Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature: 159 (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, Series Number 159)
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Reprint, 3/19/2015
EAN 9781107632912, ISBN10: 1107632919
Paperback, 288 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm
Language: English
Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature offers a rich, interdisciplinary treatment of modern black literature and cultural history, showing how debates over Africa in the works of major black writers generated productive models for imagining political agency. Yogita Goyal analyzes the tensions between romance and realism in the literature of the African diaspora, examining a remarkably diverse group of twentieth-century authors, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Chinua Achebe, Richard Wright, Ama Ata Aidoo and Caryl Phillips. Shifting the center of black diaspora studies by considering Africa as constitutive of black modernity rather than its forgotten past, Goyal argues that it is through the figure of romance that the possibility of diaspora is imagined across time and space. Drawing on literature, political history and postcolonial theory, this significant addition to the cross-cultural study of literatures will be of interest to scholars of African American studies, African studies and American literary studies.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
the romance of diaspora
1. From domestic allegory to imperial romance
Pauline Hopkins and racial mixture
2. From double consciousness to diaspora
W. E. B. Du Bois and black internationalism
3. From nativism to nationalism
Joseph Casely Hayford, Chinua Achebe and colonial modernity
4. From romance to realism
Richard Wright and nation time
5. From revolution to arrested decolonization
Ama Ata Aidoo and the long view of history
6. From return to redemption
Caryl Phillips and postcolonial hybridity
Notes.