argues that Black culture and identity have been quite thoroughly investigated in spatial terms, focusing on notions such as dispersal and displacement in national or geographical frameworks. However, she notes, “little work has been done to examine the impetus to create the temporal placement and displacement of black identity and culture, as well as its intersections with diaspora and transnationalism” (Stallings 2013: 194). The issue of temporality has been extensively explored in postcolonial theorizations of diaspora and race, most famously in Homi K. Bhabha’s Location of Culture (1994). Bhabha elaborates on the post-colonial time lag and other discourses of disjunct temporality in order to display “the problem of the ambivalent temporality of modernity that is often overlooked in the more ‘spatial’ traditions of some aspects of post-modern theory” (2004: 342). In a similar vein, Gilroy identifies the protagonists of The Black Atlantic as belonging to “non-synchronous communities” (2002: 174), marked by a “syncopated temporality” (202). Hanchard defines the notion of “racial time” as “the inequalities of temporality that result from power relations between racially dominant and subordinate groups” (1999: 253).
This focus on temporality, in particular in relation to Blackness, is already inherent in Fanon’s most infamous ‘primal scene’: the instance of racial interpellation in “The Fact of Blackness” from Black Skin White Masks where Fanon details the effect of a child’s public exclamation: “”Look, a Negro […] I’m frightened!” He recounts how being hailed a frightening thing, an “object in the midst of other objects” when all he desired was to be “a man among other men,” causes him to substitute Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal schema with a racial epidermal schema, which is in turn constituted by a “historico-racial schema” (2008: 82-84). Confronted with this initial interpellation in a white environment, Fanon discovers his “blackness, [his] ethnic characteristics” (84-85).
Fanon’s “The Fact of Blackness” is a dense text, exploring notions of (non-)recognition and visibility, ontology and metaphysics, which have acquired a certain universality in postcolonial theories but take on a heightened significance in relation to Critical Race and Black Studies. 29
Questions of temporality and historicity, however, are just as central to these disciplines. History, in most cases, is a problem. Regardless of whether the word denotes lived experience, academic discipline, or dominant episteme -it is either fraught with painful memories, complicit with exploitative structures or the principal author of race, “our deadliest fiction” (- Spillers 2003: 379). The history of race denotes a periodization that obscures its contingency and projected finitude by claiming the eternity of myth or the timelessness of science. The history in race is first of all an accumulation, Fanon’s historico-racial schema made up of “legends, stories, history, and above all, historicity” (2008: 84).
Both the history in race and the history of race inform the “historical, instrumental hypothesis” that constitutes the fact of Blackness and that triggers in Fanon only two kinds of responses: Either radically freeing oneself from the prison of history, rejecting any claims made by the past and becoming one’s “own foundation” (2008: 180), or, when the colonized intellectual decides to use the past for “his people” [sic], he should do so only “with the intention of opening up the future, of spurring them into action and fostering hope,” while, most importantly, also supplementing his efforts through political action (2001: 187). This defiant position toward history emerges from a distinct temporal position, what Bhabha calls the “time lag of cultural difference” that is born from a “temporal break” or “caesura” in the “continuist, progressivist myth of Man” (2004: 341). Relating Fanonian temporality to the notion of postcolonial and subaltern agency in general, he writes:
Fanon destroys two time schemes in which the historicity of the human is thought. He rejects the “belatedness” of the black man because it is only the opposite of the framing of the white man as universal, normative -the white sky all around me: the black man refuses to occupy the past of which the white man is the future. But Fanon also refuses the Hegelian-Marxist dialectical schema whereby the black man is part of a transcendental sublation: a minor term in a dialectic that will emerge into a more equitable universality. Fanon, I believe, suggests another time, another space. (ibid.)
For Bhabha, Fanon resists rather than deplores the heteronomous temporal ordering by the West, gaining agency by occupying and speaking from the interstices of time and history. It is noteworthy that for Bhabha, Fanon anticipates an alternative time of Blackness that also conditions a different spatial scheme or space, or perhaps even a different world, indicating what he describes as the shift of the cultural location of modernity “to the postcolonial site” (Bhabha 2004: 360). This process, which he also identifies in the temporal strategies of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, is marked by the “translation of the meaning of time into the discourse of space.” Bhabha describes this as an active and willed performance, a “catachrestic seizure of the signifying ‘caesura’ of modernity’s presence and present,” which insists simultaneously on an analysis of power that thinks through both sexuality and race, a critique of the nation’s inherent imperialism, and the reconfiguration of teleological class-consciousness through the “doubling and splitting” of race (ibid.). While Bhabha’s high hopes for postcolonial narratives align with the “writing back” paradigm that has become somewhat synonymous with certain definitions of postcolonial literature, Afropolitan narratives don’t quite map onto his paradigm as neatly. They do,
however, also translate the “meaning of time into the discourse of space” by voicing what Bhabha describes as a “vernacular cosmopolitanism which measures global progress from the minoritarian perspective” (2004: xvi).
At least in the sense of these texts being (post-)postcolonial novels, one could thus state that – without suggesting that the two can ever be fully pried apart – the centrality of temporality has somewhat replaced spatiality.
The importance of issues such as (involuntary) exile and displacement or the interplay between center and periphery largely recedes for a generation characterized by a global, and surely privileged, ease of mobility. What increases is a textual mobility through time, yet not as reenactment of history, the conjuring of a ‘pre-modern’ idyll or the countering of alleged African ahistoricity. These writers are not mainly writing back to some colonial center, and neither are they merely reflecting on their respective African homelands from a diasporic distance, even though both modes inform their texts. In the aftermath of what Mbembe and others have identified as the “planetary turn of African predicament,” theirs are attempts of writing themselves into the world as global citizen, as African and as Black cosmopolitan (Mbembe 2016: 31). Via the “epistemological proposition” of Afropolitanism, they draw attention to their own privileged perspective on the world (ibid.) However, due to their intimate experience with hegemonic epistemologies, they are simultaneously acceding to the impossibility of theorizing globally. The distance they have gained is not necessarily geographical but temporal; they are drawing on the multiangular shape of history, both exhibiting and occupying discrete vantage points, specific relations with and toward the past. Indeed, deliberate Afropolitan movements through history limn a particularly transnational vantage point, the ability of relating oneself in and as the planetary. This perspective also resembles Wai Chee Dimock’s understanding of the particular scale enlargement of deep time, which draws on a notion of planetary entanglement that exceeds the chronology of an individual nation. As Dimock writes: “[T]he concept of a global civil society, by its very nature, invites us to think of the planet as a plausible whole, a whole that… needs to be mapped along the temporal axis as well as the spatial, its membership open not only to contemporaries but also to those centuries apart” (2007: 5). Shunning the inherent spatial hierarchization of a single elevated viewpoint, these texts do not only rely on a transnational or multilocal perspective but limn the planetary configuration of the Black Diaspora along a temporal axis and through specific chronotopes.
Of course, as Mikhail Bakhtin’s seminal work on the literary chronotope shows, temporality is an intrinsic element of literature. While time, as topos and formal element, represents a fundamental building block and major preoccupation particularly of modernist writings, it is indeed noteworthy how these contemporary literatures explore the deceivingly blunt realization
that both “time and race are social discourses reverberating off each other.” An example of how the dimensions of race and time relate would be the notion of hair in Americanah, the novel’s “third protagonist,” as Rask Knudsen and Rahbeck (2016: 243) write, or, as I describe it, the Proustian cookie that triggers Ifemelu’s childhood memories. As such, however, it is not just a temporal device to structure the narrative but also indexes both psychological and social temporality. Arguably, Black hair carries broader historical and collective significance than Proust’s very personal, yet ostensibly universal, memory of his aunt. Homegoing, on the other hand, investigates Black temporality on multiple levels and, quite literally, through fragmentation and repetition, while Open City echoes Fanonian moments of interpellation and, through its pronounced dialogism, offers contrapuntal readings of history that simultaneously comment on diasporic metahistoricism. While these raced temporalities are formally woven into the fabric of these texts – through topos, trope, or syntax – notions of history or historicism seem to play out much more discursively, as extra- or contextual referent. In fact, however, these topics are so overdetermined that it might be better to speak of a certain diasporic meta-historicism that also profoundly – and formally – affects these literatures.
2.2 Diasporic Historicism or the Search for a Usable Past
Generally, I argue that the 21st-century vantage point of Afropolitan literature is particularly metahistorical insofar as it already encompasses and reflects on the role of temporality and history in earlier diasporic writing, both fictional and academic. Diasporic literature in the moment of Afropolitanism is thus able to draw on these notions, as both intertext and direct referent. It is noteworthy that most academic theorizations of Black cosmopolitanism are occupied with historical formations, most notably in The Black Atlantic, but also, for example, in Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo’s Black Cosmopolitanism (2014) or Brent Hayes Edwards’s The Practice of Diaspora (2003). The growing scholarship on Afropolitanism allows for a much-needed update of these concepts, developing a contemporary model of diaspora while drawing on the historical depth prompted by a comparative reading with concepts such as Black Internationalism or Pan-Africanism. On a smaller scale, I aim to integrate these concerns by showing the significance of temporality in contemporary diasporic literature and the impact of decades of diasporic historiography.
For scholar Markus Nehl, the influence of 20th-century historiography is a distinguishing feature of contemporary diasporic fiction. In Transnational Black Dialogues (2016), Nehl identifies a “second generation neo-slave narrative” in novels like Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008), Yvette Christiansë’s Unconfessed (2006), or Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women (2009). These
texts, he argues, draw on antebellum slave narratives and 20th-century neo-slave narratives but are also influenced by the cultural politics of the Black Power era and the adjacent “radical reconceptualization of the historiography of slavery” (24). Nehl suggests that, through this dense intertextuality, these neo-slave narratives “not only try to fill in the gaps of the historical record but also self-reflexively comment on the dangers and limits inherent in their attempt to reconstruct the history of slavery from today’s perspective” (32). The novels under discussion are also characterized by this heightened self-reflexivity and intertextuality, mobilized by an acute awareness of the ongoing legacy of slavery and colonialism and the necessity of inscribing these counter-histories into the present. However, in Afropolitan literatures, slavery becomes merely one of a cast of diasporic cornerstones, albeit an important one. Generally, and perhaps more so than other literary fields, the literatures of the Black Diaspora are implicated by the quest for ‘usable pasts’ as well as the discursive struggles surrounding them. The notion of a ‘usable past’ itself has a complex and divergent history, taking on slightly different connotations in different contexts. What follows is a brief glimpse into the two contexts that most affect Afropolitan fictions, e. g. the US-American and the postcolonial African.
In its many iterations within academic and public discourse, the notion of a ‘usable past’ has always been linked to issues of cultural values, norms, and identities. In the context of the US in particular, the process of consciously selecting and appropriating the past was motivated by an inquiry into ‘what it means to be American’ and also aimed to indicate ‘what America should be,’ thereby designating so-called usable and unusable pasts. First schematized during the Progressive era – yet clearly already informing the creation of a white Anglo-Saxon racial imaginary – the quest for America’s usable pasts spawned numerous debates throughout the 20th century, often feeding into discussions about (literary) canons or other debates generally subsumed under the so-called culture wars, by raising questions of inclusivity and diversity.30 In the 1990s, David Thelen and Roy Rosenzweig conducted a large survey that focused on personal relations with and attitudes toward history, published as The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (1998). The survey of more than 1,450 individuals revealed, among other things, a strikingly diverse appropriation and function of history among different racial and ethnic groups. Accordingly, the notion of distinctive African American pasts has been explored both in terms of their reciprocal relation to a wider, normative idea of American history and identity and, in accordance with popular culture theories á la John Fiske or Stuart Hall, as an actively employed toolkit for the creation of personal and collective identity.
The term ‘usable past’ also gained importance in the context of Africanist historiography, albeit with different connotations. While Progressive era
historian Brooks lamented a “sterile” past and argued for lending it “living value” (1918: 338-339), the colonial context provided a much more vexed notion of the historical archive and its impact on lived experience. The impact of imperial historiography installed a particularly sharp distinction between ‘official’ and ‘popular’ or ‘recorded’ and ‘lived.’ As J.M. Coetzee put it in Waiting for the Barbarians, “[e]mpire” and its creation of “the time of history” made it impossible for Africans to “live in time like fish in water” (1983: 133). A similar sentiment resonates in Ousmane Sembène’s denouncing of Western historiographers as “chronophages,” eaters of time (Murphy 2000: 177). As a consequence of this contested relation to the colonial archive, as well as the epistemic gaps it produced, post-independent national historiographers were often quick to emphasize unwanted ‘unusable pasts,’ in the same way that the national instrumentalization of history often overrode the personal or experiential one. As Cooper (2015) writes:
African and African-American intellectuals long sought to counter primitivizing ideologies of their times by pointing to narratives of African state building. The real breakthrough in writing African history occurred as colonial rule was crumbling and the quest for a usable past – notably a usable national past – attracted young scholars in Africa and beyond (286).
This project, however, soon created its own forms of discontent. The nationalism inherent in those early quests for usable pasts is even more significant if one follows scholar Bogumil Jewsiewicki’s contention that “the post-colonial state is an extension of the colonial state model,” hence also sidelines popular historiography and eclipses historical narratives of anti-nationalist insurgence (1989: 4). This sentiment is echoed by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who, wary of all kinds of official Kenyan historiography, deplores the “state historians, whose role it is to give rational legitimacy to the traditions of loyalism and collaboration with imperialism” (1993: 98). Ngũgĩ also contends that the “people’s real history of struggle and resistance” has produced its own historians – unofficial historians like himself, but also those unwilling to further corroborate the state-sanctioned, sanitary narrative of nation building (ibid.). Indeed, as Falola writes, by the 1980s, the “confident tone in nationalist historiography began to change to one of despair” (2011: 410). As a countermeasure, scholar Terence Ranger had already advocated a somewhat depoliticized notion of a “usable past for Africa,” one that more closely resembled a definition of the term as lived experience and pragmatic social tool (1976). In accordance with the idea of the “invented tradition,” which Ranger later developed in his eponymous work with Eric Hobsbawm, Ranger sought to de-mystify African historiography and wrench it out of the
hands of corrupt political elites, who had in turn inherited it from racist colonial rulers.
There are a few aspects in these discourses that can help illuminate the notion of Afropolitanism as diasporic iteration, particularly within the US. For one, the shift from passive consumption to active appropriation matters here, as well as the attention to societal hierarchies and cultural hegemonies. Secondly, the fact that negotiations of usable pasts are almost always national projects needs to be carefully parsed. Deeply enmeshed in American mythologies of purity and plurality, the question of usable/unusable pasts determines the often subtle but crucial shifts between narratives of assimilation, hybridity, or difference.31 In the Unites States, the so-called new African Diaspora symbolized by Afropolitanism is thus thrice conscripted by -while notably pushing against – nationalist narratives. 32 Afropolitanism marks the moment when the old narratives of Black Nationalist solidarity but also the national framing of assimilationist immigrant fiction and that of the exilic or émigré novel are questioned. 33 These diasporic fictions are not singularly marked by aspirational melting pot narratives or, in its reversal, by anti-aspirationalist narratives of return. Rather, they are characterized by a complication of either of these paradigms, often combining both. A good example is Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers (2016), a novel that was celebrated precisely for its renunciation of the American Dream, purportedly showing its collision with “immigrant reality” (PBS 2017). Yet where that novel’s ending, the protagonists’ return to Cameroon, merely truncates rather than questions its fairly straight-forward assimilationist story line, 34 others, like Adichie’s Americanah, Sefi Atta’s A Bit of Difference (2012), or Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater (2018), offer protagonists who are not primarily preoccupied with mapping onto the progressive linearity of national time – a change that is not solely ascribable to these characters’ financial privilege but also a willed change in perspective.
In the same way that the “era of disillusionment” and its links to contemporaneous historiography affected African fiction, Afropolitan literature conveys a specific historicism. 35 Neither disappointedly shunning political history nor glorifying narratives of national progress, the novels under discussion nevertheless heavily historicize the moment of Afropolitanism. Homegoing, for example, traces over two hundred years of diasporic history into the early 2000s, while Americanah historicizes Nigerian military rule, ‘multicultural’ Britain, and Obama’s election. Open City navigates the tense post-9/11 climate of New York and Brussels. Other contemporary fictions like Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues (2011), Yvonne Adhiambo Owour’s Dust (2013), Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu (2014), Novuyo Rosa
→Tshuma’s House of Stone (2018), and Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift (2019) also revisit crucial moments of African and diasporic history, often
illuminating the more hidden paths that have led to the present. Identifying Afropolitanism as space, analogous to Avtar Brah’s definition of diaspora space as a conceptual category, the author and blogger Minna Salami notes how the imaginative “glocal” space of Afropolitanism is equally characterized by its pronounced historical anachronisms (Rask Knudsen and Rahbeck 2016: 157). And it is not only because “the internet is Afropolitan” – the fact that a wealth of information is literally at their fingertips – that Afropolitan writers and artists move so frequently in and out of time (Mbembe 2015). Their revisiting of the past occurs in and with the full knowledge of how today’s political presents are shaped by past trajectories and how these pasts have ultimately timed and positioned themselves. To paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., these anachronisms inquire into many arcs of history, subtly interrogating if and how they may have bent toward justice.
While these novels cannot be neatly aligned with or co-opted by earlier nationalist or internationalist projects, the notion of a ‘usable/unusable past’ has not disappeared. Through active negotiation rather than passive consumption, the novels under discussion probe if and how history bears upon the present and whose pasts may actively constitute the contemporary diasporic imaginary. The latent distinction between the usable and unusable already affects what could otherwise be interpreted as arbitrary or self-sufficient metafictional play. Moreover, the deliberate and earnest exploration of pasts, both usable and unusable, counters what Ella Shohat has critiqued as the “ambiguous spatio-temporality” of the postcolonial (1992: 102). Arguing against certain “ahistorical and universalizing” (ibid. 99) tendencies in postcolonial theorizing, Shohat writes: “The term “post-colonial” carries with it the implication that colonialism is now a matter of the past, undermining colonialism’s economic, political, and cultural deformative-traces in the present” (ibid. 105).
The notion that the past has left its “deformative-traces” in the present also resonates with Anne McClintock’s critique that much of post-colonial theory may feign to dismantle “the imperial idea of linear time” yet reintroduces it through the term’s emphasis on posterity (1992: 85). As such, the “post-colonial scene” emerges “in an entranced suspension of history, as if the definitive historical events have preceded us, and are not now in the making” (ibid. 86). These auto-critiques of the postcolonial correspond with an important aspect of these novels’ pronounced (meta)-historicisms, anachronisms and explorations of asynchronous or repetitive temporalities. It exposes oses the simple fact that “trauma doesn’t care about time.” That sentence, uttered by the contemporary psychiatrist Paul Conti on a popular medical podcast, relays how Freud’s theories, despite generally having lost much of their clinical significance, continue to inform the study of trauma temporality.
2.3 Timing Historical and Racial Trauma
The timelessness of trauma is central to Freud’s model of psychic representation. What Freud observed in the shell-shocked WWI soldier’s constant reliving of painful experiences led to his development of the death drive and also confirmed his belief that “unconscious mental processes are in themselves ‘timeless'” (1955: 28). The “‘daemonic’ force” of the death drive notwithstanding, Freud interpreted the compulsion to repeat as an attempt at mastering the original trauma. Yet he also understood this as a temporally indefinite endeavor given the fact that, regarding unconscious mental processes, “time alters nothing in them, nor can the idea of time be applied to them” (ibid.).
In literature, one form of mastery is indeed form itself. Hence, yet another way that these texts can be read as meditations on race and time is through their metafictional play on genre. Following Goyal’s notion of “genre as the presence of the past in the present,” all three readings explore how these contemporary texts navigate the generic conventions of diasporic literature (2010: 10). In many ways, if not all, these explorations also illuminate questions of race and racialization as they sometimes navigate, sometimes strain at not only the ghostly presence of violent diasporic pasts, but also their textual conventions. Considering the traumatic nature of these pasts, it is unsurprising that this kind of metafiction rarely takes an ironic or self-parodic stance. At times, however, the novels’ use of metafiction does provide a metacommentary that questions the critical purchase or ethico-political value of specific modes of writing trauma. Conditioned by the abovementioned impetus of determining usable pasts in a contested discursive arena, both the historical novel and so-called trauma fiction are common genres in Black Diasporic writing.
Historically, literary and cultural approaches to trauma theories are rooted in Holocaust studies, yet numerous scholars have endeavored to widen trauma theory’s analytical framework or productively relate it to racial and colonial violence. 36 Michael Rothberg, whose Traumatic Realism (2000) forms one of the key texts of trauma studies (among them Elaine → Scarry’s The Body in Pain from 1985 and Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience from 1996), has also added his critical heft to the call for decolonizing and globalizing trauma studies. Among some of the core issues at stake in “Postcolonial Trauma Novels,” he lists “the articulation of race and space; the uncanny historicity of colonial (and other forms of) violence; the intergenerational transmission of trauma; and the problem of unequal recognition of disparate traumatic histories” (2008: 226).
Many of these different theorizations converge on a critique of → Caruth’s notion that “trauma itself may provide the very link between cultures,” by revealing how Eurocentric notions of trauma aren’t actually
always transferable (1995: 11). In fact, prevalent models such as PTSD or processes such as acting out, moving through or witnessing trauma may not be universally applicable or differently achieved. Trauma theory, as Craps writes in Postcolonial Witnessing, should thus always “take account of the specific social and historical contexts in which trauma narratives are produced and received, and be open and attentive to the diverse strategies of representation and resistance which these contexts invite or necessitate” (2013: 43). For example, in “The Question of ‘Solidarity’ in Postcolonial Trauma Fiction: Beyond the Recognition Principle,” Hamish Dalley questions whether contemporary postcolonial literature’s revisiting of traumatic historical events can really be understood as attempts at achieving recognition, or even solidarity. 37 As Dalley observes, not only do postcolonial and trauma studies appear to complement each other, exemplified by the emergent field of postcolonial trauma studies, but the very terminology of trauma theory – its focus on metaphors of invasion, disturbance or assimilation – already lends itself to narrativizing the traumas of colonialism and slavery. Furthermore, most trauma theories implicitly or explicitly develop a trajectory that moves “from pain to recognition to solidarity,” thus privileging what Dalley considers the most productive, albeit ambiguously demarcated, convergence of trauma and postcolonialism (2015: 373). That said, contemporary postcolonial texts seem to draw on these convergences in unexpected ways, as they offer a range of different, and often conflicting, subject positions. Among the vast range of literary traumas in fictions like → Adichie’s Americanah or Okey Ndibe’s Foreign Gods, Inc., Dalley identifies those of the colonized, colonizers, and what he calls transnational proletarians (2015: 372). By conducting a comparative analysis of ostensibly incomparable sites of trauma, Dalley aims to reveal a fundamental ambivalence of contemporary postcolonial literature regarding the ethico-political purchase of prevalent trauma discourses.
This ambiguity certainly informs the Afropolitan novels selected here, as all works appear to dramatize the realization that not only with regards to the disparate members of the contemporary African diaspora but also in terms of addressing differently positioned audiences – “recognition is more complex than it may appear and that, even when it seems unquestionably desirable, it does not necessarily lead to solidarity” (Dalley 2015: 372). Hence, these novels draw attention to the limits of an empathetic recognition that is not grounded in a critical reckoning with historical and material circumstance. Solidarity, they suggest, cannot be grounded in the realization of an other’s humanity and vulnerability alone, but must come replete with a deeper understanding of – and desire to change – the conditions that make traumatizing structures possible.
Apart from various historical traumas that are metafictionally commented upon or revisited, there is also the more insidious, and less
distant, trauma of racialization that repeatedly surfaces in these novels. The notion of racial trauma is already apparent in Fanon’s primal scene in “The Fact of Blackness,” where, following the initial event, his sense of self appears to be disintegrating, disassembled by the transfixing gaze, the awareness of his body splitting into dizzying, nauseating multitudes. He writes: “My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day” (2008: 86). Here, racialization is immediately equated with trauma, as the scene threatens his physical and psychological integrity and is also ‘compulsively’ repeated throughout the essay. Generally, it is important to distinguish between historical traumas and traumas of racialization in these fictions. Compared to other traumas, the temporality of racial trauma is often marked by the move from the historical to the transhistorical, thus approximating the ‘timelessness’ of trauma temporality. While this move diminishes the facticity or historicity of the event a central concern of much of historical trauma fiction – it does reveal Black temporality as an effect of the conflicting poles between which Black subjects hover: having no history and, simultaneously, too much of it.
Rather than striving for the kind of historicity that is suitable for contesting ‘official’ historiography, traumatic scenes of racialization suffer from the weight of a historicity assuming the guise of the eternal. This distinction also roughly corresponds with the difference between a (postcolonial) historicist investment in subaltern or contested historiography and that of (Black American) melancholic historicism. The latter cares much less about the facticity of the past – the horrors of slavery have been well documented and, with few exceptions, are institutionally recognized – than about its effect on or extension into the present; or put differently: it is less about the past not being the past, than about it not having passed. 38 Here, repetition really is inevitable, if not eternal, as the present is gripped by the afterlife of slavery and its appendant “racial calculus and political arithmetic” that “has yet to be undone” (Hartman 2007: 6). Positioned amid these sometimes closely related diasporic historicisms, the selected novels represent the temporal communities of the Black Diaspora in unique ways. Apart from historicizing rather than ontologizing Blackness, these texts remain both attentive and resistant to the concept of race in/as history. Resistance, while sometimes analogously structured, it is not the same as rejection. In the following literary analysis, another aspect of the complex node of race and history transpires, something much more elusive that may also take the form of an opening, a wedge with which to uncouple this fateful schema. These openings are unable or simply cannot dare to imagine a time- and race-less future and translate instead into a call for stopping time, for brushing history against the grain, if not even ending it. In continuation of the heavy Benjaminian influence on diasporic writing via the work of Gilroy and others, this call is mobilized by the desire “to stay, awaken
the dead, and make whole what has been smashed” ( Benjamin 2003: 392). And, as I argue, it is the historical constellation of Afropolitanism, marked as it is as a repetition with a difference, that allows these texts to appropriate the past as it “flashes up in a moment of danger” (ibid. 391).
In this sense, there is another dimension to repetition that is neither blind to the effect of its original trauma nor invested in a futile undoing or reversing of time but endeavors to recognize, through repetition, what happened and what might have changed. From this perspective, all of the novels can be read as earnest explorations of other people’s pasts that, through emphatic transference and historical awareness, inscribe and implicate a range of diasporic positionalities. Far from signaling rifts and fissures, their often distanced and distancing metahistoricist stance is employed in order to understand others and oneself in relation to them. The Afropolitan moment thus emerges as a historical constellation through which the Black Diaspora is able to refract and reflect itself. In reading and interpreting the texts accordingly, the term race in/as history attempts to convey how race can be curiously situated in the past and firmly envelope the ‘now’ through which that past is imagined.
I like to say “Thank You” for the like to my WordPress blog.
“Insightful point! ⏳ Exploring the temporal aspects of Black identity adds a whole new layer to understanding culture and history.”
Excellent! The timeless trauma concept is well attested even in the sacred scriptures I follow. I am so humbled, frightened, disillusioned, and ironically hopeful because of these writings. Truth sets us free.