Literature of the African Diaspora — Quiz 1

First Diasporic Stream

• Began about 100,000 years ago: movement within and outside of Africa

• To study early humankind is to study this diaspora

• Premodern

Second Diasporic Stream

• Began in 3000 BCE: movement of the Bantu-speaking people from the contemporary nations of Nigeria and Cameroon to other parts of the continent and Indian Ocean

• Premodern

Third Diasporic Stream

• 5th BCE

• “Trading diaspora”: movement of traders, merchants, slaves, soldiers, and others to parts of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia

• Premodern

Fourth Diasporic Stream

• 15th century: European Slave trade

• Modern: Racial oppression and resistance as two of its most salient features

Fifth Diasporic Stream

• Began during the 19th century after slavery’s demise in the Americas and continues into our own time

• Modern: Racial oppression and resistance as two of its most salient features

Migration vs Diasporic Stream

1. Emotional attachment to ancestral land
2. Cognizant of dispersal (and oppression if relevant)
3. Racial, ethnic or religious identity that transcends geography; share cultural
similarity, and sometimes want to go home
4. No diasporic community shares all these characteristics or shares with the
same intensity an identity with their scattered kin.
5. Thus, sometimes they are imaginary, symbolic, or political constructs

Palmer’s Students’ Definition of The Modern African Diaspora

The Modern African diaspora, at its core, consists of millions of people of African descent living in various societies who are united by a past based significantly but not exhaustively upon racial oppression and the struggles against it and who, despite the cultural variations and political and other divisions among them, share and emotional bond with one another and with
their ancestral continent and who also, regardless of their location face broadly similar problems in constructing and reconstructing themselves (30).

Third Cinema

• Latin American film movement that started in
  the 1960s–70s

• Critiques neocolonialism, the capitalist
  system, and the Hollywood model of cinema as mere entertainment to make money

Hall’s Definition of “Diaspora”

Dispersion of people from their homeland.

“First Position” of Cultural Identity (Hall)

A collective/unified culture hiding inside of the more superficial and artificially imposed “selves.”

• True culture is stable

• Production, not rediscovery, of identity

• Imaginative discovery

• Retelling

• Aporia

• Resistance

Aporia

Internal contradiction

“Second Position” of Cultural Identity

Recognizes “difference” and “differance”; belongs to the future and past; not linear or with a fixed origin.

• Becoming

• Difference

• Inner expropriation

Vectors

Black Caribbean identities as framed by two axes.

• Similarity/continuity

• Difference/rupture

African Presence (Presence Africaine)

• A new Africa of the New world, grounded in an old Africa

• Spiritual journey of discovery that leads to an indigenous cultural revolution

• A deferred Africa as a spiritual, cultural and political metaphor.

• The original Africa has been transformed. It's not a timeless zone of the primitive, unchanging past.

• Not just recovered but becoming.

European Presence (Presence Europenne)

• Positions the black subject within its dominant regimes of representation:

  • the colonial discourse

  • the literature of adventure or exploration

  • the romance of the exotic

  • the ethnographic and travelling eye

  • the tropical languages of tourism

  • the violent, pornographic languages of ganja and urban violence.

• It's about exclusion, imposition and expropriation but not external.

• Site of profound splitting and doubling.

• Constitutive element in the identity formation of black subject

American Presence (Presence Americaine)

• The New World Presence: not power but ground, place, territory: a juncture point or contact zone

• Creolizations and syncretisms

• Movement and migration

• Diaspora, diversity, hybridity, and difference.

Hall’s Conclusion

“We have been trying, in a series of metaphors, to put in play a different sense of our relationship to the past, and thus a different way of thinking about cultural identity, which might constitute new points of recognition in the discourses of the emerging Caribbean and black British cinemas. We have been trying to theorize identity as constituted, not outside but within representation (236)”

African History Before Slavery

• Slavery was an aberration (normalized)

• Before scholars knew about the greatness of West and West
  Central African civilizations, they cited ancient Egypt, Nubia,
  and Ethiopia as exemplars of accomplishment and creativity.

• Africans and their descendants have pursued long conversations about their relationships to the ancients

• This history has influenced the unfolding of African
  American art, music, religion and politics.

Importance of Ancient Africa

• Contextualizes the discussion of subsequent developments, largely inaugurated by massive trades in African captives.

• Modernity could not have been predicted, that Africans were not always under the heel but were in fact at the forefront of human civilization.

• The African diaspora did not begin with the slave trades; the dissemination of African ideas and persons began long
  ago.

• The Mediterranean in particular benefitted from Egyptian and
  Nubian culture and learning.

• Egypt was a world power that imposed its will on others, rather than the reverse.

Egyptian History

• By 1700 BCE it was connected with the urban based civilizations in the Indus Valley, the Iranian plateau, and China.

• Global crossroad for various populations and cultures.

• Race as a concept was not important then, if it did exist.

• Egyptians were “ethnocentric” and saw everyone else as uncivilized, such as Bedouins from Arabia, people from Asia Minor, Libyans from the west, and the Nehisi from the area south of Egypt (called Neheysu or Khent or borderland) by the Egyptians and known as Nubia or Cush.

• Nonetheless, their gene pool received infusions from other places.

Egypt and the South

• Egypt wanted Nubian gold, but they also want soldiers (skilled
  especially in archery), laborers, and enslaved people

• With the exception of the Hebrews, their enslaved population was never very large, with enslaved people from Europe or Asia Minor more numerous than Nubians or other Africans.

• Egypt established an institution called the Kap for a formal education
  of Nubians by Egypt.

• Nubian presence as elites, workers, and soldiers also led to the spread
  of Nubian culture in England, similar to later developments in the
  Americans.

Nubian Ancestry

• Nubia has various names but none relate to skin color.

• They have a distinctive history and culture to Egypt though
  some convergence. At one point, they conquered Egypt. Eventually went back and to their capital at Meroe and
  flourished.

• Exported luxury goods (gold, cotton, ostrich feathers, ivory,
  stones, and iron).

• Women were important to Nubian culture

Candaces

Mother queens in Nubia

Africans in the Greco-Roman World

• Ancient Mediterranean world, successively dominated by Greeks,
  Romans and Phoenicians, came to know Africans, primarily from
  Egypt and Nubia, but also from areas south of the Nile, North Africa,
  the South Sahara and West Africa.

• The Southern Europeans were struck by Africans color but did not
  ascribe intrinsic value. Modern day racism didn’t exist there.

• Greeks called them Ethiopians which means burnt-faced person.
  Ancient state of Ethiopia didn’t begin until 1st c BC.

• Greeks and Romans admired African culture and their established literature, urban-based technologically advanced civilizations long before Rome or Athens.

• Southern Europeans like Herodotus (Greek father of history) traveled
  to Africa, and African traveled to Southern Europe

• The context was often one of war both for and against the Greeks and
  Romans.

• Few Africans were enslaved in the Graeco-Roman world. Many
  Africans liked places like Rome for trade and work (musicians, actors,
  jugglers. Gladiators, wrestlers, boxers, religious specialists, and day
  laborers.

• Africans served in Roman armies.

• Even more than their presence, their cultural influence was big. Science, engineering, architecture, and philosophy

Ghana

• Smallest geographically

• Longest-lasting empire: ruled for 800 years

• Filthy rich —> double taxation —> Had to pay to pass through Ghana

Mali

• Mansa Musa: richest guy in history

• People rushed to trade in Mali because of Musa’s boasts

Timbuktu

• “Rome of West Africa”

• education

• religion

• trade

Songhai

• Biggest geographically

• Shortest reign

• Divided into 5 provinces

Controversy of Equiano’s narrative

• Allegedly not born in Africa, but in South Carolina

• Never used the name “Equiano” until the publication of his book

• Writing under a persona; double consciousness

Equiano’s Representation of Slavery

• Styled himself as reasonable, submissive, and educated

  • “The Black Englishman”

• Straddled line between “radical” abolitionism and his white audience

  • Mild reactions to the atrocities he describes in the book

• Supported the legitimacy of slavery because he bought his own freedom instead of escaping on his own

DJ Vassa

• Equiano multiplies identity, drawing on a wide range of sources to produce his Interesting Narrative.

• Bears greater resemblance to a hip-hop DJ than a European author.

• Samples found material to produce
  hybrid identities rather than express and authentic one.

• A strategy for turning identity diasporic, producing new possibilities for mobility and agency among the subjected populations scattered by the winds of the imperial trade. . . .

Afrofuturism

Alondra Nelson defines this as the artistic and critical expression of African American voices that have other stories to tell about culture, technology, and things to come.

• Equiano’s technologies:

  • The ship: experiences are made possible

  • The book

  • Mixing of genres

Hip Hop and Equiano

• Equiano remixes a number of genres:

  • Memoir

  • Spiritual autobiography

  • Abolitionist tract

  • Travelogue

  • Sailor's tale

  • Economic treatise

  • War reporting

  • Fiction

• The narrative is a willfully hybrid text that mixes genres to produce something new: Black author

• Spins the material (so Africa is routed through other materials
  than memory)

Mary Prince Preface

• Thomas Pringle, editor of Mary Prince’s narrative, asserts that Mary Prince wanted to share her story and the horrors of slavery—it was not the idea of the Anti-Slavery Society.

• Also asserts that proceeds will go to Mary Prince as well. (Gives update on her health after the First Edition of the book was released.)

Pruning

• Thorns cut off

• Shaped, made more presentable/purposeful

• When applied to Mary Prince, the editor and transcriber (Mary Strickland) made Mary sound more tactful and credible

Mary Prince as a Collaborative Text

• Thomas Pringle as editor

• Mary Strickland as transcriber

• Omitted anything sexual to present Mary as a “proper” woman

Mary Prince’s Life

Enslaved to five sets of people:

• Bermuda (Minors; Williams; Prudens; Captain Ingham)

  • Mrs Williams + Betsey were kind to her

  • Prudens: were also kind; Fanny taught her how to spell small words

  • Capt. Ingham: violent

• Grand Turk (bought by Robert Darrell; salt flats)

  • Worked in salt flats for hours; legs covered in boils

  • Implied she was SA’d

• Antigua (Robert Woods)

  • Psychologically tormented her; did not want to sell her despite his hatred for her

  • In Antigua, joined Moravian Church

  • Married Daniel James

  • Freedom in England

Mary Prince Supplement

Thomas Pringle dissects John Wood’s claims against Mary Prince.

• States Wood’s treatment of Prince did not warrant any gratitude (as Wood claims that letting Prince go home free would be an ingratitude)

• Defends Prince’s character

• Emphasizes the dehumanization that comes with slavery

• Questions why Wood had sold five slaves while retaining Prince whom he claims to despise

Contradictions/Controversies in Mary Prince

• Mary Prince’s relationship with Abbott as a means to paint her as promiscuous, not credible

• Pringle affirms that Prince has a temper

Mary Prince’s Representation of Slavery

• Emphasizes her own agency despite her strenuous circumstances

  • Forthright in telling enslavers that violent treatment is not right

  • Ran away to another plantation

  • Financial agency: sold coffee, yams, washed clothes

  • Defended Mr. Darrel’s daughter

• Value of freedom: “To be free is very sweet.”

• Violence of masters; dehumanization; specific dangers faced by enslaved women

Effia

Fante woman who marries James (white man) and moves to Cape Coast Castle.

• Strained relationship with Baaba, who was forced to be her mother

• Real mother is Maame, who was enslaved to Fante but escaped to Asante Land during fire)

Esi

• Asante woman and Effia’s half sister (betrayed by Little Dove)

• Inherits loss from her mother, Maame

Quey

• Effia (and James’s) son, born in 1779

• Lived in London but sent to mother’s Fante village to work with his uncle Fiifi

• “Half-caste”

• Queer (Cudjo)

• Marries Nana Yaa (daughter of Asante King)

• Matrilineal

Ness

• Esi’s daughter

• Enslaved person on an Alabama plantation

• Scarred

• Relationship with Pinky (little girl)

• Sam - Her husband

• Punished for trying to escape with Sam and her son, Kojo

  • Aku escapes with Kojo

  • Sam is hanged

  • Ness is whipped

James

• Quey’s son

• 1824 (Fantes took Governor Charles McCarthy’s head)

• His mother was Asante Princess and he marries Asante

• Anglo-Asante war in full swing

• “Asante had power from capturing slaves. The Fante had protection from
  trading them”

• He marries Akousa (tells her to hide her blood) and they plan to live in a small village (he escapes into the war)

Kojo

• Son of Ness

• Fell’s Point, Baltimore

• 1850, Fugitive Slave Act

• Raised by Ma Aku who speaks Twi

• Married to Anna, who is caught and sent to work South on a plantation

• Moves North to NY

Abena

• Daughter of James (Unlucky) and Akousa (mixed Ashanti/Fante)

• Goes to Kumasi; Unlucky gives her Effia’s black stone

• Loves Ohene Nyarko (they don’t marry)

  • Can only marry once harvest is good

  • They have an affair

• She is pregnant, goes back to Asante Land for the missionary church

H

• Kojo and Anna’s son

• Born on a plantation

• Imprisoned for looking at a white woman (Black Laws)

• Forced to work in the mines

  • Nicknamed “Two-Shovel”; works alongside white convicts

  • Works for nine years in brutal conditions before attaining his freed

• Works in the mine as a free laborer

  • Joins a union, strikes for better conditions

Akua

• Abena’s daughter

• Revealed that the missionary church killed her mother

• Church makes her feel like a sinner, heathen

• Dreams of a firewoman with two children; is named “Crazy Woman” and ostracized

• Husband is Asamoah; named Crippled Man after war

• House set on fire; kills her daughters and scars her son, Yaw

Willie

• H’s daughter

• Harlem Renaissance

• Talented singer

• Marries a white-passing man, Robert Clifton

  • Must pretend doesn’t know him in public so that he can get jobs to support their family in NYC

• Breaks it off with Robert, restarts life with Eli

Yaw

• Akua’s son

• History teacher

• Wants Ghanaian freedom; writes “Let the Africans Own Africa”

• Face scar

• Marries Esther, his domestic help

• Reconciles with his mother

Carson (Sonny)

• Willie’s son

• Does not know about his father (eventually finds out about him at the end of chapter)

• Civil Rights movement; protester

• Meets Amani at a jazz club; becomes addicted to heroin

• Becomes clean with Willie’s help

Marjorie

• Yaw and Esther’s daughter

• Born in Ghana, raised in Alabama

• Close relationship with Akua

• No place for belonging / Double identity

  • They think she’s a tourist in Ghana

  • Black girls at school call her “white”

  • Does not consider herself “African American,” but in America, “black is black is black”

  • Graham (white boy) deserts her; his father puts end to their relationship

• Ends with Akua’s death

Marcus

• Sonny and Amani’s son

• Ph. D student

• Thesis on convict leasing system, but soon realizes how complex African and African American history is (can’t talk about one thing without going further back into the past)

• Meets Marjorie; travels together

  • He is given the black stone

“Rooting routes to trans-Atlantic identities: the metaphor of female descendancy in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing”

• The article argues that the novel, with a gendered racial aesthetic, explores how people understand their identities in relation to changing notions of what and where they are informs notions of
  “belonging.

• Shows how imaginative literature reflects upon African and African American identities.

• Published in 2016; resonates with attention to issues embraced by Trump’s the presidential campaign surrounding borders and immigration + the radicalization of white nationalism in America

• Novel about female descendants/ancestry (matrilineal; Effia/Esi)

• Offers a narrative grounded in the female experience of slavery
  and colonialism

  • Memories of slavery for a long time had been largely masculine and dominated by Equiano, though later see Prince and Jacobs

Fragmentation in Homegoing

The form of novel reflects the fragments and reconciliation of its characters and cultures with the plot focusing on women’s agency in recovering full humanity.

• Fragments and intersections within family history

Symbols and Metaphors in “Homegoing”

• Uses symbols (stone; fire; water) and metaphors (scarring and female descendancy) to show that the defining trait in the formation of African and African American identities is trauma

• Symbolism as a foundation

  • Novel is a symbol

  • Black stone as attachment/detachment

• Uses the sisters to tell the complex narrative of the memory of slavery, ultimately in the American psyche, using
  female experiences that give new ways of knowing slavery and its part in constructing later identities.

“Rooting routes…” Conclusion

Gyasi deploys an historically situated narrative to imagine a concept of descent that centres black female experiences of descending and descendancy. Retracing black identities as they unravel from Esi, the story layers histories of black oppression that construct modern African and AF identities in America as products of systemic debasement.