MAKING BLACK HISTORY

Forgive Your Mother? Memory, Redemption, and the Sense of an Ending

6 Comments / MAKING BLACK HISTORY /

‎‎Homegoing exemplifies how the history of institutionalized racism scripts Black American lives like a preordained fate similar, but also crucially different, from a religious narrative structured around collective enslavement, emancipation, and redemption. 100 Yet its structural emplotment is impossible to undo through an individual liberation narrative, as in Kojo’s successful flight to the North, H’s […]

Forgive Your Mother? Memory, Redemption, and the Sense of an Ending Read More »

‎ “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

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

“An Accumulation of Time”: Writing Time as History

2 Comments / MAKING BLACK HISTORY /

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

“An Accumulation of Time”: Writing Time as History Read More »

The Other Problem of History: What Cannot Be Represented
‎

2 Comments / MAKING BLACK HISTORY, Uncategorized /

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

The Other Problem of History: What Cannot Be Represented
‎ Read More »

Historical Fiction Is “Having a Moment”

10 Comments / MAKING BLACK HISTORY /

‎‎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

Historical Fiction Is “Having a Moment” Read More »

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

10 Comments / MAKING BLACK HISTORY /

“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

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

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

7 Comments / MAKING BLACK HISTORY /

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

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

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

6 Comments / MAKING BLACK HISTORY /

“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

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

“An American Pathology”: Reading Americanah as Quest Romance

7 Comments / MAKING BLACK HISTORY /

‎ ‎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

“An American Pathology”: Reading Americanah as Quest Romance Read More »

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

6 Comments / MAKING BLACK HISTORY /

‎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

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