Migrating narratives: re-inscribing black diaspora cultures

ABSTRACT This essay traces the predominant counter-hegemonic, counter-discursive political and cultural models that obtain on either side of the Atlantic – the black Atlantic and the (pan-)Africanist. Typically read as disparate, even oppositional, competing ideologies, this essay examines the ways in which black Atlantic and Africanist thought migrate – travelling and journeying in ironic echoes and reverberations – across space and time, following similar contours that inscribe troublingly totalizing and exclusionary ideational narratives of black diaspora cultures and ontologies. Engaging the delimiting, signifying imprints and prescriptive modalities that inform and structure both theoretical models, this essay attempts to put black Atlantic and Africanist paradigms into conversation in ways that expand critical studies of black diasporic cultures, African cultures, and their intersecting relationships. In this regard, arguing that such intersectional relations can be evidenced in the migratory, border-crossing ethos and transgressive aesthetic of contemporary African diasporic literature, the essay’s particular reading of Adichie’s Americanah and Bulawayo’s We Need New Names suggests the ways in which these texts advance an ethical imperative for more malleable, inclusive and expansive, ways of reading and re-inscribing the (black) world.