Radical Narratives Of The Black Atlantic

*Broad-based survey of trans-Atlantic black culture*Newest book in the popular Black Atlantic seriesRadical Narratives of the Black Atlantic is a multi-faceted and interdisciplinary take on trans-Atlantic black culture. Alan Rice engages fully with Paul Gilroy's paradigm of the Black Atlantic through examination of a broad array of cultural genres including music, dance, folklore and oral literature, fine art, material culture, film and literature. The aspects of black culture under discussion range from black British gravesites to sea shanties, from the novels of Toni Morrison to the paintings of the Zanzibar born black British artist Lubaina Himid and from King Kong to the travels of Frederick Douglass and Paul Robeson. The book places such figures as the African American traveller and Barbary slave narrator Robert Adams and the West Indian slave narrator Mary Prince in a Black Atlantic context that explicates them fully. A chapter on the Titanic disaster shows how diasporan Africans composed oral poems about the disaster to criticise the discriminatory practices of its owners and racial imperialism. Overall, the book argues for the crucial importance of Black Atlantic cultures in the formation of our modern world. Moreover, it argues that looking at Black culture and history through a national lens is distorting and reductive.

This incisive book investigates memorials to slavery throughout the African diaspora, with an emphasis on Europe. It analyzes not only the increasing number of physical monuments but also the practice of remembering—and forgetting—in museums and plantation houses as well as in contemporary cultural forms like the visual arts, literature, music, and film. A series of case studies ranging from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, from Senegal and Montserrat to Manchester and Paris, explores issues such as the Lancashire cotton famine, black soldiers in World War II, and the 2007 commemoration of abolition in regional museums.

Exploring the intersections of digital humanities and African diaspora studies How can scholars use digital tools to better understand the African diaspora across time, space, and disciplines? And how can African diaspora studies inform the practices of digital humanities? These questions are at the heart of this timely collection of essays about the relationship between digital humanities and Black Atlantic studies, offering critical insights into race, migration, media, and scholarly knowledge production. The Digital Black Atlantic spans the African diaspora’s range—from Africa to North America, Europe, and the Caribbean—while its essayists span academic fields—from history and literary studies to musicology, game studies, and library and information studies. This transnational and interdisciplinary breadth is complemented by essays that focus on specific sites and digital humanities projects throughout the Black Atlantic. Covering key debates, The Digital Black Atlantic asks theoretical and practical questions about the ways that researchers and teachers of the African diaspora negotiate digital methods to explore a broad range of cultural forms including social media, open access libraries, digital music production, and video games. The volume further highlights contributions of African diaspora studies to digital humanities, such as politics and representation, power and authorship, the ephemerality of memory, and the vestiges of colonialist ideologies. Grounded in contemporary theory and praxis, The Digital Black Atlantic puts the digital humanities into conversation with African diaspora studies in crucial ways that advance both. Contributors: Alexandrina Agloro, Arizona State U; Abdul Alkalimat; Suzan Alteri, U of Florida; Paul Barrett, U of Guelph; Sayan Bhattacharyya, Singapore U of Technology and Design; Agata Błoch, Institute of History of Polish Academy of Sciences; Michał Bojanowski, Kozminski U; Sonya Donaldson, New Jersey City U; Anne Donlon; Laurent Dubois, Duke U; Amy E. Earhart, Texas A&M U; Schuyler Esprit, U of the West Indies; Demival Vasques Filho, U of Auckland, New Zealand; David Kirkland Garner; Alex Gil, Columbia U; Kaiama L. Glover, Barnard College, Columbia U; D. Fox Harrell, MIT; Hélène Huet, U of Florida; Mary Caton Lingold, Virginia Commonwealth U; Angel David Nieves, San Diego State U; Danielle Olson, MIT; Tunde Opeibi (Ope-Davies), U of Lagos, Nigeria; Jamila Moore Pewu, California State U, Fullerton; Anne Rice, Lehman College, CUNY; Sercan Şengün, Northeastern U; Janneken Smucker, West Chester U; Laurie N.Taylor, U of Florida; Toniesha L. Taylor, Texas Southern U.

Like snapshots of everyday life in the past, the compelling biographies in this book document the making of the Black Atlantic world since the sixteenth century from the point of view of those who were part of it. Centering on the diaspora caused by the forced migration of Africans to Europe and across the Atlantic to the Americas, the chapters explore the slave trade, enslavement, resistance, adaptation, cultural transformations, and the quest for citizenship rights. The variety of experiences, constraints and choices depicted in the book and their changes across time and space defy the idea of a unified "black experience." At the same time, it is clear that in the twentieth century, "black" identity unified people of African descent who, along with other "minority" groups, struggled against colonialism and racism and presented alternatives to a version of modernity that excluded and alienated them. Drawing on a rich array of little-known documents, the contributors reconstruct the lives and times of some well-known characters along with ordinary people who rarely left written records and would otherwise have remained anonymous and unknown. Contributions by: Aaron P. Althouse, Alan Bloom, Marcus J. M. de Carvalho, Aisnara Perera Díaz, María de los Ángeles Meriño Fuentes, Flávio dos Santos Gomes, Hilary Jones, Beatriz G. Mamigonian, Charles Beatty Medina, Richard Price, Sally Price, Cassandra Pybus, Karen Racine, Ty M. Reese, João José Reis, Lorna Biddle Rinear, Meredith L. Roman, Maya Talmon-Chvaicer, and Jerome Teelucksingh.

Readers are often surprised to learn that black writing in Canada is over two centuries old. Ranging from letters, editorials, sermons, and slave narratives to contemporary novels, plays, poetry, and non-fiction, black Canadian writing represents a rich body of literary and cultural achievement. The Black Atlantic Reconsidered is the first comprehensive work to explore black Canadian literature from its beginnings to the present in the broader context of the black Atlantic world. Winfried Siemerling traces the evolution of black Canadian witnessing and writing from slave testimony in New France and the 1783 "Book of Negroes" through the work of contemporary black Canadian writers including George Elliott Clarke, Austin Clarke, Dionne Brand, David Chariandy, Wayde Compton, Esi Edugyan, Marlene NourbeSe Philip, and Lawrence Hill. Arguing that black writing in Canada is deeply imbricated in a historic transnational network, Siemerling explores the powerful presence of black Canadian history, slavery, and the Underground Railroad, and the black diaspora in the work of these authors. Individual chapters examine the literature that has emerged from Quebec, Nova Scotia, the Prairies, and British Columbia, with attention to writing in both English and French. A major survey of black writing and cultural production, The Black Atlantic Reconsidered brings into focus important works that shed light not only on Canada's literature and history, but on the transatlantic black diaspora and modernity.

Afrocentrism. Eurocentrism. Caribbean Studies. British Studies. To the forces of cultural nationalism hunkered down in their camps, this bold hook sounds a liberating call. There is, Paul Gilroy tells us, a culture that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but all of these at once, a black Atlantic culture whose themes and techniques transcend ethnicity and nationality to produce something new and, until now, unremarked. Challenging the practices and assumptions of cultural studies, The Black Atlantic also complicates and enriches our understanding of modernism. Debates about postmodernism have cast an unfashionable pall over questions of historical periodization. Gilroy bucks this trend by arguing that the development of black culture in the Americas arid Europe is a historical experience which can be called modern for a number of clear and specific reasons. For Hegel, the dialectic of master and slave was integral to modernity, and Gilroy considers the implications of this idea for a transatlantic culture. In search of a poetics reflecting the politics and history of this culture, he takes us on a transatlantic tour of the music that, for centuries, has transmitted racial messages and feeling around the world, from the Jubilee Singers in the nineteenth century to Jimi Hendrix to rap. He also explores this internationalism as it is manifested in black writing from the "double consciousness" of W. E. B. Du Bois to the "double vision" of Richard Wright to the compelling voice of Toni Morrison. In a final tour de force, Gilroy exposes the shared contours of black and Jewish concepts of diaspora in order both to establish a theoretical basis for healing rifts between blacks and Jews in contemporary culture and to further define the central theme of his book: that blacks have shaped a nationalism, if not a nation, within the shared culture of the black Atlantic.

In this theory-rich study, Shelby Johnson analyzes the works of Black and Indigenous writers in the Atlantic World, examining how their literary production informs "modes of being" that confronted violent colonial times. Johnson particularly assesses how these authors connected to places—whether real or imagined—and how those connections enabled them to make worlds in spite of the violence of slavery and settler colonialism. Johnson engages with works written in a period engulfed by the extraordinary political and social upheavals of the Age of Revolution and Indian Removal, and these texts—which include not only sermons, life writing, and periodicals but also descriptions of embodied and oral knowledge, as well as material objects—register defiance to land removal and other forms of violence. In studying writers of color during this era, Johnson probes the histories of their lived environment and of the earth itself—its limits, its finite resources, and its metaphoric mortality—in a way that offers new insights on what it means to imagine sustainable connections to the ground on which we walk.

Transatlantic Revolutionary Cultures, 1789-1861 makes an interdisciplinary contribution to the cultural and intellectual history of the long nineteenth century. It argues that the cultural dimensions of the political and social upheavals in Europe and the Americas were fundamentally transnational.