Making black history (CHAPTER 1.2)

‎1.2 The Extranationality of African Literature
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‎African literature has often been defined in terms of national or nationalist literature and interpreted as a response to either colonialism, nation-building, post-independence disillusionment, or globalization. A lasting theoretical contribution to this mode of thinking is Fredric – Jameson’s much debated “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” (1986) and his reading of African fictions as “national allegories.” Notably,
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synthetic nature of African literatures, at least from a linguistic and geographical perspective. He also emphasizes the binding force of an inherent transculturalism, which echoes Fanon’s assertion that it “is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness lives and grows” (-Fanon 2001: 199). Ngũgĩ writes:
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‎Outside the fact of language, writers from the colonial world always assumed an extranational dimension. We talk of African literatures, for instance without batting an eyelid. […] In terms of nations, Africa has more than fifty. But African literature always saw itself as beyond the national territorial state, assuming, at the minimum, the continent for its theater of relevance and application. (2012: 54)
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‎Ngũgĩ adds historical depth and continuity to the global impetus of what many have described as watershed moment in African literatures, assigning the latest wave of contemporary diasporic writing variably to a third, fourth, fifth, or Afropolitan generation of African writers. Ngũgĩ frames the global orientation of African literatures as an intrinsic feature and not merely a contingent, historical development born from Western influence or global forces. Describing his early work at the Nairobi literature department, he notes how “[f]or us, the point of departure was East Africa, radiating outward to Africa, the Caribbean, and African America, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and the rest. The organizing principle was one of from here to there. Hereness and thereness are mutually contained” (2012: 58).
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‎These positions also counter what some critics fear to be a dilution of the concept of African literature. In “Bursting at the Seams: New Dimensions for African Literature in the 21st Century,” Thomas A. Hale proclaims that the “21st century will be the century of African literature” (2006: 19), yet he also warns:
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‎One can argue that these writers are invigorating, reshaping, and renewing the literatures of Europe and North America as they extend the range of African literature today. It is not clear, however, to what extent these writers will fall into a no-writers-land that is neither African nor European. One wonders if they will be co-opted into a new literary context, or simply become pioneers in a new global village of world literature. (18)
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‎Writing about the difficulty to account for the global aspect of African literature, Madhu Krishnan notes how the “idea of Africa” in predominant scholarship “remains caught in a critical schism between authenticity and cosmopolitan attachment” (2014: 4). Concomitant with this, she notes, is the
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‎tendency to analyze these literary works as either aesthetic or political, reifying the kind of critical compartmentalization that not only reproduces an oftentimes dated image of Africa in crisis but also fails to account for the ways that form, content, and context co-constitutively affect “the creation and dissemination of a global Africa” (2014: 5-6). Krishnan’s study, therefore, reads contemporary African fictions as global texts, drawing not only on textual analysis, but also on the discursive and material circuits surrounding and shaping these works, in order to illuminate what she calls a “geopolitical aesthetic” of Africa.
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‎An integrative view of African literature’s in-built extranationality proves a helpful framework for today’s increased visibility of global or diasporic African literatures. Most importantly, it is a framing that avoids outdated and often paternalistic indictments of African literature as mostly externally controlled, extroverted or subjected to market forces – and thus befits the self-confidence of the Afropolitan moment. The global orientation of African literature thus fulfills a function that goes beyond being “recognized” by the West and expresses its Afropolitan – read: fluid, transcultural, modern -reality. Along those lines, Eileen Julien has also recently revisited her notion of the extroverted novel:
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‎If writing to the world is not the only or the primary function of contemporary African novels and texts, I believe it is nonetheless a critical one. From the years of colonization to the present, modern African writers, particularly novelists, have indeed had transcontinental publics. It could be argued that these writers, like those of Asia, Latin America, and the periphery of Europe, were and are necessarily more worldly than Northern counterparts of one or two centuries back and even those of today […] And while I should not like the world to mistake a subset of narratives with particular themes and features as the sum total of what the African imaginary is and has to say, I would not want African authors to turn a blind eye to global audiences and hegemonic power to which African realities and stories are intimately bound.
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‎(2018:9)
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‎Yet whether one frames Afropolitan literature as an expression of African literature’s “globalectics” or “geopolitical aesthetics,” the contentious notion of global literature, its appendix of audiences, markets, and appetites, looms large. While a detailed engagement with the scholarship on world or global literature exceeds the scope of my analyses, there are a few basic aspects to keep in mind when considering the complex positioning of Black African writers on a global stage.
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‎1.3 The Dilemma of the Black Writer
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‎There are certain critiques of the global novel, such as the one issued by the editors of n+1 in “World Lite,” that maintain an unabashed nostalgia for the “programmatically internationalist literature of the revolutionary left” (-Saval and Tortorici 2013: 13). This kind of comparison reads romantic at best, and, as Krishnan reminds us, tends to perpetuate a stereotypical image of Africa in crisis. For critics of an apparently de-politicized, middlebrow global fiction, the culprits are easy to be found: Not only corporate publishers, but also universities – and in particular creative writing programs – become ready vessels for neoliberalism, peddling the “tastes of an international middlebrow audience” (Saval and Tortorici 2013: 14) and training a “global elite” (8). Combining the insights of Mark McGurl’s widely discussed The Program Era (2009) with Graham Huggan’s “The Postcolonial Exotic” (2001), Kalyan Nadiminti argues that “the influence of the American MFA program” has led to the evolution of a “a new realist style, one that is deeply inflected by both global capitalism and programmatic writing” (2018: 376). The MFA writing program, according to Nadiminti, becomes “not merely a networking agent but a crucial training ground of American globalism in a post-Cold War literary world” (2018: 377).
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‎Surely, such analyses expose some of the most insidious, neo-imperialist mechanisms behind, as Huggan put it, “the globalisation of cultural production” (2001: 4). However, this kind of criticism, although heavily relying on a materialist critique of globalism, often loses sight of other, equally troubling sides to the argument. Much contempt for the perceived dominance – and aesthetic inferiority of the global novel, as well as the complaint that writing programs are ‘producing’ what some regard as ‘too many’ minority authors, should be eyed with enough suspicion to account for the fact that this might also be part of a reactionary effort to maintain a social status quo. Consequently, these efforts are often coded in aesthetic terms and invested in discussions of artistic value, thinly veiling elitist claims to cultural hegemony. To some degree, this also concerns leftist Western intellectuals pining for the kind of revolutionary subject that remains ever subjugated, but it most certainly plays out when, for example, a white British critic huffily declares the end of the Booker prize because the shortlist’s “superficial multicultural aspect conceal[s] a specifically North American taste” (Hensher 2013: para. 1).
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‎Contrary to this, author and creative writing professor Aminatta Forna notes that “as the centre in literature begins to shift away from the Anglo-American writer towards writers with different backgrounds we are witnessing a backlash” (Flood 2014: para. 7). In “MFA vs. POC,” a much-noted article from 2014, Junot Díaz provides a glimpse into the ways in which
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‎the hegemonic status quo has long since been maintained. Writing about the “unbearable too-whiteness” of MFA programs, he explains:
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‎Too white as in Cornell had almost no POC – no people of color – in it. Too white as in the MFA had no faculty of color in the fiction program […]
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‎Too white as in my workshop reproduced exactly the dominant culture’s blind spots and assumptions around race and racism (and sexism and heteronormativity, etc).
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‎In my workshop there was an almost lunatical belief that race was no longer a major social force (it’s class!). In my workshop we never explored our racial identities or how they impacted our writing – at all. Never got any kind of instruction in that area at all. Shit, in my workshop we never talked about race except on the rare occasion someone wanted to argue that “race discussions” were exactly the discussion a serious writer should not be having. (para. 3)
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‎While Díaz’ text mostly deals with memories of his own writing program of the 1990s, very similar concerns were raised by Claudia Rankine in her AWP (Associations of Writers and Writing Programs) keynote in 2016, where she noted how, in these programs, “certain life experiences are said to belong to sociology and not to poetry. To write beyond the white imagination’s notion of normality and normality’s traumas is to write ‘political poetry,’ ‘sociology,’ ‘identity politics poetry,’ ‘protest poetry’ – many labels but none of them Poetry” (Rankine 2016: para. 11).
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‎Apart from structural shifts creating new areas of friction, these debates also point to the often-documented dilemma of the Black or minority writer who, in return for her admission into the illustrious circle of published literature, is faced with having to perform the status of ‘otherness’ -a process which often enough results in the repudiation of that status. In the context of the US, the pressure to ‘represent the race’ as well as the question of whether Black literature constitutes ‘art or propaganda’ is usually linked to the debate between Alain Locke and W.E.B. Du Bois. While both Locke and Du Bois converged on the social significance of literature and literary representation, Locke proposed a literature that was more in tune with his notion of the term “New Negro” and which, through “artistic self-expression,” or what he later calls “purely artistic expression,” aspired to universal values rather than denoting what was commonly understood as “the Negro problem” (Locke 1992: xxvi). Du Bois, on the other hand, argued for the necessary political situatedness of any illocution, pointing toward the very concrete constrictions of publishing. Most famously, – Du Bois maintained that “all Art is propaganda and ever must be” (1926: 296).
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‎This “great debate,” as Leonard Harris calls it, around the social role of literature is often used to signpost the two most dominant theoretical strands of early 20th-century Black aesthetics, in particular during the Harlem Renaissance, but it extends well into the 21st century, notably through Kenneth Warren’s proposition of the end of African American literature. In What Was African American Literature (2011), Warren claims that “African American literature was a postemancipation phenomenon that gained its coherence as an undertaking in the social world defined by the system of Jim Crow segregation” (107). Controversially discussed and often quickly dismissed, Warren’s intervention nevertheless cuts to the core of an ongoing “debate over the efficacy of a racially grounded solidarity as a basis for resistance to injustice” (Hayman 2015: 128). This debate and its implications for literature actually transcend the realm of African American cultural production and thereby mark a historical continuity.
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‎The Harlem Renaissance was, of course, also part of a “‘new’ black internationalism” (Edwards 2003: 2). Throughout history, the notion of the Black international, Pan-African, or African writer’s role was likewise never without contestation. In 1956, at the First Congress of Black Artists and Writers in Paris, Alioune Diop, Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, and others had anything but singular views on what constituted national or international culture, and consequently the role of the Black writer, even as the opening statement by Senghor insisted that “African Negro Literature and art” were “functional and collective” and thus necessarily “committed” (1956: 56). The various critiques leveled at the essentializing tendencies of the concept of “Négritude,” particularly by figures like Fanon and Wright, have been well documented. 17 Wole Soyinka most famously transferred these debates into the context of Anglophone African literature, when, at the Makerere conference in 1962, he declared: “I don’t think a tiger has to go around proclaiming his ‘tigritude.” Later, Soyinka clarified that he wanted to distinguish between propaganda and “true poetic creativity” (Jahn 1968: 266). Likewise, Nigerian writer Christopher Okigbo declared: “There is no such thing as African writing.
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‎There is only good writing and bad writing.” On the same grounds, Okigbo later declined a prize by the Festival of Negro Art (-Nwakanma 2010: 182). And Zimbabwean author Dambudzo Marechera put the sentiment quite simply: “If you are a writer for a specific nation or a specific race, then fuck you” (Ashcroft 2013: 79). Of course, these kinds of polemics are first and foremost leveled at external ascriptions and the specific heteronomous demands on Black and/or African art. The variously polemic or remedial responses triggered by these conscriptions, however, reveal a particularly insidious double bind, as Mbembe writes in On the Postcolony:
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‎The uncompromising nature of the Western self and its active negation of anything not itself had the countereffect of reducing African discourse to a simple polemical reaffirmation of black humanity. However, both the asserted denial and the reaffirmation of that humanity now look like the two sterile sides of the same coin. (2001:12)
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‎Relating these debates back to the current situation of Black and minority writers in Western institutions and literary markets, it becomes clear how fraught the issue of ‘writing or not writing race’ continues to be. In a way, there is ‘no way out’, or at least no easy way. Even though race, racialization, and identity make for not only valid but important and complex literary topoi, the structures of institutions which, following Sara – Ahmed (2012: 43), often allow “an act of inclusion to maintain the form of exclusion” continue to conscript writers of color into the double role of not merely exploring, but performing these themes as the embodiment of ‘a problem.’ In this sense, admission into these spaces is predicated on the performance of difference rather than on the realization of actual change. Acknowledging this aporia however, may translate into its transference rather than incorporation, by wielding it as a tool rather than a burden. Thus, Ahmed’s solution is to defiantly own the status of “killjoy” and continue to disrupt and unsettle.
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‎Rankine suggests a similar approach, noting that writing is “is and should be an arena full of discomfort as we try to keep present the differences that keep us in relation” (2016: para. 43). 18 And it is possible to interpret Wole Soyinka’s addendum to his notorious “tigritude” comment – a tiger doesn’t proclaim, “he pounces” – in a similar vein. Rather than declaring difference -qua existence, or rather, admittance – writers can try to affect change through actions, and the choice of ‘improperly’ political topics as a literary subject may well be one of them. In “The Writer in the African State,” Soyinka thus explicitly advises writers to address their political realities. “[T]here can be,” he writes, “no further distractions with universal concerns whose balms are spread on abstract wounds, not on the gaping yaws of black inhumanity” (1967: 356).
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‎Facing these “gaping yaws” and occupying an “arena of discomfort” while still being heard is a difficult task for any writer. It is worth carefully examining how it affects these widely popular authors, who are granted a wider platform than many and appear to self-consciously navigate the representation of Blackness. The following analyses will attend mostly to the textual representation of Blackness and to the ways in which the representation of race is itself thematized. There are, however, also important extratextual angles to this. One is the way the authors self-define; another is how the texts and authors are read or appropriated. As mentioned above, many of these novels were received as proof or sign of a post-racial age and described with the still young terminology of a post-racial
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‎aesthetics. While each of the novels indeed investigates and questions received notions of a particularly US-American episteme of Blackness and a somewhat outdated notion of Pan-African solidarity, it is striking how often their nuanced explorations were first stripped of their ambiguity and then folded back on to their authors, reducing them to post-racial taking heads. More than once, for example, Americanah’s often satirist description of an esoteric American race discourse was mobilized for articles running some version of ‘race is over’ or ‘even minorities are tired of talking about it’ or indeed showcasing Adichie’s smiling face under the headline “Race doesn’t occur to me.” The fact that Adichie had applied this comment to Nigeria, or, often in the same context, put it in past tense and declared that she now considers herself “happily black,” was omitted by the kind of sensationalist media representations feeding into the notion that the new visibility of Africans signaled not only a distraction from African Americans but an end to race politics. This narrative, as Goyal notes, framed the diaspora as “some kind of zero-sum game, where only one community could assume center stage in a kind of Darwinian free-for-all” (2017c: 643).
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‎I would argue that, paradoxically, the literature of these African-born or identified authors was thus framed as an instance of the “New Negro” paradigm, even and precisely when they were dis-identified with US-American Blackness. In “Afro-Modernity,” Michael Hanchard traces several trajectories of the “New Negro” discourse in the Americas, concluding how “the New Negro’s evidenced discomfort with forms of behavior that could have been – and often were – negatively associated with slavery by white and black alike would become the basis for a key dilemma of black aesthetics and cultural production throughout the diaspora” (1999: 259). Read as a paradoxical iteration of the “New Negro,” one that had not only left behind the painful memories of slavery but simply lacked them and thus signaled not only a change but an end to its very category, Afropolitan authors were indeed conscripted into a variety of related discourses, some political or cultural, others socio-economic. Noticeable in discussions that framed the African story as somehow distracting from the African American story, Goyal writes, are the fears of commentators “as African immigrants become the US’ latest model minority” (2017c: 643). Read in this way, their “entrepreneurship, habits of industry, and cultural values of hard work and discipline seem only to rebuke African Americans and blame them for their continuing subordination or malaise” (ibid.). These scenarios, reminiscent of how other Black immigrant groups have historically been pitted against African Americans, capture and enlarge only one aspect of diaspora identification, namely its uneasy articulations of unity, fraught negotiations of identity, and, most of all, its vast socioeconomic and cultural diversity.
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‎While I generally regard Afropolitanism not as a secession but as part of a long tradition of transatlantic, intradiasporic entanglements, it is true that
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‎this moment challenges the most intensively theorized constituent of both African American and Black Atlantic consciousness: the centrality of the Middle Passage. In order to further contextualize this, the following section provides an overview of the two most prominent theorizations of Blackness relying on that centrality, Paul Gilroy’s seminal The Black Atlantic (1993) and US-American Afro-pessimism, one of the most prominent correctives to post-racialism in contemporary academia. Though the two intellectual frameworks differ greatly, both share a distinct form of historicism that prioritizes the epistemological effect of slavery and the Middle Passage.
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‎1.4 An African Atlantic: Provincializing the Middle Passage Epistemology
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‎Highlighting the ways in which the events of African American past formations speak to or are entangled with current-day migration, Roderick A. Ferguson has called for a decentering of African American history and a repurposing of African American studies (2011: 113-131). For him, a more lateralized African American studies could be a tool for questioning the hegemonic valences and ideological implications behind these concepts -despite the danger of being co-opted or subsumed under the broad academic rubrics of transnationalism, globalization, or cosmopolitanism. Other scholars like Simon Gikandi, Natasha Barnes, and Michelle M. Wright have also argued against a conception of diasporic unity grounded in the experience of slavery alone. 19 Afropolitanism certainly enacts a necessary intervention into what Wright has called the “Middle Passage Epistemology” by exhibiting diasporic Black experiences that do not draw their main cues or epistemic origins from the transatlantic slave trade (alone) but narrate their specific histories in relation to colonialism and/or socioeconomic changes like globalization. Yet this kind of dialogue remains highly charged and contested, both outside and inside the academy. The uneasy relation between Afro-pessimist theorizing and Afropolitanism often appears unresolvable, as particularly the optimism associated with the early Afropolitan moment seems thoroughly antithetical to it.
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‎Neither encompassed by the notion of a coherent school of thought or political movement but a self-described “project” or “enterprise,” Afro-pessimism as a whole strongly diverges from the reparative rhetoric that, according to Afro-pessimist theorist Jared Sexton, often buttresses Black cultural and historical scholarship. For example, the same global imperative of the Afropolitan moment that Ferguson views as a chance for African American Studies, signals danger for Sexton. Whereas Ferguson writes that the “contours of globalization, generally, and global migration, specifically, provide an opportunity to fashion an African American studies organized around heterogeneity and radical non-identity of black racial
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‎formations” (2011: 116), Sexton warns against a latent global didacticism toward African American studies, and Black Americans in general, which he interprets as a barely concealed imperative to ‘get over oneself,’ to transcend and graduate in order to become “truly worldly and cosmopolitan” (2011: 8). While not entirely denying the existence of Black (social) life, Sexton notes, Afro-pessimism insists that this sociality is excluded from the modern world system: “Black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in, but is lived underground, in outer space. This is agreed” (2011: 28).20
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‎Crucially, from an Afro-pessimist perspective, a more inclusive repurposing of African American studies is easily co-opted by a post-racial argument that signals not only a “fresh perspective” on American racial politics but, most importantly, severs its constitutive ties to the past. In the field of African American studies especially, the posting, shelving away, and neatly categorizing of past epochs proves problematic in light of ongoing racial violence. Yet it is not only in these violent spectacles but also in the everyday and the mundane that scholars like Sexton, Saidiya Hartman, or Frank B. Wilderson identify an “afterlife of slavery” that bars all periodization but rather intimates the continuation of a century-old “racial calculus and political arithmetic” that “has yet to be undone” (Hartman 2007: 6). Here, it is neither the “antiquarian obsession with bygone days [n]or the burden of a too-long memory” that keeps the past alive and well understood, but a sense of permanence or even simultaneity of past and present (ibid.). Theorizing this state of permanence, Afro-pessimist scholars often draw on the work of sociologist Orlando Patterson, who, in Slavery and Social Death, develops the concepts of “social death” and “natal alienation.” Patterson describes the slave as a “socially dead person” that is isolated from “all ‘rights’ or claims of birth” and without any “right to any legitimate social order” (1982: 5). For Afro-pessimist thinkers, the “highly symbolized domain of human experience” that Patterson sees embodied by slavery exceeds the historical event and continues to condition the Black body (1982: 38).
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‎In the blurring of historical demarcations and the assertion of not only history’s inevitable return but its ongoing presence, Afro-pessimist theorizing can be linked to broader concerns in both African American and Black Atlantic studies. The inclination to excavate and actualize the past’s hauntings, as well as the theoretical centrality of the Middle Passage, embed Afro-pessimist critique in the ongoing effect of an ‘archival turn’ in literary studies in general, and diaspora studies in particular – albeit under a different, decidedly pessimist sign. In Archives of the Black Atlantic, Wendy Walters describes the archival turn as having engendered a “reading of the past for which we may have either no evidence or compromised evidence, and yet which must be imagined as possibility” (2013: 2). This imaginative attachment to a traumatic past and the recurrent revisiting thereof affects a
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‎wide range of contemporary Black studies. In “On Failing to Make the Past Present,” Stephen Best has termed this particular historiographical mode “melancholic historicism,” and traced its ur-moment to Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic. Best argues that this mode has become somewhat paradigmatic, and he criticizes its “promotion of a feeling to an axiom” (2012: 464). In a 2017 issue of American Literary History, Patricia Stuelke warns against what she calls the “American antiblack tragedy trap: a double bind that locks black subjects into the infinitely recursive roles of universal tragic martyrs or pathological tragic victims” (755). In the same issue, Margo Natalie Crawford historicizes in the tried and tested rhetoric of “turns,” by describing similar developments as “The Twenty-First-Century Black Studies Turn to Melancholy” (2017: 799-807). Crawford, who after the publication of Best’s essay had already begun to theorize “postmelancholy,” now concedes that 21st-century African American theory and literary criticism are indeed characterized by a recurring or continuous turn to melancholy. Commenting on Jermaine Singelton’s Cultural Melancholy: Readings of Race, Impossible Mourning, and African American Ritual (2015) and Joseph R. Winters’s Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress (2016), Crawford writes: “How does it feel to move on with unresolved grief? […] These recent texts signal that we are now, in black studies, developing the new frames – and new grammar – that can make legible the ‘jam-full of contradictions’ of black life in the afterlife of slavery in the twenty-first century” (2017: 805).
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‎The 21st-century “turn to melancholy” in Black Atlantic studies constitutes less a turn than a continuation – given that the inaugural scholarly text on the Black Atlantic also formulates a distinct “reading of the past […] which must be imagined as possibility” through the notion of a ‘slave sublime’ that becomes knowable only through the experience of the Middle Passage. At the heart of Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic lies the focus on rhizomatic maps of entanglements rather than singular roots, as a push back against definitions of Blackness that threaten to recede into cultural parochialism or racial essentialism. Yet its extraordinary scope and poststructuralist unmooring notwithstanding, the main coordinates of Gilroy’s Black Atlantic are clearly located and demarcated. While wary of the ways in which Blackness is easily submerged under “the smooth flow of African American exceptionalism” (2002: 120), Gilroy offers no different provenance or alternative technique for locating Black consciousness, other than perhaps digging deeper – meaning, he too prioritizes African American (male) Blackness by centering figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, and Richard Wright and predominantly tracing the concentric spreading of Black American culture. Framing his inquiry into a Black British identity that exceeds both nationality and nationalism, he concedes that he first needed to make “an intellectual journey across the Atlantic.” In “black
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America’s histories of cultural and political debate and organization” he finds “another, second perspective” – the “lure of ethnic particularism and nationalism” notwithstanding – which helps him orient his own position (ibid. 4).
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‎Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic remains an influential and highly important text, despite drawing criticism for its narrow Euro-Atlantic and Anglophone focus and its centering of predominantly male, modernist intellectuals. Various scholars, Yogita Goyal, Simon Gikandi, and Michelle M. Wright among them, have pointed out how the Black Atlantic framework eclipses the African continent. 21 By conceiving of Blackness as a quintessential New World identity, characterized by the epistemic rupture of the Middle Passage, Africa necessarily recedes or “figures as an object of retrospective rediscovery, rather than as an active agent” (-Law and Mann 1999: 308). Arguing against essentialist and Afrocentric notions of Blackness that rely on genealogical and traditional ties or biological ‘roots,’ Gilroy fashions Black Atlantic culture as a kind of counterculture of modernity, following Zygmunt Bauman, that actually better embodies the ‘true’ claims of modernity. This fundamental understanding of the modernist potential derives from the experience, or memory, of slavery. Gilroy notes how, despite or particularly because of the “racial terror” of slavery inherent to Western civilization and thought,
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‎blacks in the west eavesdropped on and then took over a fundamental question from the intellectual obsessions of their enlightened rulers. Their progress from the status of slave to the status of citizens led them to enquire into what the best possible forms of social and political existence might be. (2002: 39)
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‎Black Atlantic culture, necessarily blurring the boundary between the aesthetic and the political, is thus either adamant in bringing the enlightened claims of modernity to their logical conclusion, what Gilroy terms a discursive “politics of fulfillment,” or, in seizing modernity’s inherent and violent contradictions, aims to expressively limn its utopian overcoming through what he calls the “politics of transfiguration” (ibid. 37).
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‎Throughout The Black Atlantic, Gilroy attempts to redefine the meaning of tradition, prying it from the hands of those who value it as a culturalist, meaning racially essentialist, link to African origins. This “wrench[ing] open” of tradition, as James Clifford describes it in his discussion of the book, allows Gilroy to construct a notion of Black Atlantic culture that is fluid rather than fixed, self-generating and self-referential rather than derivational or estranged from its source (Clifford 1994: 321). At the same time, the terms tradition and memory are again limited because memory first and foremost pertains to the “ineffable, sublime terror” of slavery (Gilroy 2002: 215) that is then “actively preserved as a living intellectual resource” through the
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‎”expressive political culture” that marks the Black Atlantic tradition (ibid. 39). Gilroy’s privileging of the Middle Passage Epistemology in the making of Black culture certainly disrupts Afrocentrist romanticizing of pre-modern Africa. However, as Goyal notes, it does not “provide any alternative way of thinking about Africa” and instead reifies its role in Atlantic culture as static and passive (- Goyal 2014: v).
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‎Framing Africa as passive witness is surely not mandatory to thinking about the horrors of the Middle Passage, but it might be a tacit continuation of that conceptualization of Africa as helpless victim or abject non-place that Mbembe (2001: 4) describes: “More than any other region, Africa thus stands out as the supreme receptacle of the West’s obsession with, and circular discourse about, the facts of ‘absence,’ ‘lack,’ and ‘non-being,’ of identity and difference, of negativeness – in short, of nothingness.” It is precisely this brand of Afropessimism, as a globally mediated discourse on the African continent as hopeless heart of darkness, that Mbembe sees confronted by Afropolitanism as a “way of being in the world, refusing on principle any sort of victim identity” (Mbembe 2005: 28-29).22 However, as Mbembe adds, this “does not mean that it is not aware of the injustices and violence inflicted on the continent and its people by the law of the world” and this awareness certainly also pertains to the transatlantic slave trade (ibid 30). Mbembe’s later work The Critique of Black Reason (2017) is thus a conscious attempt at rereading the African American history of Blackness from a continental perspective and expanding a myopic vision of the Middle Passage Epistemology. In a conversation with Theo David Goldberg, Mbembe elaborates on how he wanted to “take seriously the idea that Black, or blackness, is not so much a matter of ontology as it is a matter of historicity or even contingency” as well as “contest those lineages of blackness that use memories of trauma to develop discourses of blackness as ontology” (Mbembe 2018: para. 4). What is being contested here, are Afro-pessimist perspectives in which Blackness is not only an ontological, socially and philosophically pre-determined and political category, but the kind of political ontology from which a global civil society derives its notions of lack and non-being by “dividing the Slave from the world of the Human in a constitutive way” (Sexton 2011: 23). By emphasizing, instead, the effect of “historicity or even contingency” in the making of Blackness, Mbembe draws a sharp distinction between his own and Afro-pessimist theorizing.23
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‎While it is important to distinguish between continental Afropessimism that paints a derelict picture of post-independence Africa (particularly through media coverage) and American Afro-pessimism as an umbrella term for contemporary political, historical, aesthetic, and theoretical approaches that radically problematize anti-Blackness and the afterlife of slavery, both instances converge on the point of African agency – or the lack thereof. The self-described “unflinching paradigmatic analysis” of Afro-pessimist theories
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‎tends to negate the historical and political agency, or even the existence, of Black subjects in general, including African agency. 24 Elaborating on the incompatibility of Africa as a “homeland” for its diaspora, Frank Wilderson notes:
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‎But the fact of the matter is that captivity and social death are the essential dynamics which everyone in this place called Africa stands in relation to […] [W]hat Afro-pessimism is saying is that a Black African diaspora is fundamentally different from any other diaspora, because any other diaspora has actually been dispersed from a place that has sovereign integrity. And Africa has never had sovereign integrity; since it has gained conceptual coherence as Africa. […] Africa has always been a big slave estate. That has been and still is the global consensus. (2016: 9)
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‎The demographic fact of those very visible and active African diasporas in the US that carry with them very concrete and coherent notions of their respective homelands challenges this sentiment. But it also reveals the particular myopia on which it relies. I would argue that Wilderson’s, and by extension Afro-pessimism’s, rendering of a Black ontology as lack and non-being is just as reliant upon the ’emptiness’ of the African signifier as the racist epistemologies that rendered Africa “the supreme receptacle” of the West (Mbembe 2001: 4). However, this process of projection is fundamentally challenged by a contemporary African diaspora that fills this blank or negative space with its very own, if often conflicting, presence. This issue is now particularly charged as many members of the new African diaspora in the US, and most certainly the majority of Afropolitan writers, hail from West African countries, e. g. those areas from which most enslaved African were taken and which, with the exception of Ethiopia, figure most prominently in Afrocentric notions of the ‘motherland. 25 At first glance, this West-African kinship would suggest a distinct reckoning with the common history of slavery and enslavement, probing issues like lineage, tradition or complicity and perhaps triggering feelings of guilt, avowal, or forgiveness. Despite, or perhaps precisely because of, these loaded issues, the topic of slavery has structured the cultural encounters between old and new diasporic communities in the US much less overtly, or at least differently, than former (intra-) diasporic or transnational Black discourses. An example that is more recent than 19th-and early- to mid-20th-century Pan-Africanism would be the long and fruitful linkage between South African and African American cultural production. As scholar Neville Choonoo notes, the 20th. century dialogue between South Africa and Black America has been characterized by “interplay” or even “kinship,” founded on notions of diasporic solidarity and commonality (2015: 30). The crucial difference
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‎between South Africa and Nigeria is, of course, the former’s history of Apartheid and settler colonialism, but I would argue that this circumstance also profoundly implicates the semantics of slavery and Blackness transmitted within this exchange. Here, slavery is much more than a historical fact or experience. It actually represents the same system or effect of white supremacy that is implemented by Apartheid. And in this sense, American Blackness comes to be defined as a product or response to this racist order and is able to travel outside of its national framework. This is part of the “moment of Blackness,” as Mitchell describes it in Seeing Through Race, that was “never exclusively confined to the African American population of the United States” but was “disseminated most notably in the apartheid struggle in South Africa, which was accelerated by the example of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States” (2012: 60).
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‎While various anticolonial independence movements were also implicated in that moment of Blackness, South Africa provided a much more durable ground for political recognition, even in the decades following ‘the wind of change’ on the continent – precisely because slavery had transmuted from a historical, discreet event to a mutable and mutating system. “African Americans,” Choonoo writes, “saw in South Africa a common Black experience under White hegemony” (2015: 30). The political situation of South Africa under Apartheid, together with its status as a settler colonial nation, allowed for “spontaneous and mutual” intradiasporic recognition, particularly during the 1960s and onwards (ibid. 36).
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‎Obviously, one could even further investigate how the gulf of the imaginary, the effect of the mythical idea Africa, implicates today’s diasporic encounters. A generation removed from the internationalist, Pan-African ambitions of Du Bois, the Black American search for African roots was mostly characterized by what Choonoo calls a “naive interest in African culture” (2015: 38). This is also why South Africa offered an “easy access” for interconnectedness, allowing many intellectuals to forge concrete political linkages (ibid.). These concrete political ties were less prone to implode the mythical ideas of the motherland, simply for lack of direct confrontation. This confrontation, however, is now occurring with the heightened influx of West African immigrants to the US. Yet confrontations are mutually constituted.
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‎A recurring Afropolitan narrative recounts African immigrants’ indignation at being conscripted into the racial hierarchies of US society – usually upon realizing that “black is at the bottom of America’s race ladder” (Americanah 105). Consequently, African immigrants often adopt the model minority narrative ascribed to them, emphasizing their distinctness from African Americans. Culturally however, and the pervasiveness of white supremacy and institutional racism notwithstanding, Africans in America are also benefactors of the Black Power movement and the symbolic shifts brought about by African Americans who, as Paula Moya notes, have done “important
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‎decolonizing work through their sustained efforts to delink African ancestry from notions of biological inferiority” (2015: 128). Yet at the same time, these symbolic acts have often remained just that: symbolic and steeped in Afro-centric mythology. As Africans position themselves apropos and within systems of signification that alternately (de)value or (mis) recognize them, this creates a complex environment marked by different and often ambiguous modes of rejection, adoption, and appropriation. In sum, both the limited framework of Gilroy’s Black Atlantic and the singular focus on South African similarities have, despite their productivity, done little to complicate the naïve or reductionist role that Africa often plays in the diasporic imaginary.
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‎Perhaps it is unsurprising then, that Frank Wilderson has little to no use for Africa in his theorizations, except for South Africa, where he spent five years as one of only two American ANC members and about which he extensively wrote in his memoir Incognegro (2018). In the case of South Africa, Afro-pessimist thinking is able to extend its Middle Passage Epistemology through an understanding of apartheid as a mutation and extension of the logic of enslavement. For Wilderson, it is evident that “slavery is and connotes an ontological status for Blackness; and that the constituent elements of slavery are not exploitation and alienation but accumulation and fungibility” (2010: 23). Today, with the intensified diasporic encounters between West-Africans and African Americans, I argue that it may be precisely the historico-geographical proximity of these groups that renders slavery a somewhat blatant, mutually constitutive historical fact, rather than a system or effect of white supremacy. In this context, slavery might present itself as a shared trauma, a history of exploitation, or even a system of labor that implicates but not exclusively defines what it means to be Black.
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‎It becomes clear that for theorizations centering on the Middle Passage, like Afro-pessimism or Gilroy’s Black Atlantic mapping, slavery really is a way of thinking, an epistemology, and particularly a way of thinking about (and constituting) Blackness. As Colin Dayan wrote in response to The Black Atlantic, the Middle Passage thus becomes a “metaphor, anchored somewhere in a vanishing history” rather than locating a complex node of global history (1996: 8). In relation to Blackness, the effect of this is twofold. For one, subjects who do not refer to or regard themselves through this epistemology may not be considered or consider themselves Black. Secondly, it installs a certain hierarchy or primacy of experience that sidelines all other modes of Blackness and submerges alternate histories. Conversely, however, Afropolitan narratives that insist on their own routes to becoming Black automatically counter the hegemony of the Middle Passage Epistemology and provincialize it as merely one of multiple modes, metaphors, and histories of Blackness.
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‎In many ways, Afropolitanism seems incompatible with the tenets of Afro-pessimism. However, as my readings of the novels aim to show, their relation isn’t simply reducible to antagonism or irreconcilableness but rather an uneasy negotiation of sometimes similar, and oftentimes diverging conceptualizations of Blackness. In short, the Afropolitan moment – as it plays out in the US and in the novels selected here – both challenges and reconfigures the distinct tradition of diasporic cosmopolitanism that is often referred to as Black Atlantic culture. Afropolitan narratives intervene in the Middle Passage Epistemology in ways that need not refute Afro-Pessimist concepts of fungibility or social death as much as challenge or lateralize their singular mode of plotting African American racial formations in linear rather than rhizomatic ways. As Ferguson asserts: “Contemporary black migrations productively derail the project of African American history. […] [N]ew African American subjects question the utility of grounding African American history within a line of descent that starts with the middle passage, moves to slavery, proceeds to Emancipation, stops briefly at Reconstruction, passes through Jim Crow segregation, and arrives at civil rights” (2011: 115). While Afro-pessimist theories certainly denounce the notion of a linear progress in the afterlife of slavery, they still rely on linearity as they propose instead “a reverse linear narrative indicating that no Black progress has been made” (-Wright 2015: 8).
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‎Instead, a synchronistic exploration of Blackness in the moment of Afropolitanism allows me to approximate Wright’s theorizations of Blackness as both construct and phenomenology. In Physics of Blackness, Wright develops the concept of “spacetime,” where historical constructs of Blackness and progress are associated with temporal linearity and the interpretative moment of non-linear experience is linked to the phenomenological manifestations of Blackness (2015: 4). In light of demographic shifts she identifies as belonging to a post-WWII moment, Wright notes that the “question of defining Blackness has become more urgent as the collectives that perceive themselves though these multiple histories find themselves encountering each other more frequently” (ibid.). She proposes that
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‎the only way to produce a definition of Blackness that is wholly inclusive and nonhierarchical is to understand Blackness as the intersection of constructs that locate the Black collective in history and in the specific moment in which Blackness is being imagined – the ‘now’ through which all imaginings of Blackness will be mediated. (18)
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‎The Afropolitan moment may help explore what Crawford terms the contradictions of “black life in the afterlife of slavery in the twenty-first century” by relating it to the larger framework of the global Black Diaspora,
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‎highlighting not only the disparate socioeconomic and epistemic subject positions of a Black imaginary but also the subordination of narratives that are not routed through the Middle Passage or rooted in Gilroy’s notion of the slave sublime. Read in this way, the literatures under discussion shift rather than replace the centrality of the Middle Passage Epistemology, countering what Adichie, in a famous TEDtalk, described as the “danger of a single story” (-Adichie 2009a). 26 One example of this would be their exploration of (post-) colonial traumas, highlighting how these traumas are just as intrinsic to global and diasporic history. Rather than identifying Afropolitan literatures with a distinct break with the kind of literatures which, following Toni Morrison’s Beloved, actualize the (re-)memory or afterlife of slavery, these literatures could be read as a reminder that there are other historical traumas that also speak to the diasporic imaginary. As Goyal notes, reading a novel like Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears in posttraumatic terms, like some critics have, is only possible “if the only traumatic template allowed to a black writer is that of slavery and its afterlife” (2017c: 646). Whether plotted as linear progress narrative or as Afro-pessimist reversal, it becomes clear that the Middle Passage Epistemology has long determined not only the centrality of historicism in Black and diasporic writing but also whose history is conducive to African American and Black Atlantic racial formations. Despite the fact that many 20th-century literary and intellectual movements such as Négritude or the Harlem Renaissance have been described as a “cycle of reciprocities” (-Irele 2001: 72) between Africa and New World diasporas, evoking the image of call and response, most models have ultimately prioritized the concerns of diasporic communities or reinstated US-American hegemony. With the Afropolitan reconfiguration, an African Atlantic imaginary transpires in which – Gilroy’s notion of a “living memory” of slavery (2002: 198) gives way to the active presence of Africa.
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‎Even in this configuration, it is important to take the notion of diasporic reciprocity seriously, rather than pitting one model against each other. If painted in broad and decidedly binary strokes, Afropolitanism is often conceived as a futuristic, race-less cosmopolitanism and mobilized in opposition to a racially inflected African American or Black Atlantic parochialism centered on the memory of slavery. 27 In many ways, this perspective simply reiterates the spatial separation of the Middle Passage in temporal terms. The focus on rifts and disassociations, however, is not only a somewhat limiting, if tried and tested, way of conceptualizing the Black Diaspora, it also fails to recognize precisely how the legacy of slavery figures in these narratives. While it is obvious how the primacy of the Middle Passage threatens to trump the traumatic role of colonialism in the making of modern Blackness, the Afropolitan moment does not only provide counterweight to the damaging effect of a “single story” by presenting new
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‎or neglected narratives, but also by inverting the perspective on slavery itself. While the history of slavery has affected Africa and the diaspora unevenly, this does not mean that they aren’t both affected. One particular pitfall of emphasizing the unequal positionings toward the history of transatlantic slavery is a latent disregard for the traumas that the slave trade wrought on the African side of the Atlantic. Already, the absence of institutionalized memory culture around the slave trade has created an epistemological lacuna that is directly taken up by Yaa Gyasi’s novel Homegoing. It is also addressed by the narrator of Teju Cole’s Every Day Is for the Thief, who, during his visit to Lagos, muses about the “chain of corpses” forging a “secret twinship” between Lagos, the former largest slave port, and New Orleans, “the largest market for human chattel in the New World” (112). Consequently, he criticizes that this “history is missing from Lagos. There is no monument to the great wound” (Cole 2014b: 114). This aspect is very much part of the labor that these Afropolitan works and authors are performing: a thorough reckoning with history, an investigation of how it implicates and involves them, as the history of Blackness. In this sense, Afropolitanism is indeed motivated by the vision of a better, more perfect union, marked by mutual recognition and historical culpability. I describe this motivation as the novels’ diasporic desire.
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‎In “Afropolitanism and the End of Pan-Africanism,” Balakrishnan accredits the shortcomings of Afropolitanism as an African philosophy of history to its inability “to reckon with the agency of Africans in the dispersion of diaspora: the betrayal at the heart of the symbol ‘Black'” (2018: 581). She claims that what might have served as a “powerful point of reflection: a reckoning in the form of unity,” has “not occurred” (ibid.). Yet the literary explorations discussed in this book – cautious of and attentive to its dilemmas and mobilized by a deep-seated diasporic desire – certainly belie this pessimist statement. Indeed, all three novels convey what British-Sierra Leonean writer Aminatta Forna described in an interview: a nuanced understanding of how “the legacy of slavery breaks differently on each side of the Atlantic.” Moving to the US, Forna elaborates, allowed her to discover a “sharp distinction in how she claims her past and how others view that history through skin color” (Otosirieze 2017: para. 12). We find this realization in all three texts, along with the same willingness or desire to explore and perhaps blunt the sharpness of this distinction through reckoning with that history, formally and thematically.
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‎As such, the Black Diaspora reveals itself as a geographical space, mutually constituted by both homeland and diaspora, as well as a distinctly temporal community that is both imagined and probed by these texts. Acknowledging reciprocity thus also means understanding that the Black Diaspora is in fact this Janus-faced entity, mobilized by the push and pull of homeland and diaspora, past and future. What I aim to show in my readings
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‎of Afropolitan fictions is that while the shift toward imagining diaspora under the sign of Africa certainly correlates with post-racial discourses, these processes aren’t necessarily mutually defined and much less causally related. Newly Black Americans may question the category of Blackness, but they are nevertheless Black. Afropolitan fictions may reverse the perspective on the Middle Passage, but they are not revisionist. Diasporic desire is marked by the hope for an antiracist future, but it does not renounce racist pasts and presents. Hence, what connects these novels apart from emerging in the moment of Afropolitanism is their respective investigation of “history through skin color,” or what I propose to call race in/as history.
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‎2 Writing Race in/as History
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‎By ‘making Black history’, Cole, Adichie, and Gyasi investigate the historicity of Blackness and the ways in which it implicates them, rather than treating Blackness as a specific condition that automatically includes or excludes them or an ontological fact that is inherited or rejected. In this, and rather than primarily signaling the shifts and turns of post- and newness, these fictions are just as attentive to notions of stasis, repetition, and tradition as an accumulation of certain ‘structures of feeling. 28 As such, the novels are responding to these structures selectively, if not necessarily consciously. As expressions of diasporic desire, however, they appear to employ this knowledge strategically, wielding time as the medium with which Blackness is negotiated. Like time, race can be made malleable in literature, it can be condensed, extended, or repeated, it can be foregrounded or surreptitiously rendered, but neither race nor time can be simply explained away. Because race, as Mitchell writes, is a “time-based medium that both has a history and itself narrates history,” it becomes a particular interesting topos for narrative fiction (2012: 21).
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‎2.1 Raced Temporalities
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‎I have chosen to describe these contemporary diasporic texts as belonging to or emerging in the historical moment of Afropolitanism not only as a way to bypass the open debate on whether the Afropolitan denotes a useful or problematic mode of identification, but also because I want to draw attention to the central role of time and temporality in these novels. The moment thus becomes another descriptor of the ‘race and time’ of any social articulation, defining Afropolitan discourse as a historical constellation and an investigation of what Stallings has called a “race-time continuum,” reminding us that race and time are both “basic social discourses that reverberate off each other” (2013: 194). In her discussion of “CP-Time,” colored or conscious people’s time, in Paul Beatty’s Slumberland, Stallings
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