Spectres of the shore : the memory of Africa in contemporary African-American and Black British fiction
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Abstract
This study considers the approach in recent African-American and Black British
fiction toward the cultural memory of Africa. Following a brief consideration of the
relationship between contemporary conceptions of African-American and Black
British cultural identities, I examine the ways in which the imaginative journeys and
geographies, evoked by the ideals of Africa and 'Africanness', are employed in the
negotiation of historical memory, and in the endeavour to situate black identity in
the context of contemporary American and British society.
My discussion addresses these questions, initially, in four novels by African-American
writers: Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Toni Morrison's Song of
Solomon (1977), Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1983), and John Edgar
Wideman's Philadelphia Fire (1990). I argue that African-American writers situate
a memory of an African past within an African-American present, through a form of
historical memory which is sensitive not only to tradition, but also to the practice of
'possession'. This fluid form of memory, characteristic of a voodoo tradition, and
also, these writers suggest, of a diversity of African-American artforms, allows
knowledge of African tradition to be situated within the American present, but is
broadly denied by an American trend of forgetfulness toward the past, and devalued
by institutionalised racism. African-American texts present uses of language in
which the linguistic and the pre-linguistic realms are felt to be continuous with one
another, in response to an American language which is centrally occupied by the
fraught relationship between black and white Americans.
The second half of this study examines the memory of Africa in three Black British
works, including Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River (1991), S.1. Martin's
Incomparable World (1996), and Bernardine Evaristo's Lara (1997). I suggest here
that Black British authors employ the cultural memory of Africa not as an
inheritance which is connected to a known 'tradition', but as one of a diverse
number of inheritances which are negotiated as part of the process of situating
identity as flexible, individual, and unfinished. The memory of Africa is figured as
frozen in the past, along with a range of other cultural inheritances, which are taken
up and redramatised in the present as part of an attempt to recover the inherent
diversity at the heart of an oppressive British fiction of linearity, and of uniform
'whiteness'. Where Britain, historically, has been silent on Britain's black presence,
Black British writers simply speak into that silence.
Emerging from this fruitful comparison between the two literatures is a sense of the
contrasting approaches which are made by black writers toward notions of tradition
and the performance of identity, in the context of two very different national
histories, and as part of fundamental strategies of survival employed in
contemporary social settings. These dramatisations are interrogated against
continuous issues of race and racism, but also as diverse solutions for identity where
national contexts bear a contrasting significance in an age which is increasingly
globalised, and in which imperial power has shifted, and continues to shift, between
Britain and America