Kinship Across the Black Atlantic: Writing Diasporic Relations

Description

This book considers the meaning of kinship across black Atlantic diasporas in the Caribbean, Western Europe and North America via readings of six contemporary novels. It draws upon and combines insights from postcolonial studies, queer theory and black Atlantic diaspora studies in novel ways to examine the ways in which contemporary writers engage with the legacy of anthropological discourses of kinship, interrogate the connections between kinship and historiography, and imagine new forms of diasporic relationality and subjectivity. The novels considered here offer sustained meditations on the meaning of kinship and its role in diasporic cultures and communities; they represent diasporic kinship in the context and crosscurrents of both historical and contemporary forces, such as slavery, colonialism, migration, political struggles and artistic creation. They show how displacement and migration require and generate new forms and understandings of kinship, and how kinship may be used as an instrument of both political oppression and resistance. Finally, they demonstrate the importance of literature in imagining possibilities for alternative forms of relationality and in finding a language to express the meaning of those relations. This book thus suggests that an analysis of discourses and practices of kinship is essential to understanding diasporic modernity at the turn of the twenty-first century. Cover Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Diasporic kinship across the black Atlantic Part I: Rewriting anthropology 1. Postcolonial sabotage and ethnographic recovery in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother 2. Destabilizing structuralism in Pauline Melville’s The Ventriloquist’s Tale Part II: Historiography and the afterlife of slavery 3. ‘As constricting as the corset they bind me in to keep me a lady’: colonial historiography in Andrea Levy’s The Long Song 4. Shattering the flow of history: Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon Part III: Queer diasporic relationality 5. Queer creolization in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco 6. Writing self and kin: diasporic mourning in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet Conclusion: Diasporic futures? Bibliography Index