Precarious Passages: The Diasporic Imagination in Contemporary Black Anglophone Fiction

Description

Precarious Passages unites literature written by members of the far-flung black Anglophone diaspora. Rather than categorizing novels as simply "African American," "black Canadian," "black British," or "postcolonial African Caribbean," this book takes an integrative approach: it argues that fiction creates and sustains a sense of a wider African diasporic community in the Western world. Tuire Valkeakari analyzes the writing of Toni Morrison, Caryl Phillips, Lawrence Hill, and other contemporary novelists of African descent. She shows how their novels connect with each other and with defining moments in the transatlantic experience, most notably the Middle Passage and enslavement. The lives of their characters are marked by migration and displacement. Their protagonists yearn to experience fulfilling human connection in a place they can call home. Portraying strategies of survival, adaptation, and resistance across the limitless varieties of life experiences in the diaspora, these novelists continually reimagine what it means to share a black diasporic identity. Cover Precarious Passages Title Copyright Contents Note on Usage Acknowledgments Introduction: Passages to (Be)Longing 1. An African American Journey to Black Diasporic Consciousness: Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage 2. Early Black Atlantic Crossings: Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes 3. War, Trauma, Displacement, Diaspora: Toni Morrison’s and Caryl Phillips’s African American Soldiers 4. Journeys to the Heart of Empire after World War II: George Lamming’s, Caryl Phillips’s, and Andrea Levy’s Caribbean Migrants 5. Roots, Routes, and Returns: Caryl Phillips’s, Cecil Foster’s, and Edwidge Danticat’s Caribbean Returnees Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index