Pub Date : 2022-09-12DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2022.2104897
Samantha Pinto
ABSTRACT This essay maps the uneasy terrains of Black feminist happiness in the diaspora as a complex reckoning with radical political and social theories of subject formation Refusing analytics that prioritize loss, injury, lack, stasis, and trauma as the defining features of the Black diaspora, African diaspora feminist happiness displaces whiteness and the West as its referents in favour of more difficult intimacies across Black geographies that imagine fleeting alliances, inevitable inequity, and tension across diaspora communities rather than similarity or belonging. This essay traces texts, often in popular genres, that plot intimacies that acknowledge legacies of injury but seek out other roots and routes to define the present and futures of Black feminine subjects, futures often knowingly in tension with the given materiality and resources of diaspora life, and in tension with the dominant modes of critique hewing toward death and pessimism in the field of Black diaspora studies. Through the global self-help genre, the Afropolitan literary novel, African young adult fiction, and sensational Kenyan LGBTQ cinema, this article traces the generic plots of African diaspora feminist happiness to find neither neoliberal hailed subjects nor subversive resistance. If in the masculine diaspora imagination, coming together via racial and political identity equals a new sense of community, the feminist genealogies that this essay traces through diaspora happiness are uncomfortable and deeply self-conscious about their traffic in capital and middle-class resources and desire. The texts that I look to do not attempt to erase, flatten, or romanticize difference into the poles of resistance and complicity, but instead define diaspora feminist happiness through tension and temporariness. These texts use diaspora pathways as structures of feeling conducive and conductive of happiness even as they do not engage the romance of racial, political, or even ethical community to find them.
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Deutscher Gangsta-Rap hat es als Ort der symbolischen Austragung sozialer Konflikte seit der Jahrtausendwende zu einiger Bekanntheit gebracht. Hier kommen nicht nur Spannungen zwischen Hoch- und Popkultur, Migrationsgesellschaft und Nationalitäten, wirtschaftlichen Erfolgen und künstlerischem Anspruch deutlich zum Tragen, sondern auch strafrechtlich verfolgbare Beleidigungen und gesellschaftliche Diskursfähigkeit. Die Beiträger*innen des Bandes zeigen, dass dieses Phänomen der pluralen Gesellschaft exemplarisch für die Ambivalenzen der Moderne steht.
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Pub Date : 2022-08-25DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2022.2104899
Polo B. Moji
ABSTRACT Winner of the 2003 Prix des Hémisphères Chantal Lapicque, and translated into German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and English, Fatou Diome’s 2003 novel, Le Ventre de l’Atlantique [ The Belly of the Atlantic, 2006] plays on the image of the Atlantic as an oceanic belly. This article explores the usefulness of the black Atlantic epistemology (Glissant 1990, Gilroy 1993) as a site for imagining the production of diasporic space, alongside the critique that ‘by excluding Africa, Gilroy has in effect narrowed the Africanness or Africanity of the ‘Black Atlantic’ (Masilela 1996, p. 88). Through Diome’s novel, I explore how this intersects with a feminist project of rendering visible the spatialization of difference, through an engagement with the geographies of domination. Borrowing from Zymunt Bauman’s (2006) notion of liquid modernity, I therefore propose ‘liquid feminism’ as a framework that relates the globalised oceanic mobilities of African migrants to the structures of patriarchal domination which render black women’s lives ‘ungeographic’ (McKittrick 2006). I start by exploring the geographic sensibility of Diome’s poetics, including her use of the language of geography and her personification of the Atlantic Ocean. I then analyse how her portrayal of a geulwaar matriclan subverts the notion of Western feminism as rescuing African women who are trapped by ‘tradition’. Finally, I explore Diome’s notion of ‘geographic suicide’ as associated with the reflexivity of African women as modern subjects a site for the ‘affective mapping’ (Flatley 2009) of diasporic identity. Ultimately, the article illustrates how Diome’s feminist re-imagining of the black Atlantic centres Africa and Africanness, combating the temporal dislocation that fixes the continent as a space that is lost in the originary moment of rupture of the Middle Passage.
摘要：法图·迪奥姆2003年的小说《大西洋之腹》（the Belly of the Atlantic，2006）获得了2003年Hémisphères Chantal Lapicque大奖，并被翻译成德语、意大利语、葡萄牙语、西班牙语和英语。这篇文章探讨了黑人大西洋认识论（Glissant 1990，Gilroy 1993）作为想象流散空间产生的场所的有用性，同时也提出了“通过排除非洲，吉尔罗伊实际上缩小了“黑人大西洋”的非洲性或非洲性”的批评（Masilela 1996，第88页）。通过迪奥姆的小说，我探索了这是如何与女权主义项目相交的，该项目通过与统治地理的接触，使差异的空间化变得可见。因此，借用Zymont Bauman（2006）关于流动现代性的概念，我提出了“流动女权主义”作为一个框架，将非洲移民的全球化海洋流动与父权制统治结构联系起来，父权制统治使黑人女性的生活“非地理化”（McKittrick，2006）。我首先探讨了迪奥梅诗学的地理情感，包括她对地理语言的使用和她对大西洋的拟人化。然后，我分析了她对geulwaar预科生的刻画是如何颠覆西方女权主义拯救被“传统”束缚的非洲女性的观念的。最后，我探讨了迪奥姆的“地理自杀”概念，认为这与非洲女性作为现代主体的自反性有关——这是散居身份的“情感映射”（Flatley 2009）的网站。最终，这篇文章展示了迪奥姆对黑色大西洋的女权主义重新想象是如何以非洲和非洲为中心的，与时间错位作斗争，这种错位将欧洲大陆固定为一个在中间通道断裂的最初时刻失去的空间。
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Pub Date : 2022-08-16DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2022.2104901
Janine Jones
ABSTRACT This essay challenges the traditional focus of the Black Atlantic on Anglophone-dominant movement and culture by prioritizing Afro-Francophone discussion, through a philosophical contextualization of Fatou Diome’s Le Ventre de L’Atlantique in conversation with Aminata Traoré’s Le Viol de L’Imaginaire. The essay offers an exploration of fugitivity or exile from colonially structured material conditions and lived experiences of unfreedom in African contexts, notions present in both narratives. After presenting and analyzing a key element of the encounter between Western human beings and African human be-ings, it considers a central element of Diome’s novel, in counterpart with a central theme of Traoré’s text. It explores the idea that the type of fugitivity that transpires in Diome’s novel, and the kind of exile of which Traoré speaks, can be understood as, in part, a result of a salient feature of the relationality between human beings and human be-ings. In that Diome’s Salie and Traoré tell their communities what they know about the West and how Africans really fare there, they break through community lies and ignorance that aid and abet – but do not, at the root, cause – the complex situation of capture and captivation that coerce or seduce Africa’s youth into varying states of fugitivity or exile. Both propose reimaging and rebuilding Africa for Africans – an endeavour requiring that African youth remain in Africa.
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Pub Date : 2022-08-10DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2022.2104894
J. Terry
ABSTRACT This article takes off from two of the angles of contention found in critical responses to Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic and subsequent Atlanticist studies: asymmetries and exclusions along gender lines, and insufficient attention to the dynamics of contemporary global capital. It examines what gets articulated when recent African short fiction is approached via a frame centered on the location of home, gendered labour, sexual and reproductive economies, and the interrelation of the domestic and capitalism. In particular, it is informed by Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s counter-heuristic to Gilroy, the Black Feminine Domestic. Gumbs’s attempt to make visible such a subject position and forms of labour prompts my focus on domestic workers and analogous figures, often migrant and low paid and sometimes found only at the edges of texts. I discuss Efemia Chela’s ‘Chicken’ (2014), Chibundu Onuzo’s ‘Sunita’ (2015), Lesley Nneka Arimah’s ‘Skinned’ (2019), and, from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s collection The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), the stories ‘Imitation,’ ‘The Thing Around Your Neck’ and ‘On Monday of Last Week.’ Here the tropes of circulation and regimes of rationality identified by Gilroy find counterparts in the structuring of workforces, the reach of body and biopolitics, and discourses of national borders and migration. The lens of ‘women’s work’ permits an intersectional shift in and beyond Black Atlantic frames and the heteropatriarchal imagination, but the selected material and preoccupations here also seek to offer another opening on debates about, and genres of, ‘African’ writing.
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Pub Date : 2022-08-07DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2022.2108867
A. Meghji
in the neighbourhoods that the ethnographer would not perhaps go back to? What exactly are we doing when we translate the violent and traumatic experience of the poor into an academic work in English? These are the questions Açıksöz’s brief reflections on his own experience generate and leave open for us. And this quest, though definitely requiring it, might be a little more complicated than ‘becoming terrorist’.
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Pub Date : 2022-08-07DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2022.2108864
Xie Yashu
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Pub Date : 2022-08-07DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2022.2108866
Emre Keser
sion and appropriation are harmless preoccupations. In the conclusion of the book Khanna analyses Fanon’s elaboration of the disjuncture between the body and the anticolonial rhetoric of the colonized. Drawing on Fanon’s authority enables her to generalize her abstractions drawn from the fiction of the sub-Indian continent, seeking an account of decolonization elsewhere. The bodily dysfunctions explored in this literature explain the paralyzing tensions that exist among the colonized who aim less to ‘become’ but more to ‘substitute’ the settlers. The distinction here is of course critical: as Khanna argues, ‘the act of becoming’ could have ushered in a historical subject and paved the way for an alternative instantiation of decolonization. The extent that realism stifles the revolutionary ardor of eroticism or casts it as simply pornographic is a promising line of argument as proposed by the author. Indeed, Khanna indirectly asks us to rewrite the nationalist canons in order to distinguish the revolutionary from the pseudo-revolutionary arts. Here Khanna assumes that had the nationalists dwelled more on modernism instead of realism, colonial Indians or Algerians could have withstood a chance in regaining their freedom beyond the political instantiation of freedom. Differently put, realism could or could not have been an empowering mode of expression to galvanize action for the nationalist cause against colonialism, but after independence realism became a liability. Still, the logic of Visceral Logics looks like it is charging literary and cultural elites with failing to draw the kind of excitations that would somehow reverse the postcolonial dysfunction. After its perhaps demanding early chapters, students of postcolonialism will find this book exceptionally rewarding, where Khanna’s contribution will reshape literary scholarship for generations to come in the way The Country and the City (1973) by Raymond Williams or Orientalism (1978) by Edward Said have done.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-29DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2022.2104893
Rocío Cobo-Piñero
ABSTRACT The last two decades have witnessed an emergence of African queer representations in literature and the arts that have been framed as interventions in cultural politics and as expressions of dissent. In this vein, I contend that it is necessary to consider queerness and diaspora together in order to rethink Gilroy's black Atlantic. Another important pursuit since the publication of The black Atlantic (1993) has been reclaiming the place of Africa and its broad cultural production, which was largely overlooked in Gilroy's Westernized discussion of modernity. This article thus explores the growth of African queer studies in African literature and film, and goes on to focus on Nigerian-born transgender writer and visual artist, Akwaeke Emezi. Their experimental videos and photographs use Igbo traditions as part of their own expression of a gender non-binary African self in the diaspora. In their essay, ‘Transition' (2018a), Emezi challenges Western notions of gender through an African lens and reclaims their indigenous beliefs from a decolonial perspective. In defining what it means to be transgender, Emezi posits the notion that they might be an ogbanje, a spirit child found in some African pre-colonial cultures that does not conform to Western ideas of gender. Likewise, in the critically acclaimed debut novel Freshwater (2018b), the artist draws in part from their own life to tell the story of Ada, a young Igbo and Tamil woman haunted by the ogbanje, offering a poetic account of gender transition through the polyphonic voices of spirits that inhabit the protagonist. Emezi’s combination of personal experience and art makes visible multiple African, diasporic, and gender identities in the black Atlantic.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-28DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2022.2104892
S. Naidu
ABSTRACT This article examines African noir as a literary sub-genre that attempts to articulate a revised and updated black Atlantic counterculture (1993). Using the framework provided by Paul Gilroy’s concept of a black Atlantic model of critique, African noir is shown to be transnational and intercultural in many aspects, thereby resisting racist discourses and expanding on conceptualisations of blackness and gender. Two primary texts are selected for analysis: Mukoma Wa Ngugi’s Nairobi Heat (2010) and Leye Adenle’s Easy Motion Tourist (2016). In both novels, detective figures are shown to be transnational, with local, national, or ethnic affiliations and intercultural relations which enable their detection. The article mounts a two-pronged argument. Primarily, both examples of African noir are read as texts which continue the legacy of Gilroy’s pioneering black Atlantic project of uncovering the cultural impact of colonialism and slavery on Africans on the continent and in the African diaspora. Secondarily, by examining the representation of female figures in the selected the texts, the article critically evaluates African noir’s attempt to resist the hegemonic racial and gendered representations of classic noir. To conclude, the article considers how, through the creation of intercultural and intersectional detective trios, the novels explore new black Atlantic race and gender relations, and the potential for solidarity in the face of crime.
摘要本文将非洲黑色电影作为一种文学亚流派，试图阐明一种经过修订和更新的大西洋黑人反主流文化（1993）。利用保罗·吉尔罗伊（Paul Gilroy）的黑人大西洋批判模式概念提供的框架，非洲黑色电影在许多方面都表现出跨国性和跨文化性，从而抵制种族主义话语，并扩展了黑人和性别的概念化。选择两个主要文本进行分析：Mukoma Wa Ngugi的《内罗毕热》（2010）和Leye Adenle的《轻松旅游》（2016）。在这两部小说中，侦探人物都是跨国的，具有当地、国家或种族背景和跨文化关系，这使得他们能够被发现。这篇文章提出了双管齐下的论点。首先，这两个非洲黑色电影的例子都被解读为延续了吉尔罗伊开创性的黑色大西洋项目的遗产，该项目揭示了殖民主义和奴隶制对非洲大陆和非洲侨民的文化影响。其次，通过考察所选文本中女性形象的表现，文章批判性地评价了非洲黑色电影试图抵制经典黑色电影中霸权的种族和性别表现。最后，文章考虑了通过创作跨文化和跨部门的侦探三人组，小说如何探索新的大西洋黑人种族和性别关系，以及在犯罪面前团结一致的潜力。
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