E-Book Overview
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.
E-Book Content
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