Epilogue

The epilogue affirms that the old Anglophone African diaspora in the West is characterized by considerable ethnic, national, socioeconomic, sociocultural, religious, and political diversity as well as by markedly different interplays of race, class, and gender in different geographical locations and microcontexts. Black diasporic sensibilities perpetually renew and transform themselves in response to the limitless variety of life experiences in the diaspora. Nevertheless, rather than merely emphasizing black diversity for its own sake, this book has repeatedly brought the discussion back to the original propellers of the old African diaspora. This book’s diasporic hermeneutics have highlighted the historical origin of the old African diaspora in the Middle Passage and slavery and the cultural mediation of the collective memory of this ur-event. This emphasis on the old African diaspora’s origin in an event has anchored this book’s approach to diaspora in a racially antiessentialist understanding of black diasporic identity formation. Middle Passage narratives both mourn the lives that were lost as a result of the Atlantic slave trade and highlight the survivors’ innovative strategies of survival, acclimatization, and resistance. These themes, in modified yet recognizable forms, are also powerfully present in the novels about later black migrations analyzed in this book.

Journeys to the Heart of Empire after World War II

An analysis of The Emigrants, The Final Passage, and Small Island, chapter 4 brings together this book’s arguments by exploring the relationship among diasporic, imperial, and national identity formations in George Lamming’s, Caryl Phillips’s, and Andrea Levy’s novels about West Indian immigrants (who are both African Caribbean diasporans and subjects of the British empire) settling in Britain after World War II. Lamming and Phillips—members, respectively, of the first and second generations of post-Windrush writers—convey a Middle Passage sensibility more powerfully than does Levy, who, in the generational classification of post-Windrush novelists, belongs to the third generation. Like The Emigrants and Final Passage, Small Island, too, underscores the antiblack racism experienced by black Caribbean migrants to Britain. Yet exilic melancholy, though a presence, does not dominate Small Island in the way it controls Lamming’s and Phillips’s writing. In Levy’s treatment, the story of the postwar black Caribbean diaspora in Britain grows into a narrative of active diaspora-making. Finally, the chapter also examines how each of these three authors portrays the gendered aspects of the postwar Caribbean migration to Britain.

Introduction

The introduction articulates this book’s four main arguments. First, as the selected novelists reimagine the lives of uprooted groups and individuals in various stages and settings of black history, they actively contribute to the ongoing transnational formation of black diasporic identity. Second, these novelists frequently evoke (some quite subtly) slavery and colonial modernity. Their allusions to the Middle Passage and enslavement speak to the choices that they make while participating in the continuing construction of black diasporic identity—regardless of whether they belong to the civil-rights generation of African American novelists or to the cultural-nationalist generation of Caribbean authors or to a later generation of contemporary transnational British, Canadian, American, and Caribbean writers. Third, as this book’s chapter on black soldiers’ wartime experiences abroad demonstrates, much can be gained through a dually focused thematic approach that both examines black novelists’ representations of diaspora and explores their depictions of more temporarily and loosely understood experiences of displacement or dislocation. Fourth, the novels discussed in this book portray a “diasporic double consciousness.” This term refers to the dislocated/relocated protagonists’ sense of not belonging and their simultaneous yearning to experience fulfilling human connection and communion in a place they could call “home.”

War, Trauma, Displacement, Diaspora

This chapter examines Toni Morrison’s and Caryl Phillips’s portraits of African American troops in World War I, World War II, and Vietnam. These authors’ stories of African American soldiers and veterans bring together two topic areas that may, at first glance, seem to have little to do with each other: war and diaspora. This chapter interrogates the complex relationship between diasporic subjectivity and national citizenship. Utilizing Caruthian trauma theory, it reveals how Morrison, in Sulaand Tar Baby, and Phillips, in Crossing the River, subtly link their narratives of temporary traumatic displacement on foreign battlefields with the historical ur-trauma of diasporic dislocation. In these novels, the wounds that the Middle Passage and slavery inflicted on black diasporic bodies and psyches metaphorically bleed into, and coalesce with, traumas and post-traumatic conditions resulting from black participation in modern warfare—participation that both Morrison and Phillips depict in terms of young black men being sent abroad to fight destructive and traumatizing wars that are not theirs to fight. The literal and metaphorical connections that Morrison and Phillips forge between war and diaspora in various ways call attention to the greed and large-scale violence that have all too often accompanied the Western project of modernity.

Roots, Routes, and Returns

This chapter examines Caryl Phillips’s, Cecil Foster’s, and Edwidge Danticat’s depictions of contemporary African Caribbean encounters with the United States and Canada, with a particular focus on the complexities of “return”—a theme that facilitates discussions about “origins” and “home” and about formations of both diasporic and national identities and solidarities. A State of Independence (Phillips), Sleep on, Beloved (Foster), and Breath, Eyes, Memory (Danticat) all depict black Caribbean-born diasporans’ return trips back to the Caribbean. In all their complexity, these visits and their existential consequences play a pivotal role in how Phillips’s, Foster’s, and Danticat’s protagonists interpret their pasts and envision their future identities as members of their families, of two nations, of the Caribbean diaspora, and of the African diaspora.

An African American Journey to Black Diasporic Consciousness

This chapter demonstrates that Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage participates in the ongoing construction of black diasporic identity or consciousness by offering a philosophically and spiritually informed thematic narrative of the formation of a black diasporic subject. By the novel’s end, the protagonist arrives at an analytically and emotionally processed awareness of his identity position as a member of the African diaspora, recognizes that both rupture and connection characterize his relationship with Africanity, and acknowledges the necessity of an ever-continuing existential journey. This chapter also reveals that transformed/liberated perception and transformed/liberated consciousness are inextricably intertwined in Middle Passage. Owing to this connection, Johnson bolsters his narrative of the formation of diasporic subjectivity (a narrative of the formation of one type of transformed/liberated consciousness) by conversing with the role of perception in Melville’s Benito Cereno, in phenomenology, and in Buddhism. Finally, this chapter emphasizes that Johnson’s phenomenologically and Buddhistically informed emphasis on the malleability of black diasporic identity offers a counterargument to black cultural nationalistic positions, which he sees as propagating fixed, static notions of blackness.

Early Black Atlantic Crossings

This chapter discusses Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes, in which the diasporic ur-experience is expanded to cover post–Middle Passage migrations as well. Both a neo-slave narrative and a historical novel about Black Loyalist migrations, The Book of Negroes contributes to collective black diasporic memory by depicting the early African diaspora in the Western world from the perspective of an African-born woman, who is originally a freeborn Muslim. Hill’s fictional protagonist is a black diasporic subject who enters modernity on terms dictated by racializing white Others and must fashion her diasporic self out of various conflicting elements, which have to be reconciled within a single psyche. This chapter shows that “home,” in any imaginable sense, remains perpetually elusive for this racially and sexually subjugated female character once her diasporic predicament has been propelled into being. The hope embedded in The Book of Negroes lies, first, in the protagonist’s capacity to repeatedly assert her agency against the forces that oppress her and, second, in the connection (familiar to readers of antebellum slave narratives) between literacy, freedom, and the “autobiographical” abolitionist enterprise that Hill inscribes in the novel’s frame—an endeavor that metafictionally highlights the link between black diasporic memory and identity.