Writing about the 19th-century realist novel in The Bourgeois, Franco Moretti argues that “description as a form was not neutral at all: its effect was to inscribe the present so deeply in the past that alternatives became simply unimaginable” (93). One could argue that Americanah employs realism in an effort to document the facticity and […]
”True from Experience”: Reception and the Realness of Racialization Read More »
Reading for RaceBoth in terms of style and content, the Washington Times opinion piece resembles Ifemelu’s successful race blog in Americanah. Here, Ifemelu satirizes her initiation into America’s racial order in a blog post titled “To My Fellow Non-American Blacks: In America, You Are Black, Baby” (220). She recounts her bewilderment at an almost indecipherable
You Can’t Write an Honest Novel About Race in This Country Read More »
”Since I must not all the same allow you to look at the future through rose coloured glasses, you should know that what is arising, what one has not yet seen to its final consequences […] is racism, about which you have yet to hear the last word. Voilà!”Jacques Lacan”The desire of the text (the
Toward an Ethics of ListeningBenjamin develops his Angel of History – the historical materialist view of history – apropos the dominant historicism of his time, which not only claims to understand the past “the way it really was” but naturally sympathizes with the victor’s story (2003: 391). Notably, while often being attentive to the histories
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Blackness in Diaspora TimeThe ambiguity of its metahistorical purport notwithstanding, Open City provides a staunch critique of totalizing aspirations of mastery, whether in relation to historical discourse, temporality, space, or through these theme’s metaphorical amalgamation: movement. Repeatedly, Julius is shown as failing in his attempts at mastery, feigning a sense of coherence he cannot quite
Voices Cut Out of the Past Into the Present” Read More »
Metahistory and the Circling Movement of MelancholiaCompared to the other novels I discuss in this book, Open City addresses the notion of race much less overtly. To a large extent, this is due to Julius’s self-fashioning as a “rooted cosmopolitan” apropos Anthony Kwame Appiah, as we see him repeatedly wrestle with and bristle at various
“To Experience the Pain Afresh” Read More »
With its vast array of historico-ontological and metaphorical connotations, movement can easily be identified as a master trope of the Black Diaspora, be it the forced movements and removals of colonialism and transatlantic enslavement, the northbound movements of the Underground Railroad, the Great Migration, Post-war emigration from the colonies, or the complex flows of contemporary
”To Trace Out a Story”: Narrating Movement and the Movement of Narrative
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Chapter II Going Through The Motions Movement, Metahistory, and the Spectacle of Suffering in Teju Cole’s Open City”[L]iterature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing.”Cathy Caruth”And above all beware, my body and my soul too, beware of crossing your arms in the sterile attitude of a spectator, because life
Objectively, the global moment of Afropolitanism affords a greater visibility to people of African descent, be it in the world of visual arts, media, literature, or business. 39 Yet parallel to what commentators have described as a positive rendering of what is usually a negative ‘African exceptionalism,’ Afro-pessimist thinkers like Wilderson have contended that the
Conclusion: The Challenges of Afropolitan World Making Read More »
argues that Black culture and identity have been quite thoroughly investigated in spatial terms, focusing on notions such as dispersal and displacement in national or geographical frameworks. However, she notes, “little work has been done to examine the impetus to create the temporal placement and displacement of black identity and culture, as well as its
Making black history (CHAPTER 1.3) Read More »