Afroeuropean Cartographies

Literary production is increasingly shaped by globalization and the complex nature of cultural, political, and social interaction. As such, longstanding colonial and postcolonial relations between Africa and Europe have yielded a range of challenging questions, and new generations of writers with roots in Africa have invariably found themselves navigating new geographic terrains and negotiating racialized identities, while simultaneously exploring the potential of literature in addressing the...

Transoceanic Perspectives in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy studies Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015) in relation to maritime criticism. Juan-José Martín-González draws upon the intersections between maritime criticism and postcolonial thought to provide, via an analysis of the Ibis trilogy, alternative insights into nationalism(s), cosmopolitanism and globalization. He shows that the Victorian age in its transoceanic dimension can be read as an era of proto-globalization that facilitates a materialist critique of the inequities of contemporary global neo-liberalism. The book argues that in order to maintain its critical sharpness, postcolonialism must re-direct its focus towards today’s most obvious legacy of nineteenth-century imperialism: capitalist globalization. Tracing the migrating characters who engage in transoceanic crossings through Victorian sea lanes in the Ibis trilogy, Martín-González explores how these dispossessed collectives made sense of their identities in the Victorian waterworlds and illustrates the political possibilities provided by the sea crossing and its fluid boundaries.

British Dance, Black Routes is an outstanding collection of writings which re-reads the achievements of Black British dance artists, and places them within a broad historical, cultural and artistic context. Until now discussion of choreography by Black dance practitioners has been dominated by the work of African-American artists, facilitated by the civil rights movement. But the work produced by Black British artists has in part been within the context of Britain’s colonial legacy. Ramsay Burt and Christy Adair bring together an array of leading scholars and practitioners to review the singularity and distinctiveness of the work of British-based dancers who are Black and its relation to the specificity of Black British experiences. From sub-Saharan West African and Caribbean dance forms to jazz and hip-hop, British Dance, Black Routes looks afresh at over five decades of artistic production to provide an unparalleled resource for dance students and scholars. Appendix 2 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

What are the limits of empathy and forgiveness? How can someone with a shameful past find a new path that allows for both healing and reckoning? When Clovis and Christelle find themselves face-to-face on a train heading to the outskirts of Paris, their unexpected encounter propels them on a cathartic journey toward understanding the other, mediated by their respective histories of violence. Clovis, a young undocumented African, struggles with the pain and shame of his brutal childhood, abusive exploits as a child soldier, and road to exile. Christelle, a young French nurse, has her own dark experiences but translates her suffering into an unusual capacity for empathy, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Christelle opens her home and heart to Clovis and presses him to tell his story. But how will she react to that story? Will the telling start Clovis on a path to redemption or alienate him further from French society? Wilfried N'Sondé's brave novel confronts French attitudes toward immigrants, pushes moral imagination to its limits, and constructs a world where the past must be confronted in order to map the future.

Afropean Female Selves: Migration and Language in the Life Writing of Fatou Diome and Igiaba Scego examines the corpus of writing of two contemporary female authors. Both writers are of African descent, live in Europe and write about lives across Europe and Africa in different languages (French and Italian). Their work involves episodes from their lived experience and complicates Western understandings of life writing and autobiography. As Hogarth shows in this study, the works of Diome and Scego encapsulate the new and complex identities of contemporary "Afropeans." As an identity coined and used frequently by prominent authors and critics across Europe, Africa and North America, the notion of "Afropean" is at the cutting edge of cultural analyses today. Yet each writer occupies unique and different positions within this debated category. While Scego is a "post-migratory subject" in postcolonial Europe, Diome is an African writer who has migrated to Europe in her adult life. This book examines the different trajectories and packaging of these two specific postcolonial writers in the Francophone and Italophone contexts, pointing out how and where each author practices life writing strategies and scrutinizing the trend that emphasizes the life writing, autofictional, or autoethnographic strategies of African diasporic writers. Afropean Female Selves offers a comparative study across two languages of a notion that has so far been explored mainly in English. It explores the contours of this new discursive category and positions it in regard to other notions of Afrodiasporic identity, such as Afropolitan and Afro-European.

This volume considers the Arabic and African diasporas through the underexplored Afro-Hispanic, Luso-Africans, and Mahjari (South American and Mexican authors of Arab descent) experiences in Spain, Portugal, and Latin America. Utilizing both established and emerging approaches, the authors explore the ways in which individual writers and artists negotiate the geographical, cultural, and historical parameters of their own diasporic trajectories influenced by their particular locations at home and elsewhere. At the same time, this volume sheds light on issues related to Spain, Portugal, and Latin American racial, ethnic, and sexual boundaries; the appeal of images of the Middle East and Africa in the contemporary marketplace; and the role of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American economic crunches in shaping attitudes towards immigration. This collection of thought-provoking chapters extends the concepts of diaspora and transnationalism, forcing the reader to reassess their present limitations as interpretive tools. In the process, Afro-Hispanic, Afro-Portuguese, and Mahjaris are rendered visible as national actors and transnational citizens.

A nameless young man lives in the housing projects outside of Paris. When he was a child, his parents moved with him from the Congo to France, hoping in vain to escape poverty and violence. His best friend, Drissa, is in a psychiatric hospital and now Mireille, his girlfriend, the woman with whom he has shared his childhood and hopes, has left him to reconnect with her Jewish roots in Israel. During a night out to drown the pain of his heartache, there is a fight with a policeman, the policeman dies, and the young man is arrested and taken to jail. Between police beatings and abrupt interrogations, his memory becomes his sole ally to escape from the exiguous space in which he is confined. Half-conscious and delirious, he reflects on his journey from the land of his ancestors to his life in the projects with Drissa and Mireille. In The Heart of the Leopard Children, N'Sondé explores the themes of love and pain, belonging and uprooting, desire and fear—all with an implacable and irresistible accuracy. Wilfried N'Sondé's first novel awakens the reader with an urban symphony of desire and lost love, attuned to the violence that accompanies the struggle for social ascension and a sense of belonging, and the paralyzing sentiment of betrayal that inhabits a young man caught between traditions and cultures. Awarded the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie and the Prix Senghor for the originality of his work, the author captures the sounds, rhythms and pleas of a young man who pulls on the alarm from his prison cell to warn against the multiple barriers of confinement that risk the future of certain sectors of French youth today.

The writer Gabriel Audisio once called the Mediterranean a “liquid continent.” Taking up the challenge issued by Audisio’s phrase, Edwige Tamalet Talbayev insists that we understand the region on both sides of the Mediterranean through a “transcontinental” heuristic. Rather than merely read the Maghreb in the context of its European colonizers from across the Mediterranean, Talbayev compellingly argues for a transmaritime deployment of the Maghreb across the multiple Mediterranean sites to which it has been materially and culturally bound for millennia. The Transcontinental Maghreb reveals these Mediterranean imaginaries to intersect with Maghrebi claims to an inclusive, democratic national ideal yet to be realized. Through a sustained reflection on allegory and critical melancholia, the book shows how the Mediterranean decenters postcolonial nation-building projects and mediates the nomadic subject’s reinsertion into a national collective respectful of heterogeneity. In engaging the space of the sea, the hybridity it produces, and the way it has shaped such historical dynamics as globalization, imperialism, decolonization, and nationalism, the book rethinks the very nature of postcolonial histories and identities along its shores.