Where is the Place for Black Atlantic Literature and Authorship?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5195/jffp.2023.1047Keywords:
Black Atlantic, Paul GilroyAbstract
In the wake of Black Atlantic terror, enslavement, colonialism and violence, is there a place for literature? Where is there a place for the author? In other words, to rethink poet Muriel Rukeyser’s question, where is there a place for Black Atlantic literature and authorship? Proposing Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic as the window through which to answer these questions, this essay focuses on the place for/of literature and authorship as Gilroy thinks them through an engagement with Richard Wright’s life and work, and also through the work of other Black Atlantic authors, primarily C.L.R. James, Toni Morrison, Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant. These figures show that the Black Atlantic author must persist in tenaciously writing through and within the violence that defines their experiences, revealing the necessity of such literature and the importance of producing such a literary practice. This essay poses that there is no place for Black Atlantic authorship if the author is not grappling, writing, and “living with,” as Toni Morrison would suggest, the unspeakable violence and absolute terrors of experience—scenes of horror must be (re)made through cultural production or there can be no poesis. This process of transformation amid (dis)location is grounded in the Black Atlantic experience of terror and diaspora, about which Gilroy writes, concluding his final chapter with an analysis of the Jewish diasporic experience. Because this essay engages a Jewish poet’s provocation in order to think the Black Atlantic, it is crucial to interrogate both the significance of this invocation and Gilroy’s assessment of the intimate interconnection and solidarity between the Black and Jewish experiences.
References
Adorno, Theodor. “Cultural Criticism and Society.” In The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings, edited by Levi, Neil and Rothberg, Michael. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003.
Césaire, Aimé. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press (2001).
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. London: Athlone Press (1994).
Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context” (1971). Translated by Alan Bass. In Margins of Philosophy, 307-330. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press (1982).
Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt). The Souls of Black Folk; Essays and Sketches. Chicago, A. G. McClurg, 1903. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp. (1968).
Farred, Grant. The Burden of Over-representation. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press (2018).
Farred, Grant. “Theoretical Futures: The Creation of a Concept.” In Africana Studies: Theoretical Futures, edited by Farred, Grant, 1-15. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press (2022).
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press (1993).
James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution Second edition revised ed. New York: Vintage Books (1963).
Glissant, Édouard and J. Michael Dash. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia (1992).
Glissant, Édouard and Betsy Wing. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. London, England: Vintage Classics (2007).
Newton, Melanie J. “‘The Race Leapt at Sauteurs’: Genocide, Narrative, and Indigenous Exile from the Caribbean Archipelago.” Caribbean Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2014): 5–28.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Vintage. Edited by Translator: Hollingdale & J. R. (1886).
Rukeyser, Muriel. The Life of Poetry. Current Books (1949).
Sharpe, Christina Elizabeth. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press (2016).
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. “Unthinkable History: The Haitian Revolution as a Non-Event.” In Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Michel-Rolph Truillot and Hazel V Carby, 70-107. Boston Massachusetts: Beacon Press (2015).
Žižek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant Hegel and the Critique of Ideology. Durham: Duke University Press (1993).
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Sophia Jahadhmy
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- The Author retains copyright in the Work, where the term “Work” shall include all digital objects that may result in subsequent electronic publication or distribution.
- Upon acceptance of the Work, the author shall grant to the Publisher the right of first publication of the Work.
- The Author shall grant to the Publisher and its agents the nonexclusive perpetual right and license to publish, archive, and make accessible the Work in whole or in part in all forms of media now or hereafter known under a Creative Commons 4.0 License (Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works), or its equivalent, which, for the avoidance of doubt, allows others to copy, distribute, and transmit the Work under the following conditions:
- Attribution—other users must attribute the Work in the manner specified by the author as indicated on the journal Web site;
- Noncommercial—other users (including Publisher) may not use this Work for commercial purposes;
- No Derivative Works—other users (including Publisher) may not alter, transform, or build upon this Work,with the understanding that any of the above conditions can be waived with permission from the Author and that where the Work or any of its elements is in the public domain under applicable law, that status is in no way affected by the license.
- The Author is able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the nonexclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the Work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), as long as there is provided in the document an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post online a pre-publication manuscript (but not the Publisher’s final formatted PDF version of the Work) in institutional repositories or on their Websites prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work. Any such posting made before acceptance and publication of the Work shall be updated upon publication to include a reference to the Publisher-assigned DOI (Digital Object Identifier) and a link to the online abstract for the final published Work in the Journal.
- Upon Publisher’s request, the Author agrees to furnish promptly to Publisher, at the Author’s own expense, written evidence of the permissions, licenses, and consents for use of third-party material included within the Work, except as determined by Publisher to be covered by the principles of Fair Use.
- The Author represents and warrants that:
- the Work is the Author’s original work;
- the Author has not transferred, and will not transfer, exclusive rights in the Work to any third party;
- the Work is not pending review or under consideration by another publisher;
- the Work has not previously been published;
- the Work contains no misrepresentation or infringement of the Work or property of other authors or third parties; and
- the Work contains no libel, invasion of privacy, or other unlawful matter.
- The Author agrees to indemnify and hold Publisher harmless from Author’s breach of the representations and warranties contained in Paragraph 6 above, as well as any claim or proceeding relating to Publisher’s use and publication of any content contained in the Work, including third-party content.
