HENA03825U English - Free topic: The Black Atlantic Revisited

Paul Gilroy’s groundbreaking study The Black Atlantic – Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) attempted to unhinge the discussion of the black diaspora from the tags of nation, ethnicity and ‘race’ as the stable reference points for a cultural-studies approach to black diasporic identity. Gilroy proposed instead a transnational, intercultural and anti-ethnocentric approach to the ‘unfinished’ history of blacks in the modern world in which he discarded metaphors of rootedness in the experience of ‘being’ black in favor of more fluid ones associative of passage and transformation. His Black Atlantic formation was concerned with the ‘rhizomorphic’ processes of ‘becoming’ across the conceptual distances of time and space. Much has occurred in the field of black studies since the publication of Gilroy’s book and the emergent 21-century new wave of ‘Afropolitan’ writing invites to a re-visitation of Gilroy ‘rhizomorphic’ approach to black culture. How are concepts like identity and belonging shaped today in a global age of wide-spread migration where migrants aspire to become members of cosmopolitan (post)modernity culture? In this course we will read a selection of literary texts pivoting around migrant experiences past and present, spanning from Equiano’s slave narrative The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) to Chimamanda Aditchie’s migrant bildungsroman Americanah (2013). We will explore what happens to perceptions of home, place, identity and ‘race’ in the process of border-crossings from Africa and into the West.

Reading list and course plan will be available at Absalon from mid-june 2014.