for this bibliography are “Introduction,” “The Imaginary as a Poetics
of Theory and Crosscultural Consciousness,” and “Sugar and the Ocean.”
The growth of black consciousness in the colonial
Caribbean-Atlantic, Sandiford argues, stood in direct contrast to the order
that colonizing slaveholders sought to establish. Slavocrats sought to
fetishize sugar, which was so important to their capitalist enterprise, while
the slaves’ conception of obeah (folk religion) as disease undermined the precepts
of plantation society. Sandiford posits that limbo, vodun, and slave-indigenous
creolization created myths that encountered one another, flowed through one another,
and metamorphosed to form a novel consciousness in black-indigenous America.
Clément, Vincent. “Latitude and Longitude of the Past:
Puce, Negritude and French Caribbean Identity in Aimé Césaire’s Poetry.” Caribbean
Studies 39.1/2 (2011): 171–193. Web. 14 Feb. 2015.
Connects geographical descriptions in Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to Native Land with
the natural landscape of the poet’s home island of Martinique. Clément portrays
Notebook as the poet’s search for “geographic coordinates
lost in the wake of the slave ships” (173). Through the act of writing, Clément
argues Césaire creates a new French Caribbean identity and geography.
Clément later analyzes the political energy at work in
the poem. He includes Césaire’s transformative experience living in France, where
he first discovered his “otherness” as a black man in Paris. Clément describes
Césaire meeting Léopold Sédar Senghor and their creation of the négritude movement. He notes that Césaire was critiqued for
privileging Africa over the Antilles in his poetry, and shows that Césaire’s calls
for transnational black consciousness was soon eclipsed by Caribbean valuation
of creolité.
Ngal, Georges. Aimé Césaire: Un
homme à la recherche d’une patrie. Paris: Présence africaine, 1994. 111-117.
Print.
Historicizes the moments in Césaire’s life that influenced the
development of his poetic and political consciousness. The chapters most
significant to this bibliography are “Three: Le Retour au pays natal”
and “Four: Les débuts
d’une esthétique d’enracinement 1935-1946.”
Chapter Three highlights Césaire’s departure from France by boat to
Martinique days after World War II broke out. Ngal describes Césaire’s time
teaching at Schoelcher secondary school in Martinique, where his enthusiasm
renewed student interest in their studies of Virgil and Sophocles. Chapter Four
dissects the ideological tendencies of Césaire’s négritude as expressed in his poetry. Ngal highlights in Césaire’s Notebook
the author’s deep mistrust of civilization and its conquering ways. Césaire’s
outlook, Ngal argues, is deeply influenced by Leo Frobenius’s
ethnographic work on African civilization. Because so much of négritude as an ideology
relies on rhetoric, Ngal argues a historical perspective is necessary to get at
any truth.
Plasa, Carl. “Doing the Slave
Trade in Different Voices: Poetics and Politics in Robert Hayden’s First
‘Middle Passage.’” African American Review 45.4 (2012): 557–573. Jstor. Web. 19 Mar. 2015.
Analyzes the artistic, thematic and
intertextual movements in Hayden’s “Middle Passage.” Like many critics before
him, Plasa acknowledges the influence of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” on Hayden’s innovative poem. He points
out that disjointed polyphony, typographical variation and moral disillusion
all describe the master works of both Hayden and Eliot. “Doing the Slave Trade
in Different Voices” also speculates on the historical narratives that could
have informed the composition of “Middle Passage,” especially Hayden’s
imagining of the Amistad revolt.
Plasa finds evidence to suggest Hayden’s research had been influenced by Muriel
Rukeyser’s Willard Gibbs, George
Francis Dow’s Slave Ships and Slaving, Stephen
Vincent Benêt’s John Brown's Body, and Theodore Canot’s Adventures of an African Slaver.
Plasa’s sharpest reading of “Middle
Passage” views it as narration of historical resistance, which makes the poem
itself a work of resistance. He states, “‘Middle Passage’ rejects the pyrrhic
comfort of a black resistance gained only via the melancholy defiles of suicide
(as in section one [of the poem]), and embraces the more sustaining project of
a counter-violence aimed squarely at the oppressor” (568). Plasa’s reading
complicates previous portrayals (mostly from cultural nationalists) of Hayden
as a poet too married to western, ‘white’ literary traditions.
Murphy, Jim. “‘Here Only the Sea
Is Real’: Robert Hayden’s Postmodern Passages.” MELUS 27.4 (2002):
107–127. JSTOR. Web. 15 Feb. 2015.
Explores the very complex
personality of poet Robert Hayden and investigates Hayden’s self-exploration through verse.
Murphy argues that Hayden’s poetry is both an investigation of his personal
identity and an interrogation of black cultural identity. In his reading of
Hayden’s “Middle Passage,” Murphy argues Hayden is creating black identity in
his imagining of this collective legacy. Murphy sees the complexity of Hayden’s
verse as a result of the variety of influences Hayden incorporates, including
black culture and the modernist poetics of T.S. Eliot. It is noteworthy that
Murphy’s reading implicitly views black culture and modernism as separate from
one another.
Murphy also covers Hayden’s
encounter with the Black Arts Movement in the early 1970s. The movement
promoted strong cultural nationalism and Hayden distanced himself from their
agenda. Murphy concludes that the broadminded perspective of black identity
articulated in Hayden’s poetry remains largely unexplored, and critical
attention to his work is a task to be taken up.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black
Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press, 1993. Print.
Conducts a manifold interrogation
of black vernacular culture in relation to ‘modernity’ in the industrialized
world, especially the United States. Gilroy pursues more nuanced understandings
of cultural production than essentialists and cultural nationalists are willing
to recognizes. While he rejects any view of racial essence, Gilroy’s insights
reveal that the unique experience of the black diaspora helped forge the
extraordinary social indices of black vernacular culture.
The
Black Atlantic is the author’s exploration of black culture in
white-dominated society, and his insights shed light on ‘modern’ society at
large. Gilroy’s foci of analysis include: the significance of musical styles in
black cultural production (he argues hip hop has been seriously under-analyzed
by essentialists and anti-essentialists alike), W.E.B. DuBois and double
consciousness in the black diaspora, Richard Wright and the social construct of
‘Negro-ness,’ and Toni Morrison and the legacy of racial terror. Written in
1993, Gilroy sought for The Black
Atlantic to push toward “the politics of a new century in which the central
axis of conflict will no longer be the colour line but the challenge of just,
sustainable development and the frontiers which will separate the overdeveloped
parts of the world (at home and abroad) from the intractable poverty that
already surrounds them” (223).
Dayan, Joan. “Paul Gilroy’s
Slaves, Ships, and Routes: The Middle Passage as Metaphor.” Research in
African Literatures 27.4 (1996): 7–14. Googlescholar.
Web. 14 Feb. 2015.
Joan Dayan blasts Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic on several points.
First, Dayan argues his portrayal of slavery is nothing more than a metaphor,
and his view of the Middle Passage is frozen in the historical past. Drawing on
her work in Arizona prisons, Dayan argues that mass incarceration of young
blacks and Latinos makes enslavement, if less obvious, still very much a part
of contemporary society. Dayan condemns Gilroy for cleanly sidestepping this
issue, as well as his analysis of Frederick Douglass, which ignores the
structural limitations of Douglass’s freedom after his emancipation. In
addition, Dayan critiques Gilroy’s marginalization of Black Atlantic authors in
the Caribbean and his unsophisticated treatment of pre-slave trade Africa.
Diedrich, Maria, Henry Louis
Gates, and Carl Pedersen, eds. Black Imagination and the Middle Passage.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. iucat.iu.edu. Web. 23 Feb.
2015. W.E.B. Du Bois Institute.
Including the work of 25 scholars
and 3 editors, The Black Imagination and
the Middle Passage offers a thorough examination of the Middle Passage as
cultural memory in the black diaspora (with particular emphasis on the United
States). Sections most relevant to this bibliography include “Introductory
Remarks,” “The Slave Ship Dance,” “Landings,” “‘The Persistence of Tradition,’”
and “The African American Concept of the Fantastic as Middle Passage.”
The editors present two framing
ideas in their introductory remarks. The first is that the African American
concept of space began in the Middle Passage. The second draws on Wilson
Harris’s argument that the Middle Passage memory cannot be down in the ship’s
holds where the enslaved is an emasculated victim. The crucial Middle Passage
memory, for Harris, is the limbo dance on the ship decks. In “The Slave Ship
Dance,” Geneviève Fabre states
that, even if slaves could not escape their captors’ cruelty, the dance in some
way allowed them to “imaginatively break the chains and defy traders or
captains and their crew” (42). It is lamentable that Fabre overlooks Césaire’s
monumental poem, which envisioned in 1939: “And the nigger scum is on its
feet// the seated nigger scum/ unexpectedly standing/ standing in the
hold/…standing on the deck/ standing in the wind/…standing/ and/ free” (107-8).
It is also unfortunate that the
editors, in their introductory remarks, dismiss Césaire and Senghor for their essentialism with no
consideration of their contributions to black consciousness and to the art of
poetry.
These essays explore the Middle
Passage as a ‘mythic’ memory over an ethnographic one. Much of the art and
literature examined here involve an attempt to give voice to ineffable trauma.
“Landings” describes how authors like Robert Hayden and Kamau Brathwaite
confronted the specter of the Middle Passage through literature in the 1960s
and ‘70s. Other essays highlight the way Toni Morrison’s Beloved conjures past trauma as a means to exorcise it.
DeCosta-Willis, Miriam.
“Meditations on History: The Middle Passage in the Afro-Hispanic Literary
Imagination.” Afro-Hispanic Review 22.1 (2003): 3–12. Web. 26 Feb. 15.
Surveys representations of the
Middle Passage in Afro-Latino literature, starting from The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus
Vassa, the African (1789). Following this “paradigmatic text,”
DeCosta-Willis points out that Afro-Hispanic writers did not address the theme
of the Middle Passage until the late twentieth century (3). By then, the author
notes, the Middle Passage as historical event had undergone a process of
mythification in black cultural memory.
“Meditations on History” analyzes
the Middle Passage as a trope in the work of Nancy Morejon, Perez Sarduy, Carlos
Guillermo Wilson, and Manuel Zapata Olivella. DeCosta-Willis argues that these
authors revise history by fictionalizing slavery and the Middle Passage.
Watson, Sonja Stephenson. “Changó,
El Gran Putas: Contemporary Afro-Hispanic Historical Novel.” Afro-Hispanic
Review 25.1 (2006): 67–85. Web. 8 Mar. 2015.
Investigates the Afro-Hispanic
historical novel (AHHN) with a reading of Manuel Zapata Olivella's Changó, El Gran Putas (1983). Watson
reflects on the marginalized presence of Afro-Latinos in Spanish American
literature, noting that Afro-Latinos had previously been the object of representation
by white or mestizo authors. Watson notes that the Afro-Hispanic historical
novel represents a change to Afro-Latinos representing themselves in
literature, which she sees as an act of resistance as authors revise the
history from which they have been marginalized. Watson attributes this growth
in black consciousness (which she dates to the 1960s and ‘70s) to the inspiring
“black brothers and sisters in the United States during the socio-political
activism of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements” (67). She gives no mention,
however, to C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott, Nancy Morejón or Wilson Harris.
Watson describes Olivella’s novel
as a work of ‘afro-realism,’ an aesthetic she identifies (after Quince Duncan)
by the following characteristics:
rejection of Eurocentrism, a revival of African symbolic memory based on
research, a reaffirmation of ancestral community, and a declaration of an
African identity from an insider’s perspective.
3. Confronting
the Past
Tibbles, Anthony. “Facing
Slavery’s Past: The Bicentenary of the Abolition of the British Slave Trade.” Slavery
& Abolition 29.2 (2008): 293–303. Taylor and Francis+NEJM. Web.
26 Apr. 2015.
Examines the historical importance
of Britain’s participation in the slave trade, in the context of the
Bicentennial of Britain’s abolition of the trade. As activities and events mark
this important history, Tibbles examines factors behind the reluctance of many
to confront this uncomfortable history. Item not seen.
MacGonagle, Elizabeth and Kim Warren. “‘How
Much for Kunta Kinte?!’ Sites for Memory and Diasporan Encounters in West
Africa.” Ed. Beek, W. E. A. van, and A. M Schmidt. African Hosts and Their
Guests Cultural Dynamics of Tourism. Oxford: James Currey, 2012. Open
WorldCat. Web. 26 Apr. 2015.
Investigates various aspects of
African American heritage tourism to sites in West Africa related to the slave
trade. The authors show this return pilgrimage is an extremely emotional
experience for African Americans searching for the severed roots of their
family trees. Aspects of these trips can be disappointing, though, since the
historic sites are not always what they expect and tourists are not often
received by Africans as they had imagined.
MacGonagle and Warren show Africans
feel far less impacted by the history of the slave trade as African Americans.
Africans often receive African Americans as foreigners rather than long-lost
relatives, and global economic inequalities can be a source of resentment
between the two groups. African governments and locals do not mind taking
advantage of African Americans yearning to reconstruct their pasts, although tour
guides tend to be more sensitive to the ‘return’ experience.
An important aspect for this
bibliography is when MacGonagle and Warren explore how African Americans are
often disappointed by DNA testing, which often cannot pinpoint one’s lineage to
a distinct region or ethnic group in Africa. This response from African
Americans reflects the value they place on ‘pure’ and direct links to their
African rather than the New World creolité that Eduard Glissant theorizes.
Halloran, Vivian Nun. Exhibiting
Slavery : The Caribbean Postmodern Novel as Museum. Charlottesville :
University of Virginia Press, 2009. Print.
With readings of several postmodern
Caribbean novels, Halloran argues literature can function as a virtual museum for
readers to explore the legacy of slavery. The author interprets images and objects in these novels as artifacts curated
by the authors. The most relevant aspect for my project is Halloran’s analysis
of UNESCO World Heritage sites such as Elmina Castle in Ghana. Halloran questions the motivations
behind Ghana’s decision to promote heritage tourism for African Americans.
Hartman, Saidiya V. Lose Your Mother : A
Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York : Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2007. Print.
Hartman interrogates the resonance of
slavery in contemporary society by narrating her travels to West Africa.
Hartman’s memoir gives an intimate portrait of slavery’s legacy by tracing the
slave route in reverse. She personalize the rupture that the slave trade
effected on African Americans by recognizing the irretrievability of her
genealogical links to Africa. Visiting Elmina Castle, Hartman lends a critical
eye on the industry of Ghana’s heritage tourism. Item not seen.
Mbembé, Achille. “African Modes of
Self-Writing.” Identity, Culture and Politics 2.2 (2002): 239–73. GoogleScholar.
Web. 28 May 2014.
Critiques how African authors have represented
the continent. The most relevant aspect for this bibliography is Mbembe’s
argument that the memories of slavery, colonization and apartheid create a
“cult of victimization” in the African consciousness (5). These memories affect
the present when, as Mbembe claims, it creates the idea that “Africa is not
responsible for the catastrophes that are befalling it.”
Nganang, Patrice. 2007. Manifeste d’une
nouvelle littérature africaine: Pour une littérature préemptive. Paris,
France: Homnispheres.
Advances Mbembe’s critique by
examining different types of African writing that dwells on past trauma, and thereby
perpetuates a paradigm of victimhood. Nganang’s main argument calls for
preemptive writing to prevent future catastrophes rather than obsessing on past
disasters.
———. “Necessary Doubt.” African
Writing Online 7, (July 25, 2008), Web. 28 Apr. 2014).
This speech delivered in Kigali,
Rwanda presents the central argument of Manifeste
d’une nouvelle littérature africaine for an English-speaking audience. Again building on Mbembe’s
thesis, Nganang stresses that writing that dwells on past trauma inflicted by
foreigners was no longer possible after the Rwandan genocide. The continent, he
argues, must hold itself accountable and determine its future by preempting
future violence. The new African writing he envisions would contribute to that
sea change.
U.S. News & World Report
Travel. “Anse Cafard Slave Memorial.” U.S.
News & World Report Travel n.d. Web. 24 Apr. 2015.
Ranks Anse Cafard Slave Memorial as
the top place to visit in Martinique, and summarizes the history of the disaster
that inspired the memorial. This short article describes what tourists will
find at Anse Cafard and how long they should plan to spend (a half-day).
Shadid, Salim. “Uncommon
Attraction: Anse Cafard Slave Memorial, Martinique.” Uncommon Caribbean 11 Nov. 2010. Web. 24 Apr. 2015.
Describes the history of the slave
ship that sunk in 1830, and the inspiration to construct a memorial for the 150th
anniversary of the emancipation of slaves in the French West Indies. Shadid details
how the 20, eight-foot tall effigies are organized in a triangle to allude to
the triangular slave trade, and the statues lean at 110 degrees to point at the
Gulf of Guinea in West Africa. The author promises prospective tourists an
extremely moving experience.
Tamuno, Tekena N. Oil Wars in
the Niger Delta 1849-2009. Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria: Stirling-Horden
Publishers Ltd, 2011. Print.
Tamuno’s history focuses mainly on
the violent economics of petroleum extraction in the Niger Delta, an issue that
has shaped and continues to shape life in Nigeria. The aspect of Oil Wars relevant to this bibliography
is the historical precedents Tamuno relies on for his study. Nigeria’s oil
economy involves internal exploitation of minority ethnicities in Nigeria, with
multinational corporations (based in Britain, Holland, the US, France and
Italy) running the extraction process (and reaping 40% of the profits). For
Tamuno, this dynamic evokes an earlier function of international capitalism
that affected the Niger Delta. The Niger Delta, he reminds readers, is part of
what was once the notorious ‘Slave Coast.’ The author frames his analysis of
Nigeria’s petroleum wars in the historical legacy of “[t]he inhuman trade in
slaves featured largely in the ancient economy of the communities along the
Bights of Benin and Biafra (later Bonny)” (1).
Soyinka, Wole. 2012. Of
Africa. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Print.
Contemplates the significance of the landmass
pejoratively labeled the ‘Dark Continent.’ As he sets out to explore Africa’s
past and present in an international context, Soyinka argues: “All claims that
Africa has been explored are as premature as news of her imminent demise. A
truly illuminating exploration of Africa has yet to take place” (xiii).
Part I (Chapters 1-4) is most significant to this
bibliography, which contains several images of historical sites of the West
African slave trade. Descriptions of neglected slave forts on the West African
coast, for example, trigger the author’s reflections on the trans-Atlantic
slave trade, the trans-Sahara slave trade and present-day trafficking of slave
labor. Soyinka argues that if the continent’s past does not cause present
despots and warlords reason to pause and reflect, “then Africa has ceased to
matter” (66).
