November 2025

‎ “The Gnarled Fingers of Fate”: Curse Temporalities and the Question of Agency

4 Comments / MAKING BLACK HISTORY /

In 1913, W.E.B. Du Bois commissioned the artist Meta Fuller to produce a sculpture in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the abolition of slavery. The sculpture, today located on Harriet Tubman Square in Boston, carries the title Emancipation and is inscribed with the following sentence: “Humanity weeping over her suddenly freed children, who, beneath […]

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“An Accumulation of Time”: Writing Time as History

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Homegoing is not primarily invested in aptly conveying the horrors of chattel slavery. Instead, the novel aims to capture a fuller image of the transatlantic slave trade and its resultant diaspora, tracing its ruptured lines of kinship and its forgone responsibilities, fateful entanglements, and temporal consequences. In doing this, the novel also self-referentially foregrounds its

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The Other Problem of History: What Cannot Be Represented
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As Dalley states in his study of the postcolonial historical novel, “just as contests over the meaning of history forced historians to reconceptualize their discipline as a form of interpretative realism, so the contested nature of postcolonial pasts prompts novelists to frame their work vis-à-vis norms of plausibility, verifiability, and the dialogue with archives and

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The Problem of History: Historiography’s Imperial Legacies

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Two-thirds into Gyasi’s debut novel, a middle-aged history teacher named Yaw finds himself questioned by a class of schoolboys. The young boys, hailing from rural parts of what is still called the Gold Coast, have already heard of this teacher and his heavily scarred face. The teacher, who is working on a manuscript titled Let

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Historical Fiction Is “Having a Moment”

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‎‎Listing Yaa Gyasi, Yvonne Owuor, Colson Whitehead, Chimamanda Adichie, and Peter Kimani as examples, historian Dan Magaziner notes in an article on Africa Is a Country that historical fiction “has been having a bit of a moment recently, especially among authors from the African continent and its diaspora” (2017: para. 1). Confirming this, Lizzy Attree

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‎ A Painful Notion of Time Conveying Black Temporality in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing

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“History clings to our skin. Somehow we must remember that we remember differently.”‎‎Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi‎‎”One must return to the site. Detour is not a useful ploy unless it is nourished by return: not a return to the dream of origin […] but a return to the point of entanglement [point d’intrication], from which one was

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This Shared Space of Africanness”: The Hair Salon as Afropolitan Heterotopia

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Americanah is a diasporic novel that explicitly negotiates different Black epistemologies. While acceding to the constitutive force of an afterlife of slavery, the novel also investigates other moments of race in/as history, and it proffers other forms of Blackness: communal, diverse, Pan-African. At times, we can detect a strained but nevertheless existent notion of a

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“An Unapologetic Love Story”: Adichie’s Gendered Romance with Africa

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“An Unapologetic Love Story”: Adichie’s Gendered Romance with Africa‎‎Adichie herself has called Americanah an “unapologetic” love story, and it is indeed remarkable how extensively it adheres to and inverts the narrative strategies of romantic genre fiction (Sehgal 2013: para. 15). To offer some anecdotal insight, I once overheard two women in a café discussing the

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“An American Pathology”: Reading Americanah as Quest Romance

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‎ ‎As Adichie remarked in an interview about the novel: “I am more or less expected, or maybe permitted, to write about African pathology, but I don’t think I am expected to write about American pathology” (Sehgal 2013: para. 21). At this point, it may be useful to distinguish what the novel’s turn toward realism

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“A Bitter Americanizing”: Gendered Violence in the Aftermath of Slavery

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‎Americanah is part of a discourse that diversifies notions of Blackness in the diaspora. This is what Goyal asserts when she notes that “the novel self-consciously foregrounds its own reception as a new kind of black novel, an exploration of blackness that does not highlight injury or trauma, but focuses on romantic love, hair, and

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