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The Atlantic slave trade continues to haunt the cultural memories of Africa, Europe and the Americas. There is a prevailing desire to forget: While victims of the African diaspora tried to flee the sites of trauma, enlightened Westerners preferred to be oblivious to the discomforting complicity between their enlightenment and chattel slavery. Recently, however, fiction writers have ventured to ‘re-member’ the Black Atlantic. This book is concerned with how literature performs as memory. It sets out to chart systematically the ways in which literature and memory intersect, and offers readings of three seminal Black Atlantic novels. Each reading illustrates a particular poetic strategy of accessing the past and presents a distinct political outlook on memory. Novelists may choose to write back to texts, images or music: Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge brings together numerous fragments of slave narratives, travelogues and histories to shape a brilliant montage of long-forgotten texts. David Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress approaches slavery through the gateway of paintings by William Hogarth, Sir Joshua Reynolds and J.M.W. Turner. Toni Morrison’s Beloved, finally, is steeped in black music, from spirituals and blues to the art of John Coltrane. Beyond differences in poetic strategy, moreover, the novels paradigmatically reveal distinct ideologies: their politics of memory variously promote an encompassing transcultural sense of responsibility, an aestheticist ‘creative amnesia’, and the need to preserve a collective ‘black’ identity.
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Re-Membering the Black Atlantic C ross ultures Readings in the Post / Colonial Literatures in English 84 Series Editors Gordon Collier (Giessen) Hena Maes–Jelinek (Liège) Geoffrey Davis (Aachen) Re-Membering the Black Atlantic On the Poetics and Politics of Literary Memory Lars Eckstein Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006 NOTE ON THE COVER The background of the montage illustrating the cover uses a detail from Sir Joshua Reynolds’ “A Young Black” (1770?), oil on canvas, 78.7 x 65 cm. Reproduced by courtesy of the Menil Collection, Houston, Texas. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 90-420-1958-1 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2006 Printed in The Netherlands Contents vii ix Illustrations Introduction PART I LITERARY MEMORY 1 Towards a Poetics of Mnemonic Strategy in Narrative Texts Testimonies: recourse to mental mnemonic resources Interlude: the testimony of Olaudah Equiano Palimpsests: recourse to manifest mnemonic resources 3 12 25 35 P A R T II MNEMONIC FICTIONS OF THE BLACK ATLANTIC 2 Caryl Phillips, Cambridge The poetics of memory: the art of montage The politics of memory: empowering culture 3 David Dabydeen, A Harlot’s Progress The poetics of memory: the art of ekphrasis The politics of memory: empowering the individual 63 69 98 117 127 155 4 Toni Morrison, Beloved The poetics of memory: the art of musicalization The politics of memory: empowering the collective 177 187 223 Conclusion 235 Appendix: Source Passages Adapted in Cambridge Bibliography Acknowledgements 241 273 291 Illustrations F IGS . 1a–1i. William Hogarth, A Harlot’s Progress (1732). Plates I–V I . Engravings, ca. 31 x 38 cm. British Museum. 169–72 a. Plate I 169 b. Plate I I 169 c. Plate I I I 170 d. Plate I V 170 e. Plate V 171 f. Plate V I 171 g. Plate I V , detail 172