Temporality

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 […]

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‎ “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

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

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