Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.3138/diaspora.23.2.2023.06.30
Vahé Tachjian
To remember a native village or town, collect written accounts, photos, and maps, and raise funds to publish a book that displayed all of this material, this was the decades-long dream of many who made up the first generation of Armenian exiles. It was in this general environment, starting in the 1920s, that books— houshamadyans—began to appear in succession in various Armenian diasporan communities. This article analyzes the post-genocide ideological environment where most of the houshamadyans were written and published. It examines the contents of this genre of book in detail and shows how the houshamadyans, which in their essence are a depiction of a past life characterized by diversity, adapt themselves to diasporic nationalist environments.
{"title":"Depicting the Past and its Diversity in the Age of Nationalisms: The Armenian Memory Books (<i>houshamadyan</i>)","authors":"Vahé Tachjian","doi":"10.3138/diaspora.23.2.2023.06.30","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/diaspora.23.2.2023.06.30","url":null,"abstract":"To remember a native village or town, collect written accounts, photos, and maps, and raise funds to publish a book that displayed all of this material, this was the decades-long dream of many who made up the first generation of Armenian exiles. It was in this general environment, starting in the 1920s, that books— houshamadyans—began to appear in succession in various Armenian diasporan communities. This article analyzes the post-genocide ideological environment where most of the houshamadyans were written and published. It examines the contents of this genre of book in detail and shows how the houshamadyans, which in their essence are a depiction of a past life characterized by diversity, adapt themselves to diasporic nationalist environments.","PeriodicalId":119873,"journal":{"name":"Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135782524","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.3138/diaspora.23.2.2023.07.30
Susan Slyomovics
In French colonial Algeria (1830–1962), a European settler community was made from both displacement and the encounter with Indigenous Algerian collectives. After Algeria's independence from France in 1962, this community was remade by a second displacement and the encounter in France with the metropolitan community. Known as Pieds-Noirs, this community has organized associative life, books, and newsletter publications, and sometimes return visits to Algeria. This article looks at Pieds-Noir settler associations devoted to Algeria's colonial agricultural schools, model farms, and nurseries, and how they reconstitute metropole-colony and colony-metropole through memory and a memorial book. This case study of the agricultural school in the town of Sidi-Bel-Abbès, former headquarters of the French Foreign Legion, discusses post-independent Algerian responses to return visits, claims, and writings by settlers.
{"title":"A Settler Colonial Memorial Book: The Agricultural School and Museum of Sidi-Bel-Abbès, Algeria","authors":"Susan Slyomovics","doi":"10.3138/diaspora.23.2.2023.07.30","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/diaspora.23.2.2023.07.30","url":null,"abstract":"In French colonial Algeria (1830–1962), a European settler community was made from both displacement and the encounter with Indigenous Algerian collectives. After Algeria's independence from France in 1962, this community was remade by a second displacement and the encounter in France with the metropolitan community. Known as Pieds-Noirs, this community has organized associative life, books, and newsletter publications, and sometimes return visits to Algeria. This article looks at Pieds-Noir settler associations devoted to Algeria's colonial agricultural schools, model farms, and nurseries, and how they reconstitute metropole-colony and colony-metropole through memory and a memorial book. This case study of the agricultural school in the town of Sidi-Bel-Abbès, former headquarters of the French Foreign Legion, discusses post-independent Algerian responses to return visits, claims, and writings by settlers.","PeriodicalId":119873,"journal":{"name":"Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135782525","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.3138/diaspora.23.2.2023.08.10
Sebouh David Aslanian
This essay is a detailed study of a heretofore largely ignored and extraordinary notebook written by an Armenian merchant, tailor, and late-seventeenth-century artist named Gabriel stored at the Austrian National Library (Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek). Part sketchbook with beautiful illuminations of religious and other landmarks and part chronicle, this notebook destabilizes clear-cut distinctions between travel diary, first-person narrative, chronicle, and a work of “nouveau literacy” in Islamicate Eurasia. This essay probes the multilayered contents of Gabriel's notebook and on the basis of an archival reconstruction of the author's microhistory, it places the author at the center of a complex underground spy ring involved in the 1687 Habsburg reconquest of the Ottoman fortified city of Buda in Hungary.
{"title":"A Merchant, a Spy, an Artist, and a Viennese Coffeehouse Owner: Some Notes on an Armenian Sketchbook-Chronicle Preserved in the National Library of Austria","authors":"Sebouh David Aslanian","doi":"10.3138/diaspora.23.2.2023.08.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/diaspora.23.2.2023.08.10","url":null,"abstract":"This essay is a detailed study of a heretofore largely ignored and extraordinary notebook written by an Armenian merchant, tailor, and late-seventeenth-century artist named Gabriel stored at the Austrian National Library (Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek). Part sketchbook with beautiful illuminations of religious and other landmarks and part chronicle, this notebook destabilizes clear-cut distinctions between travel diary, first-person narrative, chronicle, and a work of “nouveau literacy” in Islamicate Eurasia. This essay probes the multilayered contents of Gabriel's notebook and on the basis of an archival reconstruction of the author's microhistory, it places the author at the center of a complex underground spy ring involved in the 1687 Habsburg reconquest of the Ottoman fortified city of Buda in Hungary.","PeriodicalId":119873,"journal":{"name":"Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135782521","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.3138/diaspora.23.2.2023.08.09
Aviad Moreno, Haim Bitton
The writing of “Yizkor books” (Yizker bikher, רעכיב רוכזי)—memorial books for European Jewish communities that were destroyed in the Holocaust—has developed and expanded as the remnants of these lost communities scattered around the globe in the post-war era. The motives for writing comparable books among non-European Jewish communities—which experienced different circumstances of dispersal but were still influenced by Holocaust memory—and the way these books nourished the intentional creation of immigrant communities, are understudied. This article focuses on the related genre of what we define as community-oriented autobiographical memoirs penned by Moroccan Jews who migrated to Israel in the 1950s. Within these books, we trace patterns of narration and memory construction utilized by Moroccan leaders in an effort to cope with the stereotyping and exclusion of their communities from mainstream culture by the Ashkenazi-European elite in Israel. We explore how these narratives by Moroccan immigrants were, on the one hand, inspired by commonplace Israeli Holocaust memories depicting the traumatic annihilation of Jewish life in Morocco, and, on the other hand, accounts of Moroccan marginality in Israel.
{"title":"The Moroccan “Yizkor Book”: Holocaust Memory, Intra-Jewish Marginalization, and Communal Empowerment in Israel","authors":"Aviad Moreno, Haim Bitton","doi":"10.3138/diaspora.23.2.2023.08.09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/diaspora.23.2.2023.08.09","url":null,"abstract":"The writing of “Yizkor books” (Yizker bikher, רעכיב רוכזי)—memorial books for European Jewish communities that were destroyed in the Holocaust—has developed and expanded as the remnants of these lost communities scattered around the globe in the post-war era. The motives for writing comparable books among non-European Jewish communities—which experienced different circumstances of dispersal but were still influenced by Holocaust memory—and the way these books nourished the intentional creation of immigrant communities, are understudied. This article focuses on the related genre of what we define as community-oriented autobiographical memoirs penned by Moroccan Jews who migrated to Israel in the 1950s. Within these books, we trace patterns of narration and memory construction utilized by Moroccan leaders in an effort to cope with the stereotyping and exclusion of their communities from mainstream culture by the Ashkenazi-European elite in Israel. We explore how these narratives by Moroccan immigrants were, on the one hand, inspired by commonplace Israeli Holocaust memories depicting the traumatic annihilation of Jewish life in Morocco, and, on the other hand, accounts of Moroccan marginality in Israel.","PeriodicalId":119873,"journal":{"name":"Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135782526","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.3138/diaspora.23.2.2023.07.29
Sarah-Jane (Saje) Mathieu
{"title":"From Near and Far: A Transnational History of France","authors":"Sarah-Jane (Saje) Mathieu","doi":"10.3138/diaspora.23.2.2023.07.29","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/diaspora.23.2.2023.07.29","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":119873,"journal":{"name":"Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135782528","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.3138/diaspora.23.2.2023.07.07
Jennifer Rich
In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, Eastern European Jews turned to a rich tradition of remembering lost peoples and cultures, and organized the collaborative writing of memorial books. There were over 1,000 of these place-based memory texts written by survivors and pre-war emigres in order to shape knowledge about the war, to emphasize the vibrancy of their prewar lives, and to share their memories and perceptions with future generations. This corpus of material has been largely overlooked by scholars over the past seventy years; this article begins to fill the gap in what is known about postwar memorial books.
{"title":"Let this Book be a Monument: Yizker Bikher and Jewish Collective Memory","authors":"Jennifer Rich","doi":"10.3138/diaspora.23.2.2023.07.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/diaspora.23.2.2023.07.07","url":null,"abstract":"In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, Eastern European Jews turned to a rich tradition of remembering lost peoples and cultures, and organized the collaborative writing of memorial books. There were over 1,000 of these place-based memory texts written by survivors and pre-war emigres in order to shape knowledge about the war, to emphasize the vibrancy of their prewar lives, and to share their memories and perceptions with future generations. This corpus of material has been largely overlooked by scholars over the past seventy years; this article begins to fill the gap in what is known about postwar memorial books.","PeriodicalId":119873,"journal":{"name":"Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135782527","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.3138/diaspora.23.2.2023.07.25
Amy L. Hubbell
France's colonial history in Algeria has been the subject of “Memory Wars” since the end of the 1990s. Culminating in 2012 at the fiftieth anniversary of the Algerian War (1954–1962), these Memory Wars contributed to numerous publications about every aspect of Algeria. Large format coffee-table photographic books ( beaux livres), as well as paperbacks full of collected memories of the colonial years and the war, from both French and Algerians, flooded French bookshops. In this article, I engage with the concepts of competitive, hoarded, and multidirectional memory to demonstrate how French memorial books that are especially photo driven appear to place war on display, but, at the same time, bury difficult and traumatic memory. The research examines three French memorial books published between 2010 and 2012, leading up to the fiftieth anniversary of Algerian independence, and addresses how traumatic memories are recuperated and still hidden within texts that attempt to fill a memorial void. Despite book titles that claim to examine the memories of war, within the books, Algeria often remains a beautiful, peaceful, and nostalgic backdrop. War is not clearly depicted in the images but emerges in accompanying descriptive texts. In light of France's establishment of the Truth and Memory Commission on the Algerian War in 2022, I examine how diverse versions of the past come into dialogue with each other, while individual memorial books continue to crowd out unspeakable violence.
自20世纪90年代末以来，法国在阿尔及利亚的殖民历史一直是“记忆战争”的主题。在2012年阿尔及利亚战争(1954-1962)五十周年之际达到高潮，这些记忆战争促成了关于阿尔及利亚各个方面的大量出版物。从法国和阿尔及利亚收集到的关于殖民时期和战争的大量平装书以及咖啡桌上的大画幅摄影书(beaux livres)充斥着法国的书店。在这篇文章中，我探讨了竞争性、囤积性和多向性记忆的概念，以证明法国的纪念书籍，尤其是照片驱动的书籍，似乎是在展示战争，但与此同时，埋葬了困难和创伤的记忆。这项研究考察了2010年至2012年间出版的三本法国纪念书籍，这些书籍是在阿尔及利亚独立50周年之前出版的，研究了创伤记忆是如何被恢复的，并且仍然隐藏在试图填补纪念空白的文本中。尽管书的标题声称要审视战争的记忆，但在书中，阿尔及利亚往往是一个美丽、和平、怀旧的背景。战争并没有在图像中清晰地描绘出来，而是在伴随的描述性文字中出现。鉴于法国在2022年成立了“阿尔及利亚战争真相与记忆委员会”(Truth and Memory Commission on the Algerian War)，我研究了不同版本的过去是如何相互对话的，而个别的纪念书籍继续排挤着难以言表的暴力。
{"title":"Crowding out the Algerian War in French Memorial Books","authors":"Amy L. Hubbell","doi":"10.3138/diaspora.23.2.2023.07.25","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/diaspora.23.2.2023.07.25","url":null,"abstract":"France's colonial history in Algeria has been the subject of “Memory Wars” since the end of the 1990s. Culminating in 2012 at the fiftieth anniversary of the Algerian War (1954–1962), these Memory Wars contributed to numerous publications about every aspect of Algeria. Large format coffee-table photographic books ( beaux livres), as well as paperbacks full of collected memories of the colonial years and the war, from both French and Algerians, flooded French bookshops. In this article, I engage with the concepts of competitive, hoarded, and multidirectional memory to demonstrate how French memorial books that are especially photo driven appear to place war on display, but, at the same time, bury difficult and traumatic memory. The research examines three French memorial books published between 2010 and 2012, leading up to the fiftieth anniversary of Algerian independence, and addresses how traumatic memories are recuperated and still hidden within texts that attempt to fill a memorial void. Despite book titles that claim to examine the memories of war, within the books, Algeria often remains a beautiful, peaceful, and nostalgic backdrop. War is not clearly depicted in the images but emerges in accompanying descriptive texts. In light of France's establishment of the Truth and Memory Commission on the Algerian War in 2022, I examine how diverse versions of the past come into dialogue with each other, while individual memorial books continue to crowd out unspeakable violence.","PeriodicalId":119873,"journal":{"name":"Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135782529","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-05DOI: 10.3138/diaspora.23.1.2023.01.23
Yonatan Tewelde
Abstract:This study explores the utilization of the PalTalk chat application by the Eritrean diaspora as a platform for solidarity building and long-distance activism against totalitarianism in their home country between 2000 and 2016. The objective of this research is to analyze the role of Eritrean PalTalk as a transnational mobilization network, with a particular focus on “Smer” room, one of the most popular Eritrean PalTalk groups. The study delves into the evolution, struggles, and milestones of “Smer” room and illustrates how Eritrean migrants, living under a regime where private press is banned and criticism of the government is not tolerated, utilized chat rooms as safe spaces for solidarity building and public opinion construction. Additionally, the research considers how PalTalk may have enabled diaspora Eritreans to overcome fears of punishment from the repressive state, and how chat room patrons planned and mobilized diasporic mass demonstrations in Europe demanding the stepping down of their state leader.
{"title":"Plotting Democratic Change in Chat Rooms: The Role of PalTalk as an Eritrean Diaspora Forum","authors":"Yonatan Tewelde","doi":"10.3138/diaspora.23.1.2023.01.23","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/diaspora.23.1.2023.01.23","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This study explores the utilization of the PalTalk chat application by the Eritrean diaspora as a platform for solidarity building and long-distance activism against totalitarianism in their home country between 2000 and 2016. The objective of this research is to analyze the role of Eritrean PalTalk as a transnational mobilization network, with a particular focus on “Smer” room, one of the most popular Eritrean PalTalk groups. The study delves into the evolution, struggles, and milestones of “Smer” room and illustrates how Eritrean migrants, living under a regime where private press is banned and criticism of the government is not tolerated, utilized chat rooms as safe spaces for solidarity building and public opinion construction. Additionally, the research considers how PalTalk may have enabled diaspora Eritreans to overcome fears of punishment from the repressive state, and how chat room patrons planned and mobilized diasporic mass demonstrations in Europe demanding the stepping down of their state leader.","PeriodicalId":119873,"journal":{"name":"Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122547917","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-05DOI: 10.3138/diaspora.23.1.2023.02.03
A. Kini
Abstract:This essay queries the dynamics of history and diasporic memory, difference and affiliation, in the context of empire, by dwelling on the spectral presence of my great uncle, D. K. Sharda, in stories passed on to me by my mother and grandmother. Sharda was a journalist in British East Africa, part of a network of leftist anticolonial activists who used the independent press to advocate for Black-Asian alliance in the Kenyan struggle for independence. Grappling with the fragmentary nature of diasporic memory, I engage personal family history in order to disrupt the conventional politics of knowledge production in the academy, particularly scholarly disinterest and critical distance. Drawing on and juxtaposing archival research, personal interviews, and analyses of family photographs, I examine the gendered visual, narrative, and affective mechanisms by which histories and knowledges of imperial migration and diaspora are transmitted, and the political imaginaries such transmissions might produce.
{"title":"Imperial Inheritances: A Meditation in Five Parts","authors":"A. Kini","doi":"10.3138/diaspora.23.1.2023.02.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/diaspora.23.1.2023.02.03","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay queries the dynamics of history and diasporic memory, difference and affiliation, in the context of empire, by dwelling on the spectral presence of my great uncle, D. K. Sharda, in stories passed on to me by my mother and grandmother. Sharda was a journalist in British East Africa, part of a network of leftist anticolonial activists who used the independent press to advocate for Black-Asian alliance in the Kenyan struggle for independence. Grappling with the fragmentary nature of diasporic memory, I engage personal family history in order to disrupt the conventional politics of knowledge production in the academy, particularly scholarly disinterest and critical distance. Drawing on and juxtaposing archival research, personal interviews, and analyses of family photographs, I examine the gendered visual, narrative, and affective mechanisms by which histories and knowledges of imperial migration and diaspora are transmitted, and the political imaginaries such transmissions might produce.","PeriodicalId":119873,"journal":{"name":"Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132075818","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-05DOI: 10.3138/diaspora.23.1.2023.02.01
Caitlin Simmons
Abstract:In the eight sections of her 2008 book-length poem Zong!, Afro-Canadian poet NourbeSe Philip breaks apart the representational, colonialist, and objectifying language of an archived insurance document, repurposes it, and transforms it into poetry that establishes new methods of reading that resist the semantic logic of slavery's necropolitical archive. While many critics focus on the de(con)structive nature of Philip's response to the murder of 133 enslaved persons at sea, I assert that Zong! is ultimately an antinomian text of recovery and reconstruction by virtue of her inclusion of multiple Indigenous African tongues. In doing so, I turn to Tiffany Lethabo King's exploration of the “shoal”—a liminal spot of convergence between the sea and land that connects the Black Atlantic to Indigenous violence—to establish that Zong! is more than a text of the Black Atlantic. Through the inclusion of thirteen Afro-Indigenous languages, I argue that Philip creates a convergence between the Black Atlantic and Indigeneity, in a new Afro-Indigenous shoal. This expands King's shoal to the shores of Africa, demonstrating that these multiethnic convergences exceed an Americanist approach.
{"title":"A Shoal on a New Shore: Afro-Indigeneity and Multilingualism in M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong!","authors":"Caitlin Simmons","doi":"10.3138/diaspora.23.1.2023.02.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/diaspora.23.1.2023.02.01","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In the eight sections of her 2008 book-length poem Zong!, Afro-Canadian poet NourbeSe Philip breaks apart the representational, colonialist, and objectifying language of an archived insurance document, repurposes it, and transforms it into poetry that establishes new methods of reading that resist the semantic logic of slavery's necropolitical archive. While many critics focus on the de(con)structive nature of Philip's response to the murder of 133 enslaved persons at sea, I assert that Zong! is ultimately an antinomian text of recovery and reconstruction by virtue of her inclusion of multiple Indigenous African tongues. In doing so, I turn to Tiffany Lethabo King's exploration of the “shoal”—a liminal spot of convergence between the sea and land that connects the Black Atlantic to Indigenous violence—to establish that Zong! is more than a text of the Black Atlantic. Through the inclusion of thirteen Afro-Indigenous languages, I argue that Philip creates a convergence between the Black Atlantic and Indigeneity, in a new Afro-Indigenous shoal. This expands King's shoal to the shores of Africa, demonstrating that these multiethnic convergences exceed an Americanist approach.","PeriodicalId":119873,"journal":{"name":"Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133047283","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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